You were her saving grace, her knight in shining armour.

You were always the one who could bring her back from the darkness and show her the light.

You taught her how to love, how to live, how to dream. You were the foundations of her heart and her life, the building blocks where she built her life around your dreams—because you were her universe and she was your star.

You placed her on a pedestal, where you showed her off to your friends. This amazing girl was so young but so full of life, love, and happiness, and ever-so-willing to give you everything you wanted. Her life had come from the depths of darkness to the place of dreams, and she had all she ever needed in you and the love you fueled her with.

When one is standing on a pedestal, it is a challenge to keep balance.

Rocking back and forth, with the breeze swaying ever so slightly—until over time, the wind picks up speed, and one finds herself grappling to hold on, clutching at the air. From a life of gentle breezes and warmth came storms of negativity and criticism, as your own expectations began to let you down.

The pedestal of perfection—that’s what I like to call it. One cannot begin to explain how difficult it is to spend every day of your life carefully calculating the most appropriate, correct thing to say and do to uphold this notion of perfection—forever in a state of stress and anxiousness, never able to loosen.

A girl full of happiness, joy, and life, became a girl who lost all sense of herself.

She was never quite good enough for you, always saying the wrong thing, always doing the wrong thing. And so began the downward spiral, that would bring with it the end of a promising love, pulled back and forth, back and forth, by the crashing, cycling waves of happiness and love, to anger, frustration, and disappointment. And, so the cycle continued.

It was a love one could say tasted like sweet, passionate poison, one where you simply cannot find a harmonious way to live with the other—but, the pain and loss of living without them are simply too much to bear. A love in which two human beings, once both fueled by love, passion, dreams, and happiness, were drowned by expectations, anger, sadness, and misunderstandings that simply could not exist in a world together.

Finally, the words she so dreaded to hear came. “You’ll be better off without me,” you told her and you left her life, leaving a crater in her heart where your love had once burned so strongly.

There comes a time in a person’s life when you realise that although all love is worth fighting for, the love you have for yourself is worth so much more. When her pedestal was swept out from under her feet, and she came crashing down, all she was left with were the scars and the bruises that you had left upon her soul: The words you had spoken, the feelings you had swept aside, and the free spirit you had torn apart with your impossible expectations and poisonous words.

When one has lost herself, it is a long and difficult journey to find her way back.

It can take years to truly realise the impact that such a life-changing experience can have upon one’s life and sense of self. It took her a long time to realise this, searching and searching for you in other people, and never quite finding what she needed. And after years of ups, downs, highs and lows, and many stages of cyclical healing, she came to the stunning realisation that what she had clung to within you, and had since searched for in everybody else, could simply only be found within herself.

Because she could choose to live her life, believing the things that you had so deeply fed her young and innocent mind, believing that she was never quite good enough, or aspiring enough, or strong enough, or confident enough.

Or, she could call bullsh*t and realise that she was the only one who held the power to create her reality—to realise that every capacity of the universe to change, to dream, and to believe was already within her, and that was the most powerful thing of all because it meant that no one else could ever have that power over her again.

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Author: Ashleigh Smart 
Image: Courtesy of @gypsieraleigh on Instagram
Editor: Leah Sugerman
Copy Editor: Danielle Beutell
Social Editor: Khara-Jade Warren