Who you really leave for when you are leaving

Before I left my last partner, I asked myself a question:

If I were never to be a wife, and if I were never to be a mother,
could I at least learn to love myself?

I remember writing this in my diary during a very hot summer in Portugal. I was living in a top-floor apartment without air conditioning, lying on the floor where it felt coolest.

And the answer to that question was not a clear yes.

The words "at least"

The words at least are very telling.

They show that I had put myself last.

Last behind my dreams.

Last behind being a wife.

Last behind becoming a mother.

Tbh I wasn’t surprised that my answer was not a clear yes.

Because hidden inside the question if I could at least learn to love myself was another one:

How could I love the person who had failed to bring me the life of my dreams?

I was not sure I could learn how to love myself.

But underneath, there was a tiny voice.

And it didn't say:

"You can."

It asked an open question:

"What if you can?"

Because what the relationship I was in showed me was this:

You cannot outsource the love for yourself.

You can be loved beyond measure.

But what truly matters is that you love and accept yourself, otherwise you will stay in places you don’t belong, just to get love.

Who I really left for

What I found over the next two years after leaving is that this is what I truly wanted: accpeting myself, believing in myself, being my own friend.

In the beginning, I thought I was leaving for a man.

A man who wanted more similar things in life than I did.

But what I discovered later was this:

I was leaving to learn how to love myself.

Who I really left for was me.

And I found that you can only learn to love yourself when you are able (or forced, like I was) to look at all the hurt and shameful parts that are living inside of you.

And if there is no one there to give them love and attention, you eventually have to become aware that there actually is someone.

Sometimes life has to strip away the others so that you become aware of the one who had been hidden in plain sight:

You.

And you can only learn this after leaving and before arriving.

What the in-between is for

If you want to define leaving as leaving a relationship (job, country, friendship circle < please insert what applies to you) and arriving as meeting a new person who is a better fit with the version of you that has emerged.

And probably the reason for leaving was that you wanted to become this version in the first place.

What I learned is also this:

In the end, your life is about you.

What you want to experience.

What you want to express.

And the quality of both is determined by the depth of how much you can accept yourself and connect with life, even if (or especially if) it doesn't look the way you want it to.

This is a skill that is mainly developed in the in-between.

And it serves you very well when something you wanted finally arrives.

Because now you have the capacity to experience it on a level of fulfillment that you would have barely scratched before. Which in my opinion is the whole point of every human process and “healing work”: the ability to experience being human fully.