Leaving me was the best thing she ever taught me.
Not in the way a teacher marks your paper in red ink,
but in the way a storm teaches you which walls were never built right.
The way silence teaches you what your voice sounds like
when there’s no one left to echo it.
I used to think love was proof of worth
that if someone stayed, it meant I’d finally become enough.
But she left, and the world didn’t end,
it just unfolded into a lesson I was too stubborn to read.
Turns out, I’d mistaken attachment for devotion,
and comfort for connection.
She showed me that affection can be currency,
that I was always spending myself on people
who only came to make change.
That I could build a life from the rubble
of someone else’s exit
one breath, one boundary, one soft refusal at a time.
When she left, I learned to stop begging for peace
from people who profit off my chaos.
I learned that loneliness isn’t punishment,
it’s a practice.
A way to relearn my name in a quiet room
and mean it this time.
She didn’t just leave—she freed me.
From the hunger to be seen, from the mirror’s trial,
from the altar I’d built in the shape of her approval.
And now I see it clear:
some people arrive to break you open,
others to remind you that you were never broken,
just unlearned.
So yes,
leaving me was the best thing she ever taught me
because she was the last person I ever needed
to show me how to stay.