The Line Between Giving Up and Letting Go

I know some people (well...one person) that believes the difference between giving up on something and letting is go is:

NOTHING

For a while, I thought this way too. I mean, it's a pretty big line that not a lot of people see. Usually, we only see it when it's working against us.

For example, there was a girl who said some pretty mean things about me, in front of a lot of my friends. She didn't do this to be hurtful, she did it to be funny, and she got her fair share of crap for it that night. But I didn't see it that way. I thought to myself, how can I just give up my anger? How can I let her win like that, where she gets to laugh with the same people I laugh with, hang out with the same people I do, and not get it brought up once that maybe I'm the victim in this instance?

But I was wrong. I was dead wrong. My anger, my hatred for her and for the situation I was in, wasn't something to hold on to. It was something to feel in that moment, and after she apologized (which she did almost immediately after and I menacingly brushed off) I needed to let it go.

I seem to have that problem a lot. I blur that line almost consistently, but only when it's in my favor. I don't think I'm alone in that, but I think being wrong is what makes us human. We've always been defined by our mistakes.

Recently, though, I've seen another offender that blurs these lines. My ex (the one that pulled a drop-and-run on me before) also can't see the difference between giving someone up and letting them go.

I've made it pretty clear that we're done. I believe the break up was enough to show that. And, even though I was having doubts afterwards and he's a really good guy, we're going to stay apart. It's for the best, considering we can't talk on the phone for more than five minutes before one of us gets upset or ticked off. By this I mean he gets upset and I get ticked off. Really really ticked off.

But I digress. This ex-boyfriend of mine believes that the act of letting our relationship take its course is actually giving up on it. Now, I'm not sure how to convince him otherwise, or even if it's possible, but he seems adamant that he's right.

Unfortunately for him, I feel the opposite. And we're pretty stubborn people. So it comes into question, is he right? Is letting something die just simply giving up? And is this a bad thing in every case? If something is too far gone to be saved, shouldn't it then not be saved? 

I don't know what he thinks of himself. Hell, I'm a writer and sometimes I don't know what I think of him, either. But I know that if he were watching this play out on some crappy television movie (that I'm sure my life is made for) then I know almost for a fact he would yell, just like the rest of us, 

"Just let it go!"