I stopped checking my ex’s life in order to survive my own evenings

Dear Delyara, I told myself for a long time that it was just curiosity. It wasn’t. It was ritual. A private habit of re-entering old pain under the soft respectable name of remembering. Photos, updates, signs of happiness, signs of movement, signs of life without me. Every time I looked, I felt worse. Every time I told myself I was only looking quickly. Then one evening I finally admitted the truth: it wasn’t memory anymore. It was self-harm in small socially acceptable doses. So I blocked it. All of it. The first few nights were harder than I expected because habit has its own grief. But then something very quiet and very real began to return to me — evenings that did not have to pass through old injury before becoming night. That matters. Not because it erased the past. Because it stopped me volunteering myself for fresh pain every time loneliness got louder than self-respect.