You left my life a year ago.

I thought it would kill me. I almost let it.

I now sit on the other side of pain, grief, and heartbreak that I never thought I would recover from.

Don’t get me wrong, I still miss you all the time—your smile, your laugh, the way your body felt against mine. It took a year to see that I had love all wrong and it was one of the many things that suffocated our relationship.

I loved you, yes, and sometimes in the most beautiful ways. But I also loved you from a toxic place of abandonment issues and codependency. You were like my drug, and I was a full-blown addict. We weren’t healthy, not on our own and not together. But I so badly wanted us to be.

Six months ago, I started sitting with plant medicine. First psilocybin, then Kambo, then Ayahuasca.

In the beginning, I thought it would be the path back to you. If I could heal myself, “raise my frequency,” you would magically reappear back in my life. It quickly became clear that these plants would be the path back to myself, my true self—not the person I became as a result of trauma.

It has been messy, difficult, terrifying, and painful. Years of trauma patterns that carved their way into my brain and nervous system have had to be purged out in many ways to make room to restart. I’ve learned how to sit with my pain, to become an explorer of it, to move through it, and find acceptance for things just as they are. Each ceremony, I let something else go, I let more of you and of us go.

When I sit and you flood my memories, I apologize to you relentlessly for the ways in which I let my fears and insecurity hurt you. I send you love, and I let you go. I forgive you. I forgive myself. It is a practice. I am seeing myself fully and finding compassion for myself as I am in a place of recovery from the unhealthy mechanisms that had me so confused about love and partnership.

Today, I realized just how much I’ve let you go when I was able to look at a picture of the two of us together and not burst into tears or reach out to you or reach for some other kind of distraction. The love I have for you now is not one of any sort of attachment. Though we will likely never have any type of closure, nor will I see your face again, I am able to love you fully and completely.

Love is letting go.

Love is saying I want what is in your highest good and for you to be happy, unconditionally so—even when that path doesn’t include me.

Our time together was the beginning of me learning what love is and what love isn’t. Our ending was the catalyst to a new beginning for myself. I hope it has been the same for you.