Sarah Irby, Editor in Chief~
Have you ever missed someone you know you shouldn’t? Or maybe you don’t know whether you should miss him/her or not, but everyone around you keeps telling you you’re better off? When everyone is telling you how you’re supposed to feel, how do you reach deep down and figure out how you truly feel? Feelings aren’t always so fun.
Obviously, missing people is normal. There are people I miss all the time, and there are people I will randomly miss. But then there are those certain people in your life who evoke a nagging, painful type of loss that you feel sharp right in the middle of your chest, and you can’t seem to shake it. I think this kind of “missing” arises when there is unfinished business between you and the person; you remain unsettled about what could have been.
Instead, you’re here and they’re not, and you don’t know how to feel about it. Maybe it’s been months since whatever happened to separate you, but these feelings have a way of materializing when we least expect it. It’s important to remember that we’re all human, we all have emotions and we all create meaningful connections with one another. It’s difficult when you quit one of those connections cold turkey. But people aren’t always so understanding of this.
I remember when the relationship I was in for almost five years – all throughout high school and some of college – ended. I was devastated, and I went through months and months of trying to be okay, but it’s not something you can always do alone. Sometimes you want to talk to people about it, whether it be venting or looking back at memories.
But what I distinctly remember is how quickly I had to learn to hold my tongue, because my friends were telling me to shut up about it or to get over it. I get it; listening to people cry and complain about their ex gets real old after a while, but imagine how that person is feeling, especially if they spent a significant amount of their life with that person. That’s not something you just get over in a week’s time. The experience stays with you forever. We all need to be a little more considerate and understanding of what each individual is going through, because the only person who can ever know their pain is them.
Where was I, again? Oh, yeah. Recently I’ve found myself missing someone I really loved, someone who had been through a lot of crap, but was trying to improve himself. I catch myself wondering where he’s at, what he’s doing, if he has food in his stomach and a bed to sleep in at night. Unfortunately, I seem to have no way to contact this person to ask if he’s doing okay, which just adds to my distress over the whole situation.
I realize this column is basically just me spilling my inner thoughts onto paper, and that’s what journals are for, so why should you care? The point is, I’ve let others dictate how I feel about some people based off of their own perceptions of that person. I suppressed things when I should have been working through how I really felt. I know that friends and family often just want what is best for you, and of course you should appreciate that, but it’s not their life. You have to be able to make the decisions that are right for you at the time. Even if someone was toxic for you, you still have the right to miss them. He or she is a human being who was a part of your life, who altered it in some form or another, and the sheer fact that we are able to forge these types of bonds is powerful.
You never have to feel guilty for missing someone, ever.