Week 6 · The Exit Season · Discipline = Self-Respect
There is a version of healing that looks nothing like the movies.
No single moment of clarity. No dramatic final conversation where everything gets said and understood and resolved. No clean door closing with a satisfying click.
Just a car. A New Year’s Eve. A phone that rang twice and went unanswered. And a lady who finally , after more than three years of trying , decided to believe what she had always already known.
That is what my healing looked like. Unglamorous. Overdue. And completely mine.
What Three Years of On and Off Actually Looks Like
Let me tell you what people don’t say about staying connected to someone who isn’t good for you, it doesn’t always look like weakness from the inside. Sometimes it looks like hope. Sometimes it looks like closure-seeking. Sometimes it looks like love that refuses to accept what it’s being shown.
For three years, H moved in and out of my life like the weather.
The first time he came back, it was Christmas. He offered to fly me back to see him, the ticket, the dates, the plan all discussed. And then, on the day he was supposed to book it, he disappeared. When he resurfaced, there was an excuse, something urgent, something about the war in his home country, a phone call with his family that had consumed the day. He had missed the time to call me back. He was so sorry.
I believed him. Because I wanted to.
The second time, he came back in person. He told me how much he had changed. He said he had done inner work, even seen a therapist. He looked sorry in the way that people look when they need you to see it. His mother, he said, still asked about me sometimes. Something in me, the part that had almost fully closed the door, cracked open again. We talked for hours. And in the weeks that followed, slowly, something that felt like connection rebuilt itself between us.
Three months later, he stopped again.
He didn’t want to get married yet, he said. He had something big to build in his life. From the beginning, I had told him clearly: if we go back, it is serious. It is for a future. He had agreed to those terms. Then changed his mind quietly, on a day that was ordinary for him and devastating for me.
The day he called to end it, before everything he said, he asked, and i answered…I told him what I loved about him, the version of him I had seen in small, private moments. Him coding. Planting things. Feeding the fish he kept. Cooking with focus and care and only for me. I told him all of it.
And then he said he wanted to stop.
I hung up and sat with the fact that I had just confessed my love to someone, ending things for the second time. I had shown up, fully, for a person who kept leaving.
“You Are Mine”
Seven or eight months of silence followed. I visited the city where we had history and chose not to tell him. He found out somehow and called, indignant, almost wounded, asking why I hadn’t reached out. Why I hadn’t come to see him.
Why should I, I thought. And underneath that: he is still exactly who he has always been.
He told me he had something important to say. We arranged a call for a few days later.
When it came, he talked a lot but ended with three words:
“You are mine.”
I felt something. I want to be honest about that, because this series is built on honesty. Even after everything, even knowing what I knew, even carrying the full weight of what those three years had cost me, those words moved something in me. Not because I believed him. But because some part of me had spent years wanting to be claimed by him, properly, without conditions. And hearing it, finally, still touched something old and tired in my chest.
But I had learned, by then, to listen past the feeling to the information underneath it.
What I found out in the calls that followed was this: on the day he said you are mine, there was another girl in his home. They had been fighting. He had picked up the phone and called me while someone else was standing in his apartment. You are mine was not a declaration. It was a move in a game I hadn’t agreed to play.
I wanted those calls anyway. Not for him, for me. I had things I had never gotten to say. Words I had swallowed for years that still lived in my chest. I wanted to speak them out loud, to close the chapter properly, to give my own voice the space it had been denied.
So I stayed on those calls. I spoke. I said what I needed to say.
And he, as he always had, promised something he would not keep.
The Last Promise
He said he would come to where I was, a five hour flight journey, so we could sat down in front of each other, I could say everything, face to face, he’d listen to me. He said it like he meant it. He always said things like he meant them.
The day came. No call. No answer. Silence.
Three days later he resurfaced with an explanation, the emergency room, the hospital, the crisis that had kept him away. He delivered it with the same tone he always used for his excuses: urgent, specific, designed to be believed.
I didn’t feel angry. I felt something quieter and more final than anger.
He is still who he has always been. He will never change. And I have known this for a very long time.
The Night I Finally Stopped
New Year’s Eve. I was in a car on the way to celebrate with friends when I found out someone I loved was in the hospital, just ten minutes from where H was living. Someone he had met before. Someone who was part of the life I had once imagined sharing with him.
I sat in that car holding two things at once: genuine worry for someone I loved, and the weight of a name saved in my phone as “This Past Is Dead.” I told myself it made sense to call, he was nearby, he knew this person, it felt almost reasonable.
But I knew, even as I reached for the phone, what I was really doing. I was giving myself one last permission to try.
I had blocked him hundreds of times. Unblocked him because he said he was coming to visit. This was the pattern — the block, the return, the excuse, the hope, the block again.
I called his number. It rang. No answer.
I called again. Nothing..
I put the phone in my lap and made a decision that felt less like a dramatic choice and more like a door I was simply done leaving open.
This is the last time I call this person. After this, no more messages. No more connections. He will be out of my world at once.
I blocked everything. Not in rage. Not even in pain. In the quiet, matter-of-fact way, you throw out something that has been sitting in your house long past the point of usefulness.
That was it. No final speech. No closure conversation. Just a New Year’s Eve, a car, and a phone that rang twice into silence.
Two months later, a girl I didn’t know sent me a friend request on social media. Her first message was in Mandarin:
「Hi 您好 👋，請問你認識 H 嗎？我看他有和你是好友，想確認一下。」Hi. Do you know H? I saw that you’re friends with him, just wanted to check.
I stared at that message for a long moment. I recognised everything in it: the careful phrasing, the casual tone masking something urgent beneath the surface, a woman trying to confirm what she already suspected.
I knew that feeling. I had lived inside it for years.
Some things confirm themselves. You just have to wait long enough to see it.
The Mirror
If you are reading this and recognising the pattern, the return, the hope, the disappointment, the staying connected anyway, I want to say something to you directly:
You are not weak for going back. You are not foolish for feeling something when they reappear. You are not broken for wanting the ending to be different from what it always was.
You are human. And humans love in loops when they haven’t yet been given a reason good enough to believe the loop is finished.
But here is what I know now: the reason you are waiting for, the apology big enough, the change real enough, the conversation final enough, it is not coming. Not from him. The only reason powerful enough to close this chapter is one you give yourself.
And it doesn’t arrive as a feeling. It arrives as a decision.
The Hard Truth, Named Directly
Healing is not a feeling. It is a practice.
It is choosing, on a Tuesday with no particular significance, not to check his profile. It is choosing, on a day when you miss him for no clear reason, to sit with that feeling instead of picking up the phone. It is choosing, on a New Year’s Eve in a car full of complicated emotions, to let the call ring out and mean it this time.
The block was not the end of the healing. The healing is every day you do not unblock. Every morning you wake up and make that choice again, not because you no longer feel anything, but because you have decided that what you feel is no longer a reason to stay.
That is not softness. That is discipline. That is the most unglamorous, underrated, essential form of self-respect there is.
Nobody will celebrate it. There is no moment that looks like victory. Just a quiet accumulation of days in which you chose yourself, again, and again, and again, until one day you realise you have built, out of all those small repeated choices, a life that no longer has room for him in it.
This Week’s Action Step
Choose one daily act of self-respect this week. Just one.
It does not have to be significant. In fact, the smaller the better, because the point is not the act itself but the repetition of it. Making your bed. Not checking his profile. Answering your own needs before anyone else’s. Take five minutes of silence that belongs entirely to you.
Do it every day this week. Not because it will fix everything. But because every time you do it, you are casting a vote for the version of yourself who has already moved on.
That version exists. You are building toward her, one small choice at a time.
Before You Go
I want to say something about the years I spent in that cycle, the returns, the hopes, the disappointments, the unblocking.
I used to be ashamed of it. Three years feels like a long time to be learning the same lesson. But I understand now that I wasn’t failing to learn it; I was learning it in the only way it was available to me. Slowly. Painfully. With full evidence.
I needed to see it enough times to believe it completely. And now I do.
The path that finally opened up was not through one last conversation, or one perfect act of closure, or one moment of him finally becoming who I needed him to be. It opened in a car on New Year’s Eve, in the silence after two unanswered calls, in the quiet certainty of a decision made without drama or audience.
I don’t need to feel better every day. I just need to choose better every day.
The feeling follows. I promise you, it follows.
Next week: I Stopped Chasing Love Like It Was My Only Goal. “Ambition that includes me, not competes with me.”