sometimes quiet is violent

"You must allow yourself to outgrow and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of ruthlessness." I saw this quote today, from a book by Katy Maxwell, and it brought up some things I have been thinking about for a while. These thoughts are mostly about letting go of people, and simultaneously letting go of that 'version' of you that you try to cling on to and pretend to be when you interact with these people. Discussions about letting go of people in your life that may be harmful to you in some way or another are often made to be more serious than they should be. Words like "toxic" and "cutting people out" are thrown around and it makes it seem like only people who are actively abusive towards you, be it emotionally or physically, "deserve" to be cut out of your life, whatever that might mean. This is insinuating that something extreme has to happen in my relationships for me to have the right to "cut them out...

Months ago, I took one of those silly quizzes. Like, "which Harry Potter house are you in" and the like. I rarely do these, mostly because I know I'm a Gryffindor and the rest of the quizzes don't interest me. But there was one about Game of Thrones, and I wanted to know where my characteristics would fit, considering I identify most with either Arya or Daenerys. I took the quiz, and ended up a Targaryen. You do not need to know anything about Game of Thrones to understand what comes next. The only thing that is relevant from that quiz is that one of the options was "what do you do when someone has wronged you?". My answer was "forgive but never forget", which effectively placed me in Targaryen. I've had a lot of chances and situations where I needed to forgive people. I've been bullied since I was 10-years old and that bullying didn't stop when I started 7th grade, it just changed form. Instead of knocking me down or hitting me i...