I Shouldn’t Have Pretended To Forgive You

You know what our problem is? It’s that we’re afraid of being disliked. Even by the people who hurt us the most.

There are two things I learned from leaving the person who was not worthy of having me.

First, that things and, in some cases, people never go away before you teaching you everything they should.

Second, it’s okay to be disliked by others if that’s what it takes to be true to yourself and most importantly be liked by yourself.

I should have known that you were never going to go away before I learned these final two lessons from you. You were basically one overwhelmingly, lengthy lesson and I thought I saw the end of it after we broke up. But no, it wasn’t the end because now I know that there are post break up issues that people need to deal with before moving on.

When you to spoke to me months after we had agreed to stop talking, I welcomed you back with open arms because I thought I was doing us both good by putting everything behind us.

I shouldn’t have pretended that I forgave you. Because I didn’t.

I should’ve politely apologized and asked for more time because the truth was that I needed more space from you. I needed to distance myself even more from the sticky relationship we had built.

By welcoming you back, I thought I was being the bigger person. Or more bluntly, I thought I was appearing to be the bigger person which is exactly what I wanted to prove.

But that’s why you never went away because that was the final lesson I needed to learn: that I shouldn’t care what I appear to you as long as I appear truthful to myself.

There it was, the whole truth laid out in front of me: you shouldn’t be in my life, at least not at this time.

Maybe I will find it in myself to genuinely welcome you back as a friend or simply someone I used to know later in the future, but ‘too soon’ sometimes hurts as much as ‘too late’.

You coming back as if nothing has happened and asking for a second chance as a friend one day and a second chance as a boyfriend the next day was just too much confusion to deal with. And I shouldn’t have agreed to it.

There are no regrets, though, because now I know that sometimes it doesn’t just end after walking away. It also takes everything in you to stay away.

Every person deserves forgiveness, but not everyone deserves a second chance. The more we allow that to sink in, the more we understand the power that lies in our choices.

Moving on sets us free, letting go of the hurt liberates all our hidden frustrations. But when we force ourselves to do it too soon, we end up simply lying to ourselves which is simply what got us in trouble in the first place.

Here’s what it was like forgiving you before I was ready to:

It hurt me to hear you talk about things that used drive me crazy like they were nothing.

It hurt me to bring up all these inside jokes which felt like wounds that hadn’t healed.

It hurt me to pretend like I’ve let go of all the terrible things you said because you’ve just now decided to replace them with sweeter words.

It hurt me that you even thought for a second that you deserved a second chance because that felt like a disregard for my feelings which just recently had been torn apart by your ignorance.

So yeah, basically I still gave you ways of hurting me even when we weren’t together.

Pretending to forgive you just to seem like the bigger person was not the victory I thought it would be. It was the defeat I never saw coming.

But without going through it, I wouldn’t have understood the importance of staying real with yourself especially in these situations.

This doesn’t scare me though, because realness, authenticity, reminding yourself of your own self-worth? It all takes practice.

And the light in all of this? When you learn such lessons, you can never unlearn them.