Let me take you back to the fall of last year—pumpkin spice lattes were flowing, my Spotify Wrapped was already embarrassing me, and I was staring down the barrel of the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I had too much to say. Too many sharp-edged truths, too many contradictions to balance, and a looming sense that I might be unpacking more of myself than I wanted to for an internet full of people who might skim past the heart of it in 12 seconds flat.

It wasn’t an article about politics, though I’ve written those. It wasn’t even about love, though love made an appearance, as it always does. No, my Everest was this: writing about how to leave a relationship that once felt like home—and walking away from it without burning the whole house down. Fun, huh?

Let me tell you what made this feel like such a tightrope walk. You see, growing up in a family like mine, where social justice and empathy ruled the dinner table, I'd been taught to dissect issues until I found their core. Every argument, every dilemma—there’s always a framework to make sense of it. But writing about leaving a relationship is like arguing with fog. You can’t grab it, you can’t pin it down, and no two people experience it the same way. It’s universal and yet uniquely, achingly personal.

So, yeah, no pressure.

The Breakup Blueprint (That No One Ever Gave Me)

The framework I eventually found for leaving a relationship—and writing about it—was this: be authentic, be kind, but don’t sugarcoat reality. And reader, that’s deceptively simple. Here’s what helped me walk the line, both on the page and in my own life.

Section 1: Know Why You’re Leaving

Writing that article forced me to examine my own past unravelings and reckon with something I’d buried: why leaving is so hard in the first place. It’s not just about love—it’s about sitting in the echoes of shared plans, the lingering “what-ifs,” and walking away with that cocktail of relief and guilt churning in your chest. If you’ve ever been the one to tearfully return their sweatshirt, feigning bravery while dying inside, you know exactly what I mean.

Real talk? Understanding why you’re stepping away makes everything more honest. I realized that no action—whether staying in a mediocre relationship or leaving a toxic one—comes without consequences. The longer you avoid making the decision, the more you’re letting something fester. It’s like that mystery Tupperware in the back of the fridge. Spoiler alert: it does not get better with time.

Here’s what I wrote in my trusty draft (yes, dangerously close to a Dear Diary moment):
- Be clear with yourself first. It’s easier to explain when you’ve uncluttered your own mixed feelings.
- Take time to separate what you want for yourself from what you think others will want you to do.

Section 2: The Art of Leaving Without Setting Fire to Everything

Gandalf once said, "A wizard is never late," but I would argue he forgot to mention that a well-timed breakup speech is even rarer. When I finally sat down to articulate this in writing, I kept returning to one very real-life breakup that I handled much like a clumsy episode of The Office. (Picture me panicking, blurting out confusing metaphors, and leaving before they’d even processed what I was saying. Not a glowing highlight.)

If I’ve learned anything the hard way, it’s this:
- Honesty takes courage, but being too blunt can turn “honest” into “cruel.”
- Practice is underrated. If you need to ugly-cry into your pillow or rehearse with a friend who will lovingly roast you for your delivery, do it. Sometimes saying hard things out loud softens the edges for when it really matters.
- Timing is everything. Don't schedule a breakup conversation right before their big work presentation or—worse—during an already emotional family gathering. (Yes, I have stories. No, they are not my proudest moments.)

Section 3: Give Grief Its Space

Here’s the thing no one told me in my twenties, when I first tiptoed through relationships and half-hearted breakups: leaving doesn’t equal forgetting. You are allowed to grieve someone you walked away from.

One of the biggest challenges in writing about my own experience was trying to convey this emotional whiplash. Breakups are not either/or situations. You can feel both free and heartbroken, both relieved and regretful. It’s no contradiction; it’s just being human.

I included this in the article not just to comfort others, but to remind myself:
- Don’t let people guilt you into rushing “closure.” Closure isn’t a checklist—it’s a process.
- Keep the focus on what you learned from the relationship rather than lingering on the “mistakes” or “failures.” Trust me, this mental shift will save you from late-night spiral texts.
- Find your people. Lean into friends, therapy, or even just your go-to power ballads (shoutout to Alanis Morissette). You’re not meant to do this alone.

What Writing That Piece Taught Me

If you’d told fresh-out-of-college Harper that one day she’d be dishing out breakup advice in a public forum, I’d have laughed, then cried a little (because breakups, am I right?). But writing about heartbreak changed the way I understood it. We paint leaving as an act of destruction—the good place you’re walking away from, the scorched-earth policy of cutting ties—but it doesn’t have to be that way.

The truth is, leaving is a beginning. Closing one door might lead to a hallway with fifty other doors you hadn’t even noticed before.

And maybe that’s how life works—messily, imperfectly, but always persistently. Writing my hardest piece helped me realize that endings don’t have the power to define you unless you hand them the pen.

Leaving You with This

Whether you’re walking out of a relationship or navigating any other seemingly impossible ending, take this with you: it will be hard, and it will take strength, but you are not made of glass. You are more like (and forgive the corny metaphor here) a mosaic—pieces of every moment you’ve lived and loved, rearranged into something newly beautiful after every crack. That’s resilience. That’s you.

So go forth, break some Tupperware-bound ties and maybe, just maybe, leave it all a little better than you found it. Relationships, after all, aren’t measured by how long they last but by what they teach us along the way.