“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” —Brian A. Chalker
I recently made the decision to let go of a friendship with someone I care about deeply.
This wasn’t a cut-and-dry situation. They didn’t do anything egregiously offensive. And it wasn’t the slow drifting-apart in which people gradually outgrow the friendship and fade away from each other. Instead, I gently and intentionally ended this friendship.
And in doing so, I realized how far I’ve come this year in practicing interoception and living my values of equanimity, honesty, and acceptance.
Needing to end my connection with this person was an embodied realization: noticing that I was wanting to pull away, getting curious about that feeling, and trusting my intuition.
This decision started with information from my body, not my mind, which is a big shift for me. Our bodies hold emotion and intuitive wisdom, and we can learn so much from listening to our bodies’ subtle messages, even if we don’t know yet what they mean.
My body was telling me to put some distance between us. So I listened to my body.
I took my sweet time listening. As I wrote about equanimity:
I can be impulsive sometimes. I want to practice sitting with a desire (to speak, to act, to decide) without acting on it. I want to practice naming and fully considering and feeling the potential consequences of my decisions.
So I sat with those feelings for weeks, trying to figure out what they meant. I realized that I was feeling hesitation and uncertainty around continued closeness with this friend, and that it was because they weren’t bringing out the best in me.
And, as I’ve started valuing my time more intentionally, I’ve had to make some hard choices about how I spend my time. It was time to let this person go.
I decided to tell them directly rather than avoiding, slow-fading, or telling a little white lie. Another of the values I’ve been trying to practice is honesty:
Not pretending to like or want something I don’t, just because it would make someone else more comfortable. Speaking my truth with love.
I owned my truth and shared it with kindness. We had a good, honest conversation. I expressed gratitude for what they had meant to me and what I had learned from and loved about our connection. We parted ways with respect and affection.
I’m highly skilled at overthinking: second-guessing myself, feeling the weight of sunk cost, and trying to make the friendship what it was in the past rather than accepting that things have changed. But I’m feeling steadier now, better able to trust in my own intuition. I’m accepting the new shape of things.
As I wrote about acceptance:
[I want to work on] accepting that everything changes. Staying committed to holding all things lightly (non-grasping). Being content with how things are rather than how we wish things were or used to be.
I’m grateful for having grown in my discernment and ability to trust my own judgment.
Losing a friend is hard. It’s like losing a version of yourself. It’s the death of potential. But then again, it’s not really loss, is it? I gained so much from this friendship. And even though it no longer works for me, I’m so grateful for having had it.
When we met, this person was just who I needed in my life. Together we explored and grew, shared new exciting experiences and adventures, and had deep and meaningful conversations as we each learned more about ourselves and who we wanted to become.
This is what our culture gets deeply wrong about relationships. We think that relationships have to last a lifetime to be meaningful or successful. We think that friendships that end have “failed.”
I disagree.
In A Love Letter to Friendship, I wrote:
What if we defined a friendship’s success not by its longevity but by the joy and growth it brought its participants? And by the integrity with which friends commit to honoring, remembering, and sometimes grieving the people they were in that friendship, and the meaning that friendship held in their lives?
We can learn something from every connection, in every season of our lives. We can savor the hell out of exactly where and who we are while knowing that someday, inevitably, things will shift.
All significant relationships change us in some way, shaping who we become. My mom died nearly 16 years ago, and yet I feel her presence every day in my own mothering.
Yet relationships are also valuable for their significance in the moment, in that particular time in our life. Because, as Above & Beyond say, “life is made of small moments.” And meaning in life comes not from reaching some end goal, some final and perfect version of ourselves, but from savoring all of those moments.
So for now, I’m feeling the peace and satisfaction that comes with the end to a good story. And I’m making space in my life for the next chapter, the other friendships I’ll nurture, and the newest version of myself they will help me become.
