Don’t Water Dead Flowers

By Kianna Cho

This is a piece derived from my own experience about the difficulty of letting people go. It was written in hopes of reaching an audience that, too, has experienced this—and helping them move on.

There's a saying that has recently come to have great significance in my life: “don't water dead flowers”. 
I’ve found that we often overexert ourselves in getting people that are slipping from our lives to stay, delaying the endings of connections that might, in turn, delay our growth. 
Even if we are conscious of its reaped consequences, we choose pursuing them over ourselves because the familiarity of their presence, if gone, would disturb our lives as we've known them: a life that they are not a part of is unknown to us, and confronting this unknown is, at first, harder than letting them go. 
So, we might spend some time attempting everything we can possibly do to keep them, though it will not have the effect we want it to. 
In our fixation of this already dead flower, we tend to neglect all others: we water it with all that we have to offer, forgetting to, or even intentionally not leaving anything for anybody else, including ourselves. 
And though this exchange might last seemingly endlessly, we, at some point, come to the realization that making somebody who's unwilling to stay, stay, is impossible, even with our best efforts. 
We, at last, let go: eventually finding satisfaction in our own company, tending first to ourselves and then to the right people.

Process

The first draft of this piece was personal to me; it was written to cope with my own struggles. However, I later revised it to be more general so that it can be applied to any who read it, in hopes of helping other people cope with these same struggles. With the help of my mentor, I finalized this piece and have thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing it, as it has helped me, and may help others following its publication.