Cutting People Off and Moving On: Is It Feasible?

Alienating toxic people is a step toward healing. But it’s not the whole journey.

By: Abby Vela

It’s about that time in the semester when students begin to get a bit antsy, especially our first years. Sure, the campus experience is welcoming and provides us with a community of our choosing, and life away from our guardians’ prying eyes still has that freeing feeling that it did the first week. However, those positives don’t always beat out the longing for our mattresses, a home-cooked meal, or the incessant barking of the family dog you didn’t know you could miss. New experiences can be fantastic, but so can comfort, familiarity.

I’ve been home one weekend so far this semester, and I don’t plan on going back for a while. That being said, I enjoyed my time there; I went to my favorite coffee shop, record store, and brunch spot. It was relaxing, escaping the hustle and bustle of our campus for 72 hours. Yet, it was unsettling to see all those people I thought were in a separate chapter of my life. When I decided to go out of state for college, I believed that I would never have to see all the people I disliked ever again. I thought that because my address changed, I would be a separate entity from the community.

That is, unfortunately, not the case.

Hometown trauma is a real experience. I’m a person of color coming from the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. There’s a certain unease that doesn’t just dissipate the minute I leave. The racism and violence I experienced stuck with me and shaped not only the way I navigate life in Minneapolis but also how I navigate relationships within my hometown. I cut people off and out, but is this truly a feasible solution?

Moving forward is not a one-size-fits-all experience, and I don’t want to make it out to be. It takes a lot of self-reflection and work even to begin moving forward, so to say that one way is the only way would be absurd. Alienation of individual people has worked for me in the past (let’s be honest, we all have that one friend in high school that needed to be cut off for some reason or another), but whole towns, communities, and memories? I don’t know how possible that is to do, especially if you have families, friends, and experiences still intertwined with it.

While the body moves away and it’s possible that you may never lay eyes on your hometown again, every single person you interact with leaves an impression, positive, negative, or neutral; none of that changes with an address. In a way, all seven billion people on this planet are just 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles of every person they’ve ever met and every experience they’ve ever had. Take a piece of that puzzle out, and it’s incomplete, no matter how ugly or misshapen the piece may be.

That’s not to say that distance and time don’t heal, because they do. The physical act of blocking that number, unfollowing on social media, or burning those bridges is therapeutic and freeing in a sense. Putting parts of your past in the past is a battle in and of itself, but perhaps it’s only part of the battle. I think the other part may be coming to terms with the past’s effect on the present. It’s a part of me, it’s a part of you, and it’s a part of the people we try to forget.

Because no matter how hard we try to forget about those who hurt us, it sticks with you, perseveres. 

Yet in the same breath, so do we. Can cutting people off be a feasible tool to move on? Of course, but with that, we have to learn to live with our experiences. So let’s forgive ourselves and all of our ugly and misshapen pieces, because even those pieces deserve new beginnings.