There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes when you stop pretending. Not the sad kind. The honest kind. The kind where you look around at certain people in your life and realize they’ve been gone for a while—you just kept setting a plate for them anyway.
I’ve been thinking about that because of something I read last week. Pastor Yvonne Barnes has this line in The Kindness Code about seasons of release. She says the most intelligent thing you can do is look at the people in your life and ask whether they serve a healthy purpose anymore. Not a selfish question. Just an honest one.
I don’t think we talk enough about how that feels. The actual moment when you stop fighting for someone to stay.
Because we’re trained to believe that letting go means you didn’t try hard enough. That if you really loved someone, you’d find a way. But Barnes says something different. She says holding things loosely means when it’s time to let it go, it knows how to let you go. I had to read that twice. There’s a gentleness in it that doesn’t feel like failure.
I had a friend once—good friend, or so I thought. But somewhere along the way, every conversation became me explaining myself. Every text felt like a test I didn’t study for. And I kept showing up because I thought that’s what loyalty looked like. But loyalty without honesty isn’t loyalty. It’s just endurance.
The Kindness Code kept nudging me on this. Not loudly. More like a hand on my shoulder. Barnes writes about how you can’t expect someone to respect you when disrespect was the beginning of it all. And I sat with that for a long time. Because in that friendship, disrespect wasn’t loud. It wasn’t yelling or name-calling. It was subtle. Forgetting plans. Laughing at something I shared that mattered to me. Showing up late and never apologizing.
And I let it slide. Every time. Because I thought kindness meant absorbing things. Taking the hit so the other person didn’t have to feel uncomfortable.
But that’s not what Barnes is saying at all. She talks about how when you compromise who you are to be accepted by someone else, you lose respect for yourself. Not they lose respect. You lose it. That hit different. Because I realized I wasn’t angry at my friend for how they treated me. I was angry at myself for how long I let it happen.
I stopped calling that person a few months ago. Not dramatically. No big conversation. I just… stopped. And the silence was loud at first. But then it wasn’t. Then it was just quiet. And in that quiet, I had more energy for other things. For people who actually seemed glad to hear from me.
Barnes says something else that I keep coming back to. About how when God is elevating you, it’s going to make some people mad. Not because you did anything wrong. But because everyone can’t go where you’re about to go. I don’t know if I believe God is picking favorites or anything like that. But I do know that growth has a cost. And one of the costs is that some people won’t recognize you anymore. Not because you changed in a bad way. Just because you changed.
And they were comfortable with the old version.
The Kindness Code has this whole section about how you outgrow people like you outgrow clothes. Not because the clothes were bad. They just don’t fit anymore. And you can keep squeezing into something that doesn’t fit, but you’ll be uncomfortable the whole time. And honestly? You’ll look a little silly.
I’m trying to be better about that. About noticing when a relationship has become a museum—just me walking through the same rooms, looking at the same memories, pretending something is still alive when it’s been gone for years.
Barnes says every situation has to serve its purpose, and when the purpose is served, you can let it go. That’s the part I struggle with. Knowing when the purpose is actually done. Not when I wish it was done. Not when I’m scared to be without it. But when it’s truly finished.
I don’t have a clean answer for that. I think you just feel it. A loosening. A quiet knowing that you’ve said everything you needed to say, and there’s nothing left but echoes.
Reading The Kindness Code didn’t make me braver overnight. But it did make me more honest about which relationships I was holding onto out of fear and which ones I was holding onto out of love. And once I could see the difference, I couldn’t unsee it.
So I’m learning to let the right things go. Slowly. Messily. Not all at once. But I’m learning.
