The most romantic sight I still to this day have ever witnessed was a kiss between my dear Croatian Nana and my resiliently Irish Grandad, his body was now finally at rest, mind drinking Guinness in the heavens above. Nana’s lips quivered as I watched her give him a last farewell kiss from the doorway, I’m certain in that moment that he took a part of her with him too. Yet twelve years later there is still enough bounce in my Nana to love him with all her heart, but continue living her life beyond him and her own way too.

The day my adopted sister fled our home at age sixteen was my first significant goodbye, she had become immune to goodbyes, as they were all she knew for most of her life. It was goodbyes after all that led her to say hello to our family unit as her homeland and sea for eight years.

Goodbyes are the hardest thing for any of us to do, those moments at the airport when you farewell your family and friends on your first permanent relocation abroad and look back for a moment to see your mother reeling in pain. Sometimes it’s a look that forever penetrates your mind, the moment when you look into a lovers eyes and know this will be the last time you see them in this light or share a kiss like this with them because you both can’t go on hating something that was once so blissful. Other times it’s when you’re scattering the ashes of a loved one lost too early from a Raglan cliff face and look out into the horizon and can imagine her dancing on a cityscape under a plethora of dizzying lights looking enigmatically radiant, and feel like grabbing the hands of her two best friends next to you and jumping into the rocks below to join her.

The thing is though without goodbyes we wouldn’t grow, we wouldn’t change, we wouldn’t get stronger, we wouldn’t get bolder and we probably wouldn’t have found at least 50 % of the people in our lives now.

So whether you’re certain of exactly where you want to go or terrified of what will come after a goodbye, have the faith to believe that goodbyes are as cathartic for us as a hello a decade later and remember….

People like you in a town on the edge of the world spin their fathers vintage globe of the world, pinpoint a destination and catch the tide towards their future every day. The initial farewell may be terrifying and heart wrenching, but everyone knows when their home no longer feels like a home and when travel is needed to grow.

Lovers say goodbye every minute that we breathe and although we get left with the memories, burn, long, pine for those significant loves; in the moment when we know that the love we had is now tarnished by the unease of all that has frayed, we must say goodbye. It has to be said for us and for them too because beyond love and after grief there is birth.

Life is fucked up, did you not realize that at age 5 when Thomas J finally kissed Vada and then the bees came swarming? But if you carry your past around with you like a suitcase, if you don’t deal with your past, talk about your past and process your past psychologically. Then your resistance to saying goodbye to your past is actually what’s delaying you from growing.

Friends shape us, friends define eras in our life, but like lovers, friends can be toxic and there will come a time when you don’t need certain friends in your life anymore. This is not to say that you’ve become better than them and they’re some tragic looser, but development and what we experience in life does change us and sometimes friendships do expire. 

Perseverance is an admirable societal quality to possess, yet we all know when a role or workplace is getting us nowhere, taking its toll on our lives outside of the office and is really just fucking with our groove. I’m not saying run at the first warning bell but after three months of warning bells, in that moment when you realize that you’re nothing but a cunt with an office chair imprint on the carpet, say goodbye with dignity.

A wise teenager once told me “Sometimes it’s more fulfilling to be a no one somewhere than a someone nowhere”. So are you ready to say goodbye to who you are now and say hello to a new chapter of you?

Written by Samuel Elliot Snowden