Today, I deleted every email conversation and every text that I had sent or received from an emotionally abusive friend. I've blocked their number, and I've severed most social media ties. I'm breathing easy.
I don't intend to vilify this former friend, because I've witnessed too much of their journey to hate or condemn. But letting go of this relationship, severing ties, after months of trying to set boundaries, and more months of feeling responsible for the failures in our relationship, it is a senseless act of beauty to let go.
It doesn't make sense that letting go can be beautiful, when there has been so much pain and so much grief, as I've processed the loss of this relationship. But it is beautiful, today, as I sit in my home, allowing myself to close the chapter. I don't expect to write about this relationship ever again. I don't intend to emotionally flog myself by rereading emails and texts from the good times or the more painful times. I don't plan on letting myself wallow in this.
I've learned the difference between grief and wallowing from all of this. Grief sets in when loss and pain occur. Grieving is essential to healing. It can debilitate you, and leave you sitting in your living room in your underwear playing computer games for eight hours a day. Grief can involve binge-watching Queer Eye while you shovel down chocolate and popcorn. Grief is ugly and beautiful. You realize that something central to your life has shifted, and it can never unshift. That realization makes moving forward difficult, and means that for a moment we must be still and find the central pieces that have not shifted, and ground ourselves there.
Wallowing (I have done a fair amount of this) comes after grief. It is in the moments when we know that we can actually put on pants, we can turn off the TV and the computer, and we can clean the house, or write, or read a book, or be a better partner, or start the process of moving forward again, and we choose to not do that, because we have an excuse to not do any of these things. I have wallowed over the loss of this relationship for too long.
It is kindness, intentional kindness to stop wallowing, and to choose to move on, once the grief has passed. Today, I'm wearing pants with a zipper (and that feels like a TREMENDOUS accomplishment, since I am unemployed in the middle of a pandemic), and I am writing, and I am choosing to let go.