If You’re Going Through a Breakup, Read This. The World Doesn’t Owe Me Anything, Including Love. And

When your best friend gets taken out of your life, you feel like you are falling through the air with nothing to grab onto. Like you’ve been uprooted and thrown into a river. Like you’re wandering lost and aimlessly through the woods with nowhere to call home. Like your one safe haven has been filled in with concrete, or your diary has been snatched from underneath your pen. What do you do when the only person who knew you intimately enough to understand you cannot be a source of comfort for the very pain that they are the source of? It is the most foreign and surreal feeling imaginable.

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If you don’t know, my boyfriend and I ended our very serious, almost three-year relationship about a week ago. For his privacy sake, I won’t go into huge detail on why we broke up. I can say that it was relatively mutual. What we had together was very real, very wonderful, and very true. There was a time we were planning to get married even, so it is definitely shocking, sad, and unsettling. But life began to call to us in different ways and suddenly we were maturing on different timelines. Staying together seemed to handicap both of our unique paths rather than benefit them. For this, among a few other reasons, we made the sad and hard decision to go ahead and end it respectfully and lovingly.

Do I have the breakup blues? Of course I do. There are a lot of things that by nature of association, are difficult for me to enjoy the same way. Things that he taught me, things we did together, places we went, foods we tried, ideas we had, movies we watched, music we listened to, dreams we made up. So much of his ideology is now integrated in my thought patterns. My very life outlook feels painful, knowing that he half inspired it. Heck, he is even the one that suggested I start a blog! He was formative to most of my adult years. There is a myriad of things I am going to have to learn over without him in the picture. Things like cooking with wine, going to the beach, editing photos, analyzing movies, and imagining my dream house. There were things that were ours, like Guiness, Sushi, Please and Thank You, country music, John Mayer, “Tennessee Whiskey,” The Greatest Showman, tea rooms, and homemade fettuccini alfredo. Breakups do this really uncool thing where they take all your favorite things that you intimately shared with this one special person and make them taboo. All of these are things I treasure, and I don’t want to stop treasuring them just because I know have to enjoy them alone. But how do you relearn how to do these things in the most painless way possible?

Life after a breakup, for a time, is painted with that person. How do you remove what you thought was a permanent seal from your walls, your picture frames, your taste buds, your playlists, your bucket lists, your camera roll, your memories? This “paint” is not so easily removed. And it is scary to try to peel it all away at the risk of your heart providing you the natural coping mechanism of resentment towards the things you’re ungluing yourself from.

When separating yourself from a person woven so intricately into your life, it seems like it would be easier if you just hated each other so there would be some room for resentment to cushion your heart. Parting graciously and responsibly with feelings for each other that admittedly aren’t dead yet is much, much harder. It stings way more to preserve your memories fairly, without pouring the poison of hatred and blame on them in the aftermath.

No doubt, the hindsight framing of your entire relationship as a waste, a lie, and a terrible time makes it an easier pill for the heart to swallow. Saying “I never liked him anyways” would be easier to deal with. Thinking “our relationship was never going anywhere anyways” would make your newly uncertain future seem more bearable. But those are lies that don’t do either of you any favors. It chocks up all the life experience and lessons learned in your relationship to a quarantined mistake that you can never re-access for fear of opening Pandora’s box. All of those lessons, experiences, and memories would just become a waste. To box all of that up with chains and padlocks is not a very wise use of the time spent on the life you carefully cultivated for however many years.

Imagine you are an engineer and you have a garage full of inventions. You are working on a new invention that this time you are absolutely certain is going to work. You have poured your heart and soul into this invention for months, years even. Your faith in it is 110% unshaken. But then, by some unforeseen, terrible change of circumstance, and to your utterly horrifying shock, it goes awry and fails before your eyes, and you know you’ll have to start over from scratch. What do you do with the failed invention? Do you furiously tear it apart and burn it in the furnace? Well you could, but by not having that old invention sitting on a worktable nearby, you could be forfeiting some valuable information that could inform your future choices on your second try at the project. Throwing away the failed invention might make your unforeseen mishap feel easier to face. It might even make you feel like “you’ve showed it” in the heat of that moment. But what good is trying and failing if you defensively throw the failure out of your mind before you’ve had a chance to learn from it?

I’ve been that furious, emotional engineer many times. I’ve done the whole angsty, utter darkness, angry at the world, resentful of life and love thing after a couple breakups now. But that, I have learned, is no honorable response. It is toxic to you and those around you and an exhausting façade to maintain. Admittedly, when this all first happened a few days ago, I was terrified at the severe danger of how much I was probably going to wear my heart on my sleeve. I am one of the most debilitatingly emotional beings I know. When I get depressed, I do so deeply and for a long time. I was dreading the inevitable depression I would be obligated to lapse into following this massively grievous life change. 

But truthfully, I do not want to do that anymore. I cannot fathom torturing myself with angsty breakup songs, or reverting my wardrobe back to black on black, or binge eating ice cream, or drinking myself into “blissful” oblivion, or swimming in dark thoughts, or wallowing in my pity all day. I’ve been in that headspace. And while these things are socially accepted knee-jerk reactions that appear to be cathartic post-breakup, they are not really fun or useful at all. Torturing yourself with grief is not some righteous payment you owe yourself or your ex to seal the deal on your breakup. Being miserable is not the funeral procession with which you are obligated to honor your time spent together. Victimizing yourself is not your right of passage into moving on. You are allowed to skip this gloomy purgatory, if your heart allows you.

I would much rather be strong. I would much rather view this from a mature, non-eat-your-heart-out perspective. The support I have experienced from the people around me has already shown me that I do not need to beg for emotional attention or be at war with the world to compensate for the hole in my heart. This reassurance leads me automatically into a lighter and healthier way of responding to the situation. The bottom line is the world doesn’t owe me anything. Not even love. So if I can’t have that right now, then that is how it will be. And I have no right to whine about it being taken away from me when I was never promised it in the first place. I can’t take my life so seriously that I fall apart if something in it malfunctions. Let’s face it, I’m not that important!

I do not want to look at other people in love and be resentful. I do not want to look at my old photographs with my boyfriend and feel hateful. I do not want to think of the future we were once building and feel bitter. I don’t want to look at the last few years of my life and think of it as a waste. I don’t want to do any of that! Because that simply isn’t productive in any way. Every single second I spend in self-pity is a second I could be using to suck the marrow out of life.

Instead, I want to hear other people’s struggles, so that I can use my pain to relate and to lift them up. So I can personally bask in the same truths I know to encourage them with. So I can look at my own advice a whiteboard, slowly eating my words as I address and erase each painful problem. This is how I’m coping this time I around. I am focusing on the love I do have instead of the love I don’t have. I’m categorizing my old memories into file folders of positivity that I’ll be able to reference in the future. I’m being happy this happened instead of sad it ended. And so far, I feel like a Rockstar. I used to think it felt cool to be angsty, dark, and misunderstood in time like these. But it feels way cooler to believe in myself and go on loving life the same way I always have, boyfriend, or no boyfriend. It feels way cooler to stand strong and ready for whatever life has for me next, knowing I’m wearing the armor of God.

Is it weird that I almost feel practiced at breakups by now? I do not have the capacity to grieve anymore. I cannot fall apart anymore. I can’t. It is so debilitating. It is a waste of time. Not out of disrespect or lack of love and admiration for my late boyfriend, but out of necessity to use the time allotted to me wisely, I am choosing to be strong. I am choosing resilience. I am choosing light. I am choosing power over my reactions. I am choosing faith that God has my path laid out for me. I’m choosing patience for him to show me that path in his perfect timing. And I am choosing to embrace this life of singleness I’m evidently being called to right now. Who knows? Maybe this freedom will lead me somewhere beyond my wildest dreams that wouldn’t have been possible were I still in a relationship. All I know is God is good. Life is good. Love is good. And we shouldn’t take it for granted for even a second.

I hope that if any of you that have read this and are struggling in a relationship, that you will choose happiness, know your value, and remember to learn. Things are rarely the end of the world. The person you are with, or not with, does not control how you feel. You do. You are much more whole of a person than you give yourself credit for, and if you are scared of being alone, know that it isn’t as scary as everyone cracks it up to be. In fact, it feels a lot like freedom.

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