Letting Go Saved Me

Earlier this year, I severed my relationship with my parents. This year has been one of the heaviest years of my life, but also one of the best. I have flourished in ways I didn’t think were possible, and that’s why letting them go saved me.

There is a kind of loneliness that sits in the bones. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being surrounded by people who were meant to protect you and instead became the source of the deepest wounds you carry. I didn’t choose that loneliness — I learned it. I inherited it. It shaped me. And I spent years thinking it was my fault, thinking I was somehow born wrong, thinking I had to justify my existence.

But letting go saved me.

People love to say parents’ love is unconditional. I know now that isn’t true. A child’s love might be unconditional, but a parent’s love — that depends on their capacity, their healing, their honesty with themselves. Some people have children before they’ve confronted the chaos inside them, before they’ve learned how to love themselves. And when those people become parents, the child becomes the battlefield for their unhealed wounds.

I still loved them. Of course I did. Unfortunately.

But love wasn’t enough to survive them.

What I grew up inside was inconsistency. Emotional whiplash. Being lifted up one moment and torn down the next. Warmth followed by coldness. Praise wrapped around sharp edges. A cycle that kept me guessing, kept me spinning, kept me small. I never knew what version of them I would meet on any given day. And even when I took space — when I walked, worked, danced, lifted weights — the sadness would still hit me like a punch in the chest. A reminder that I had no anchor. A reminder that I was on my own.

But the truth is: I had been on my own long before I admitted it to myself.

There were moments that broke me in ways I still don’t fully have language for. Times when I desperately needed safety, protection, accountability, love — and instead I was handed silence, dismissal, withheld empathy, performances of care that didn’t match reality. Times when my boundaries were ignored even when I spoke them with softness, clarity, and kindness. Times when I questioned my own memory because the gaslighting was that strong. Times I wondered what I could have done differently, only to realise there was nothing I could have changed — the pain was already written.

I grew up being the one who gave comfort.

The one who steadied others.

The one who held the emotional weight of people who should have held me.

I extended compassion over and over until it left me unthanked and drained.

And still, people want explanations.

Still, people say, “But they’re your parents.”

As if that erases the truth.

As if biology is the same as safety.

As if shared DNA cancels out harm.

They’re my parents, not yours.

You don’t know what shaped me.

You don’t know the things I swallowed whole just to keep the peace.

You don’t know the internal ruins I had to walk through to reach myself again.

I reached a point where I no longer needed anyone else to understand.

I didn’t need to offer my wounds as proof.

I didn’t need to open myself up just to be doubted or explained away.

So I wrote the letters.

Letters that weren’t born out of hate — but out of final clarity.

Letters that marked the end of a cycle I could not survive any longer.

Letters that were the last act of honesty before I finally closed the door.

Letting go wasn’t easy.

Letting go was breaking.

Letting go was grieving people who are still alive.

Letting go was choosing myself for the first time.

And yet — letting go saved me.

I take the sweet memories with me, the ones that truly held joy, the ones that stitched confidence into my skin. I let go of the internal critic that was never my voice to begin with. I keep the parts that feel like love, and I release the parts that feel like harm.

I’m not done with life.

I’m just done with them.

Letting go didn’t erase the loneliness.

It didn’t take away the grief.

It didn’t rewrite the past.

But it gave me breath.

It gave me peace.

It gave me back to myself.

I am alone in this world sometimes — yes.

But I have me.

When everything crashes, when I am on my knees, when nothing feels steady —

I have me.

And that is enough.

Letting go saved me.

And I’m not going back.