I stood drunk at party with a Taylor Swift song on repeat in my head: “Now I’m standing alone in a crowded room and we’re not speaking, and I’m dying to know, is it killing you like it’s killing me?”
I drank in a desperate attempt to not feel anything as he walked in, everyone around me knowing how hurt I’d been just months earlier. But he didn’t ignore me. Instead, he gave me a genuine hug and told me how great it was to see me. I wasn’t even that drunk, but I wanted to throw up.
As the night progressed, he called my sister telling her he’d take me home. I ended up riding shotgun in a familiar truck. He pulled over and gave a speech I remember word for word. It began with, “I was wrong.”
My kind reputation means I try to control every emotion. It means not screaming things out of anger to the person who just broke your heart. Those times you want to yell, “F*ck you,” and punch them in the face, are replaced with, “I wish you the best.” In my life, I can think of three people I have been unkind to out of anger – and I still regret it, even if they forgave me.
At the end of any relationship – whether it’s a friendship, romance, or the mystical grey area in between – when you're, the bigger person, walk away with kind words while they’re anything but kind, they eventually come to terms with how horribly they treated you.
When you handle endings maturely, you will always win. You might hear the words, “I was wrong.” Trust me when I say that three magical words are the only words that make those nights you cried yourself to sleep worth it.
You may not become friends again, you may not get back together (or maybe you will), but when you end things with your head held high, there’s a chance for repair. Even if tears were shed, don’t say anything out of anger.
The happiest people in life are in control of their thoughts and emotions, even when it seems like their world is crashing down on them.
Don’t spite exes, don’t try to hurt them back, don’t get drunk and say something you regret. Unkindness is a temporary high; it only lasts so long. Then, once everything is said and done, after the smoke clears, what people remember most about you is how you handled that final moment. And if you handled it saying, “Good luck,” they might come back. If you end something with, “F*ck you,” they’ll hate you for it. So even if they deserve every middle finger thrown at them, even if they deserve to get their *sses kicked, refrain.
If you handled it maturely, you get the last laugh when they utter the words, “I was wrong,” and you smirk as you leave because you knew that all along.
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