it is well

you don't owe anyone

too often i reflect on my life choices and i overthink everything i've done. i ask myself if i should've treated others differently or where i would be if i had done things differently. i remember i once broke a boys heart, but it's not like i wanted to. i just simply wasn't happy in our relationship. after that day, there were a lot of people who were angry at me. they all wanted to know how i could let a good guy like that go. it truly broke my heart to let him go, but i knew that i had to.
then, a while later, i got my own heart broken by another boy. i honestly thought that it was the end of the world. i laid in bed and cried for days at a time. i didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't even focus on work. and i came to the conclusion that heartbreak is quite easily the most extreme pain i had ever felt. and it made me realize that i was now feeling the pain of the boy whose heart i had broken and i felt terrible. i asked myself how i could ever do that to him. i remember laying in bed, drowning in my own misery. i picked up my phone multiple times just to send him a message apologizing for breaking his heart. i felt like I owed him that, even though i had already apologized dozens of times. i thought that maybe if he heard it one more time that all would be forgiven. he deserved to hear it one more time, right?
quite some time passed before i came to the conclusion that i didn't owe him or anyone else anything. here's what it all boiled down to:
1. i had my reasons for letting him go, just like the boy who broke my heart had his reasons of letting me go. i gave him my reasons, apologized, and moved on as best as i could.
2. i realized that i wasn't in the right state of mind for the relationship. i could barely take care of myself, much less keep a stable relationship.
3. i was at peace with my decision to leave. i didn't want to break his heart, but staying with him was only breaking my heart. i was unhappy. i knew that i had to take care of my own heart before i took care of anyone else's.
if you're not helping yourself grow, then how can you ever expect to help others grow? the answer is simple: you can't. you have to take care of your heart first. water it, keep it out in the sunshine, nurture it, and then it will grow like a beautiful sunflower.
if you're doing something to take of yourself, even if it does mean breaking someone's heart, then you don't owe anyone anything. sure, you can give them an apology or an explanation but after that, you don't owe them anything. the only person you owe anything to is yourself. and what you owe yourself is the happiness that you've been living without.
this is something that i went years without realizing. i put the happiness of other people before mine and when i finally made the decision to change that, i felt selfish. but in reality it's not a matter of selfishness, it's a matter of growth and self love. if you haven't yet learned how to show yourself true love, how in the world do you think that you can show anyone else true love? it can't be done. so just take a deep breath, have a little faith, and let go of everything that makes you unhappy, and all will be well.