My dear, tormented soul,

I know you feel sad. Disappointed. Rejected. Angry. Lost. And it’s ok. You’re ok. You’re great, actually, greater than you think of yourself right now. And things will get better. Trust me. I write this from the future so I know.

You have lost someone. Someone whom you loved with all of your heart. Someone to whom you gave all of your energy, time, talents, compassion, and vulnerabilities. Someone whose mere presence activated your smile and overflowed serotonin and oxytocin more than any drug ever can. Someone whose hug and kiss cured every wound, solved every puzzle, and answered every question. Someone who changed your life so profoundly that you envisioned a life together till the end of time. Someone you wanted to share every sunrise and sunset with. Someone with whom you wanted to fuse your love and genes together to form new life and family. Someone who made you love, dream and care about every detail of life, experience, taste, and overcome the feelings of days and nights, wins and losses, joys and tears as a team, as a couple, as soulmates. Someone you wanted to spend the rest of your life with.

My god, how proud you should be of yourself. You have loved oh so deeply. You dared to open your heart and let life fill it with sweetness, joy, and love. You received so many blossoms for your soul to dance on, your mind to learn from and your body to lean on. That’s something to be grateful for.

And now you feel like a bomb has exploded everything that mattered to you, devil teeth have shredded your book of life and you’ve been ousted from your protagonist role. You only see ruins and holes where smiles, hugs, and orgasms used to linger and all of your castles in the sky have suddenly puffed into sad, grey nothingness.

You look at yourself and your life, alone, broken, on your knees, with tears in your eyes and don’t want to accept what has happened.

But you have to.

Here’s a hard truth: Everyone will leave your life at some point. Except yourself. That’s why the relationship you cultivate with yourself is the most important one in your life. So, above everyone else, you must approach yourself with kindness, respect, and love first.

Don’t torture yourself now with questions of why and what if. Don’t dwell in hope for what isn’t. Just learn to accept. When you feel tears, let them out. When you feel pain, let it out. When you feel anger, let it out. Shout it, sport it, art it, do with it whatever feels okay. Allow yourself to grief, for you have lost someone. But know that this grief, too, has an end.

So. How do we go about this?

Accepting the reasons you have been given, or any reason you want to invent is the first step you must take right now.

You must learn to accept this chapter as the past and accept that you don’t live in the past. You live in the present. So you must learn to let go and move on. And very soon, you will learn to say yes again. You will grow confidence in yourself and your talents again. And life will guide you if you let it.

You are an exceptional human being. Exceptional in your capacity to love, to give, and to create. You have, time and time again, shown yourself and the world that you have all it takes to make something from nothing. Use this power. Use your talents. Use your time. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to yourself to get up again now. You owe it to the future you have ahead of you. You owe it to all the beautiful feelings, thoughts, and ideas you have inside of you that haven’t been born yet. Don’t give up now. Never give up, for fuck’s sake! Never give up on yourself.

Don’t let anyone steal your future. Don’t let anyone hold your hope hostage. Set yourself free. Set yourself free, my dear.

So gather the courage now, roll up your sleeves and clean up the mess that was left behind. Don’t prolong this more than necessary. Clean up and throw out what feels like baggage. Clear the ground and soon you’ll see fresh green grass growing again. And after some time, you’ll start to spot new flowers in the wilderness.

Let me also tell you that you’re not alone. You have built relationships with friends and family who are here for you. Call them. They are here to hug you. And no, you don’t need to play it cool in front of them. They accept your tears, they accept your wobbling, they understand that you’re learning to walk on your own again.

And when those memories come up again, embrace them. Places, pictures, songs, scents, meals, and faces will come up in your life and they will ask for your attention and emotions. Don’t shy away from them. Instead, breathe. Inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. Practice gratefulness, and reality check that those memories are the past and you live in the present.

When this feels hard, remind yourself of all the things that weren’t great. You have made concessions. You have made compromises. You have passions, dreams, and needs that weren’t met. Remind yourself of those and your newfound freedom to practice that. Remind yourself that you deserve someone who loves you. Someone who makes you a priority.

Oh, and I should also talk about time because you seem concerned with that. Time pushes life forward, always forward, with death and birth, with goodbye and hello at every corner, at every second. Understand that many things are pushed by time and life and these are out of your control. What is in your control is what you do with what you’re given, what you do with what you’re gifted.

And please, stop using other people’s lives and arbitrary, out-of-context milestones as a model for yours. I’m sure it will only take you seconds to notice all the differences between you and them, between your experiences and dreams, so why worry about comparing your life’s rose to their tulip? Your life, your flower will bloom again, and smile if you can point your head to the sun and let it kiss you.

My dear, life is a journey that comes in many chapters. Some are shorter, some are longer and they all ask for different skills for you to master. This one asks you to let go. This one asks you to grow with the flow. Don’t stay stuck here. Promise me you’ll be kind and respectful and loving to yourself. Promise me you’ll try to do something good for yourself, every day. You have such an amazing future ahead of you, you amazing, kind, creative, strong, and beautiful human soul. You owe it to yourself and the world to let that soul shine.

In loving anticipation,

your future self