For 15 years as a psychotherapist, I was paid handsomely to offer observations about my patients—their behavior, thinking, reasoning, communication and ways of relating to others.

Then I helped them navigate toward a more adaptable, functional way of living.

Because they were patients, I worked under the assumption that their willingness to follow my lead was implicit.

After all, they sought me. I didn’t seek them.

When they were less willing, the road sometimes required a brief detour into conversations that helped them understand—and eventually ask me for—what I had been hired to provide.

Success usually followed.

And at the end of treatment, if I had done my job well, they left empowered, believing that they had, for the most part, become their own guide out of the darkness and into the light.

Those moments made my work an absolute joy.

Life outside the therapy room, of course, is different.

With acquaintances, friends and people I love, I could not be their therapist and, indeed, was not.

Still, somewhere quietly inside me, I suppose I have always sifted my clinical impressions of people through an undetectable mental-health sieve, continuing relationships with those who seemed to hold the greatest potential for genuine friendship.

Neither they nor my process was ever perfect. But, with the exception of some friendships acquired during my drug days—which ended 15 years ago this Friday—it has spared me much of the heartache and wasted effort that comes from trying to fix people who never asked to be fixed.

It was fair to me.

It was fair to them.

And, for the most part, it worked.

My struggle today is with the exceptions.

The ones who slipped through the sieve and remain in my life.

They are people to whom I cannot—and will not—offer unsolicited, however well-meaning, observations, suggestions or opinions. Yet they have maintained a presence nonetheless, and I have allowed them to.

My social circle is already the smallest it has ever been for this lifelong extrovert. Discontinuing even one relationship I have permitted to remain would represent a significant percentage loss of the whole.

But something changes as we get older.

Being accepted becomes less important.

Having people around becomes less important.

And the quantity of people in my life matters far less than the quality of those I allow to remain there.

Still, one of the hardest things for me is saying goodbye without actually saying it—by my absence, by no longer pursuing, by withdrawing the perseverance I once invested in relationships I had counted among the keepers.

There is sadness in that.

There is also wisdom.

Because sometimes the things most necessary for our survival are the very things most difficult to do.

Every relationship surrendered moves us, perhaps, a little closer to human loneliness.

I used to think that was something to fear.

I’m beginning to wonder if there are seasons when loneliness is not an emptiness at all, but a clearing—a place created when we finally stop filling every space with people simply because we are afraid of the space itself.

And perhaps, in that clearing, we discover that letting go of some people does not necessarily leave us with less.

Sometimes in that space, a tree grows and leaves a bigger space for God.