Thank You For Teaching Me How To Heal

We typically hate the ones that break us, but with you that’s not the case.

I could never hate you because that would mean hating what we’ve been, what we’ve become, and who I am right now in this moment.

And the woman I am now—I don’t hate her. I couldn’t.

It was you that taught me the greatest lesson of all: That I am my own strength and power, that it is only me who can save myself.

And I cannot hold anger towards you, carry it around with me like a big, heavy burden tied to my vertebrae. You are not a burden. Our love was not a burden.

It was in the aftermath of you that I found my greatest strength.

All too often we take the pain of our relationships and pin it to our chests. ’See, I am broken. I am aching. I am hurt.’ But we can’t. This only marks us, only keeps us from shifting into what we are capable of becoming.

We have to take what we’ve learned, who we’ve molded into, the good and the bad, and embrace it, learn from it, let it continue to grow us into new versions of ourselves.

What I’ve learned from you, I now use to raise myself up, to stretch my spine towards the sky until I’m standing tall and brave.

Heartbreak was your lesson, your blessing.

So thank you for teaching me how to heal.

Thank you for showing me that love brings beauty, and after love brings clarity. That people fall together and fall apart, and this is all a natural process. A process that no matter the outcome, is still more beautiful than we could have ever imagined.

And every step, even the painful, was worth it.

Thank you for showing me that power comes from resilience. That I could find perseverance, even when I was at the end of my rope and my world was spinning, even when the one I thought was my everything just became another piece in my wonderfully complicated puzzle. But it’s still beautiful, isn’t it?

Thank you for being the end, but also the beginning.

The new start, the foundation where I will forever smile and stand.

No matter where we go, or who we become, together or separate, I am thankful for what you taught me, what ‘us’ taught me, and what will forever be both a piece of my past, and the woman I am.