“I Still Feel Abandoned, Even Though I Left”
“I was the one who ended it. I chose to walk away. I know it was the right thing—there was too much misalignment, too much pain—but now, months later, I still feel abandoned. It doesn’t make sense. How can I feel left, when I was the one who left?”
Dear Jordan,
I felt that one in my bones. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in your words—not the loneliness of being alone, but of feeling misunderstood even by yourself. You made the choice. You walked away. You did what people call the brave thing, the empowered thing. And still, here you are—carrying the ache of something that feels like you were the one left behind.
That contradiction? It’s not failure. It’s not regression. It’s the real texture of emotional truth. Because what you’re describing isn’t just about who ended what—it’s about the shape of loss when it doesn’t match the story we expected to live.
There’s a quiet myth we often internalize: that the one who leaves will feel resolved, clear, empowered. That heartbreak belongs to the one left standing in the wreckage, while the one who walks away gets to move on. But in real life, endings are rarely that clean. We can choose to leave and still feel gutted. We can act from wisdom and still carry grief. And we can end a relationship because we know we have to, even while a younger part of us aches to be chosen, wanted, fought for.
Sometimes, the most painful kind of abandonment is the one that confirms what we were hoping wasn’t true—that even at the end, they didn’t show up for us. That we had to be the one to do the leaving. That they didn’t try to stop us. That we had to carry the weight of the ending not because we didn’t love them, but because they weren’t willing or able to meet us where we needed to be met.
That doesn’t feel like power. That feels like emotional exile.
So yes, you left. But you also waited, maybe for longer than anyone saw. Waited for them to change. To notice. To try. To become someone who could walk toward you instead of away from intimacy, conflict, or accountability. And when they didn’t, you made the choice to walk yourself out of something that had already been fading.
But knowing it was the right decision doesn’t insulate us from pain. Sometimes it intensifies it. Because it’s easier to say “they left me” than to sit with the quieter ache of “I had to leave, even though part of me didn’t want to.”
We’re wired to seek belonging. To want reciprocity. To yearn for emotional repair. And when we don’t get that—even when we are the one to end it—there is still something in us that feels dropped. Unmet. Unwitnessed.
I think part of what you’re feeling isn’t abandonment in the traditional sense—it’s emotional aloneness. The kind that comes from realizing someone never really met you in the way you needed. That they may have been physically present, or emotionally entangled, or woven into your routines—but they didn’t truly see you. Or fight for you. Or offer the kind of care that could have made staying possible.
You didn’t just lose a person. You lost the possibility of repair. You lost the hope that they might finally show up. You lost the version of you that kept holding out for that moment.
And now you’re here. In the aftermath. Sitting in a silence that doesn’t come with clarity, only contradiction.
That’s the thing about emotionally intelligent choices—they’re often deeply lonely ones. They don’t come with applause or immediate peace. They come with slow grief. They come with echoes of old wounds, especially the ones that trace back to early abandonment, unmet needs, or childhood roles where you had to take care of others before yourself.
When you chose to leave, you weren’t just ending a relationship. You were ending the cycle of trying to earn love through overextension, silence, or hope. That’s hard. It takes more strength than most people will ever understand.
And even now, as you sit in this in-between—no longer tethered to that person, but not yet fully anchored in a new version of yourself—you’re doing something holy. You’re grieving the fantasy. You’re grieving the absence of a rescue that never came. You’re learning to live without the illusion that they were ever going to become who you needed.
That’s not weakness. That’s mourning. And it deserves gentleness.
So if you feel abandoned, let yourself feel it. You’re not wrong. You didn’t imagine it. The ending you chose didn’t erase the abandonment you experienced long before you walked away. And leaving someone who can’t meet you doesn’t mean you never wanted them to try.
You did. And they didn’t. And now, here you are—making space for the version of you who no longer needs to be needed in order to stay.
You’re not alone in this.
–RJ