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Friday, March 29, 2024

Ah, break-ups.

The lovely emotions and thoughts that come with feeling like yesterday’s trash, thrown into the garbage truck well on its way to the land of the other dumpees.

I was dumped. He was very careful with his words, kind about it, and apologized that it didn’t work out. As far as break-ups go, I think a break-up that ends with a hug and an, “I wish it would have worked out,” is a pretty darn good way to go down.

Of course, life throws us curveballs and it turned out the nobility he was trying to emulate turned out to be a bit of a farce. Long story short, I continued to harbor an unhealthy amount of animosity towards the guy.

“You can either be right, or you can be happy.”

That was the single sentence that stuck the core of my grudge against him. I was fed up with constantly hating him, arguing that what he had done to me had been wrong and making sure I never saw him at parties or around campus.

Forgiving and forgetting is not as easy as everyone says; I tried.

Truth is, it takes a lot more effort to choose the path of forgiveness. But more importantly than anything, it takes much more energy, thought, emotion, and happiness to continue hating someone, then to hike up that difficult path of letting go.

Why waste time on that person at all? They don’t deserve an inkling of your thoughts and they certainly don’t deserve to claim any fraction of your happiness.

You can’t let them.

When my present boyfriend told me that I could be right or I could be happy when I was arguing with my ex, I asked him why I couldn’t be both. “I can prove my point to him, and then I’ll be happy,” I said.

It took me a while to understand that I was never going to be happy trying to be right. I had to understand that things happen, and that life doesn’t always work in your favor.

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People are going to knock you down so many times in your life. You can either let them keep you down or you can get the heck off that dirty ground, brush the dust off your fabulous self, and move on to bigger and better things. You deserve the utmost happiness in this world.

And you deserve the beautiful feeling of a heavy burden finally lifted off your heart.

I’m not saying it’s easy to get to the point where you can just laugh it off, chuckle and say, “oh well!” But I am saying it’s worth the struggle of just letting bygones be bygones.

I’ll leave you all with one last quote by Jonathan Lockwood Huie: “Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.”

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