There are no perfect endings—just endings.
You can play a moment over again in your head, but you can’t plan for someone else’s reaction. Instead, you can only pick yourself up after it happens and move forward. Sure, you can wish and hope that things will go how you want them to, but ultimately, you can’t always control the outcome.
Maybe you’re dating someone and dream of spending the rest of your life with them. It would be beautiful and make you happy. But what if their ideal ending doesn’t match your own? What if, while you’ve spent months blissfully dreaming about your future, they’ve tried to figure out how to leave?
It’s terrible when situations don’t go how our hearts and minds want them to. Sometimes the people we love the most hurt us more than we could ever imagine; at that point, we have no choice but to accept that fact and move on. You can’t force someone to be with you or to love you enough to stay. And you shouldn’t have to change or lose yourself to keep someone.
Sometimes, the most perfect thing you can do for yourself is to let go.
You need to let go of the life you created in your head; instead, live the one you’re physically in right now. For the person who hurt you, the one you thought you’d create the perfect, happy ending with, you must let them go. And for the friendship you lost, the one you wanted to gain again, you may have to let that go.
Most of all, let go of trying to control every aspect of your life. There’s so much out there that we can’t control. Everything is not your fault because everything is not your responsibility.
Life gets messy, and people can become cruel. You must learn these lessons as your life goes on, but you must also learn how to love yourself. When you love yourself fiercely enough, those less-than-perfect endings will feel less earth-shattering.
When you do this, you’ll start to value your life, what you can bring, and how complete you are. Learn that, even when things don’t end how you hoped, that doesn’t mean your life is over. One imperfect ending does not equal the end of the world, and it is not a sign to give up hope.
Instead, it’s just a sign that something needed to end to allow space for something new.
You may be hurt by how painful your breakup is now, but that heartbreak won’t last forever. And you lost someone you never thought you would lose in your life—but that doesn’t mean you won’t meet anyone else. Even if you deeply loved someone you lost, whoever comes next will be so much better. Ultimately, you have to keep moving forward, even (and especially) on your worst days.
Sometimes, moving forward is a slow crawl; other times, you might not recognize your life because of how far you’ve come. And when you get to that point, you’ll realize how imperfect that perfect ending you wanted was.
Photo by Anatol Lem on Unsplash
Life gets m
