“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
Kahlil Gibran
Things are always so much easier when they fizzle out and no one gets hurt. Like when you have a friend that you are close to but then over the years you slowly stop being friends. No one gets hurt. There’s no bad blood. Everyone is fine.
It worse when you don’t expect it. When you are telling each other “I love you more than anything.” “You are my person.” and talking about how you would decorate your house and what types of pets you will have and then the next day it’s all over.
2 months ago I went through a breakup. I had my heart broken and for the first time since I was a child, I crawled into my parents bed and let them hold me as I sobbed. I had not at all been expecting a breakup. I was imagining that we would find a solution and that we would be able to work on it. I had put my whole heart into this relationship. I had a hypothetical plan in my head of how our future would look. I was 1000% expecting challenges. But I wanted to do that with him. He made me believe in love.
But this is less so about him and more so about what heartbreak looks like in different people.
People never react to anything the same way and I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately. I did a lot of reading about why people react different, some of these answers revolved around rejection, insecurities, and anxiety.
“For some people, their answers made it clear that the rejection had come to define them—they assumed that their former partners had discovered something truly undesirable about them. For example, one person wrote: ‘Things were going well when all of a sudden he stopped talking to me. I have no idea why, but I think he saw that I was too clingy and this scared him away.'”
I tried so hard to not let my anxiety get the best of me. I tried so hard to not let my mind fool me into letting my insecurities get the best of me. And yet, at some point after the breakup, I had thought of every single reason why maybe it didn’t work out. And every insecurity that I tried not to let affect me, eventually affected me. Even the stupid ones like maybe I wasn’t tall enough. I didn’t think it was funny when I was bawling my eyes out, but I did end up laughing at that one a few days later. There were lots of questions too. Why wasn’t I good enough? Why wasn’t I worth fighting for? And questions like those, plague my mind ever single day. And I’ll never have those answers. But what I am learning every single day about myself is that I don’t need to know those answers to move on.
My brother, who has a lot more self confidence than I do, is taking his breakup differently than I am. I don’t know all of his thoughts. I only know what I have been seeing as far as how he is dealing with his breakup. There are things that we had in common, like the different emotions we are going though. When I was talking to him about his breakup, I mentioned that it seemed like he was born with healthy coping mechanisms. I am envious of how he seems to be processing his breakup. I don’t know what goes on in his head, so maybe I am wrong, but it looks like he is going to be ok. Probably soon, I’m not sure. I’m proud of him.
“In our research, people reported the most prolonged distress after a romantic rejection when it caused their self-image to change for the worse. People who agreed that the rejection made them question who they really were also reported more often that they were still upset when they thought about the person who had rejected them. Pain lingered from rejections that had occurred even years before. Writing about what they took away from the rejection, one study participant said: ‘Lots of emotional pain. Sometimes it keeps me awake at night … It’s been 10 years and the pain hasn’t gone away.’ If rejection seems to reveal a new, negative truth about a person, it becomes a heavier, more painful burden.”
For me, I would say that it is less so an issue of finding who I am, because I would say that I am comfortable and confident in knowing who I am as a person. I know who I am and what I want to do with my life and I am making progress towards my career. The issue lies in wanting to be a different, better version of me. I want to be the best me that I can be. I want to be someone that my past self can look up to and be proud of. But the one part of me that I don’t know is the part of me that has no idea how to not be in love with him. Because since I was 12 or 13 years old, I had the biggest crush on this kid that was so nice and wore fedoras and was shorter than me. And we were close friends as we grew up and he saw me through all of my embarrassing stages of life, and I saw all of his awkward stages. All the way until we were semi-confident adults that fell in love and had this epic love story. And part of me has a really hard time letting that go. Another part of me is scared that I won’t be able to move on. And another part of me is so so scared that no one will love me again.
Getting broken up with hurts. The days that you spend wondering what could have or should have happened differently, or the days you spend hoping and praying that it is all just a bad dream and you’ll wake up and it won’t be true. He was my safe space, the person that I could talk to about anything. And you don’t just lose a significant other. You lose their family, at least you do if the person that you date has a good relationship with their family. You have everything one day, all of your needs being met, and then the next day, you have nothing, none of your needs being met. There are days that are so hard – days where you aren’t sure you can get out of bed, where all you can do is cry, and you can only think of the past and how much you miss that person. And then there are days where you don’t even give them a second thought and you spend time with friends or with family and you forget what it is like to be hurt.
I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my relationship and working through the hurt, and the fears, and everything that comes with trying to un-love someone, especially someone who doesn’t love you back anymore. I am proud of the progress that I have made. And I am really proud of myself for working on myself. I wish that I had taken initiative sooner to find a therapist and work on myself sooner. But I can’t think about the what ifs. I don’t have a time machine. I don’t have any sort of way to change the past. I can’t spend my time wondering about how I could have fixed everything.
There are days that are harder than others and there are days that are easier than others. But the number of days that I wish I could just be moved on already happen on both the good and bad days. People deal with things differently. The ways that people handle things and their emotions are based on a number of factors like the different ways that people were raised, or whether or not they have anxiety, or depression, whether or not they have gone to therapy before. I could go on, but you get the point. People’s brains are wired differently. Even after 21 years of being on this earth, I am finding out that there are things about myself that I didn’t know, especially in terms of how I react to situations around me. I’ve gone to church since I was born. I’ve been going to Impact, which is now Converge for my whole life. It is a place that I feel comfortable in and a place that I love. Unfortunately, it is no longer a place that I feel entirely comfortable in. Not when he is there. It hurts too much. So now I am forced to choose – do I keep going to this church that I love, the church that I believe in? Or do I try somewhere new?
“One strategy for making breakups a little easier, then, might be to consciously consider the narratives we create about the experience. A person might think: I was bad at communicating in the relationship; I guess I just can’t open up to people. Another story might be: I was bad at communicating in the relationship, but that’s something that I can work on, and future relationships will be better. Maybe a healthy habit of questioning our own narratives can help us to make better ones—stories that promote resilience in the face of pain.”
And if there is one really really important thing that I have learned from this breakup, it is that you need to express your emotions and you shouldn’t let other people try to tell you that just because you are expressing yourself, that it means you are unstable. You are expressing your emotions in the only way you know how to, and that’s ok. The very first thing you talk about in therapy is your personal rights, your motivations of self, and the motivations of others. One of the things on that list is, “I respond to any situation in my own unique way based on my background and prior experiences.” Make sure you have a support system and people who love you. Make sure that you get out of the house and experience new things. Don’t dwell too much on the past (this is so much easier said than done). Do not move on with someone else too fast. You need time to process not only your emotions but the relationship (If it was a good relationship, maybe wonder why it ended, or if it should have ended). Plus, moving on too quickly is both disrespectful to your ex-relationship and to yourself. It’ll only end up hurting everyone involved. Prioritize yourself and self-care and your mental health. You come first, make sure of that. Give yourself time to get over this and to move on from them and to move through the situation. Grief is a complicated emotion and it takes time to move on. Don’t try to rush through what you are feeling. Don’t tell yourself you are ok if you are not ok. It’s ok not to be ok.
“If there are lessons to take away about yourself or the relationship more broadly, give yourself time to understand them.”
And to anyone who is going through something, no matter what it is, you’re doing great. Just be patient with yourself and you’ll get through this. I wish I would take my own advice but at least if I don’t someone else might. You can’t control what other people say, do, or think. And that sucks. But it’s time to not let that matter to you. Because you can’t control that. And that’s something I have had to learn. I can’t control other people and what they say, do, or think.
I’m trying. I’m learning. It takes time. And it takes practice. Just take a deep breath. We will get through this. Years from now, we’ll look back and smile at all the progress that we made. It’s going to be ok…
We are going to be ok…
You are going to be ok…
I am going to be ok…
Links to articles if you want to read them
https://jedfoundation.org/resource/the-painful-truth-about-breakups/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/this_is_your_brain_on_heartbreak
Georgia On My Mind 