This Is How You Break The Habit Of Loving Him

You’re burning bright enough now to light your own way out.

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This Is How You Break The Habit Of Loving Him
Atikh Bana
This Is How You Break The Habit Of Loving Him
Atikh Bana

Remember when you wore that sexy black outfit which you bought just for him? You asked him what he thought of it. He asked if you were going to a funeral. He should’ve told you how beautiful you looked. He shouldn’t have been able to keep his eyes off you. His tiny criticisms were slowly eating away at you, even when you couldn’t recognize it. You are slowly mending a tiny piece of your heart every time you wear the sexy black outfit and mute his critical voice in the back of your head.

You miss having a relationship, but you refuse to settle for comfort. Sometimes you think it’d be easier to focus on the positives and ignore all of the negatives. Seeing the positive in people is not a bad thing unless you are ignoring glaring red flags. You are perfectly capable of being alone. You are thriving, even without the company of someone else. It can be so easy to slide into the arms of someone who isn’t right for you when you are lonely. You’ve come far enough to know when you are still too broken to fall back into that trap. You’d rather spend your time holding on to your broken pieces instead of letting them hit the floor to shatter again.

You are taking care of yourself every time you type out the text but don’t press send. There a million things you would like to say. There is dignity to be found in silence. There is nothing new to say. You’ve said it all before and it hasn’t made a difference. The more you avoid pressing send, the more resilient you become. You choose to accept closure is not a guarantee. Who cares about the last conversation or fight? It doesn’t matter if you were right or wrong. What matters is that so long as you keep the conversation going, you are holding yourself back from moving forward. You have to let go in order to heal your broken pieces. The person who broke you will never be the person who heals you.

The memories wash over you like a wave pushing you deep into the sand. It feels like you’re drowning and you need to be rescued. You will do anything to come up for air. You desperately want him to be your life raft, even though you know he’ll watch you sink. You keep fighting the urge to give up. You remind yourself how far you’ve come. You can save yourself this time. You’ve finally learned to swim.

Remember those lonely, cold nights when you’d try to dull your spark for him? Maybe if you’d toned yourself down a bit, he could’ve loved you. Now, you light yourself up and rise as the whole damn fire. Fretting over a burning bridge is a thing of the past. You feel relieved as you watch the bridge turn to ashes. You’re burning bright enough now to light your own way out. You started to think maybe hell was a place on earth to punish the living.

Then you find heaven right here on earth. You are finally free from the chains which have held you down to your past for too long. Healing is a slow and steady process. It is a beautiful mosaic of lessons learned. The dust is starting to settle. Nothing is clear, but the pieces are falling into place. Time is our greatest gift. It doesn’t matter how slowly you are moving, as long as you never turn back. Thought Catalog Logo Mark