When you fall ill, you have the ability to go to the hospital, receive treatment, and recovery. While recovery varies between patients, you typically know that there is a scientific solution somewhere. When my heart was broken, there was no formula to mend the wounds. However, the pain was so unbearable that I searched for one. The symptoms were ones of physical pain, nausea, loss of appetite, sleep deprivation, and disorientation. The feelings overwhelmed me.
The instant he admitted he no longer loved me, I felt as if the earth had been removed from beneath me. My body was being compressed from all angles, causing the air to release from my lungs at an extreme speed. Being with him forever was as much of a truth to me, as trees having roots. My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that this truth was in fact a falsity.
So, I googled “how to recover from a broken heart.” There were many women giving their own personal advice: time will heal, talk to people, stay active, allow yourself to cry. These were all great words of advice, but I kept digging. I wanted to find that exact formula to make all the pain go away. I cried a lot. I also talked to a lot of people, which temporarily eased the pain as I was able to escape from my misery and enter another person’s story. I placed myself in the future. They were doing fine. They had survived. So maybe I could?
There seemed to be no permanent solution though. While I felt both physically and emotionally worse than I had ever before, I still saw everything that was good in him. The good memories were the ones stuck in my head, not all the memories that would make it apparent that we were not meant to be together.
Then one day I woke up to see the sun lighting up the entire room. In that moment, something hit me. I realized that I had options! For the first time in many years I could breathe. I could walk outside that moment and go anywhere I wanted. I could enjoy the day however I chose to enjoy it. While the pain would return in intervals for the next few months, it became more bearable because of that moment. I realized that I could create new truths that weren’t based around a single person. I could make realities based around myself, and maybe someday, somebody would fit into that reality. I have always loved the sun, and in a single moment I was reminded of that.
In order to overcome physical and mental illness, you are advised to get at the root of the pain. What I realized, is that the root of most emotional pain is time. We use time to define ourselves and to define our lives. We struggle to let go of people because in a way they are our past continuing into our future. When we aren’t reminiscing on the past, we are considering our future, and attempting to connect those two periods of time. When I was with him, we were right for each other. While we didn’t always get along, he was meant to be in my life for that period of time. When I was able to let go of our future and the memories of our past, I realized I could be happy in the present without him.
Several months later we met up and I enjoyed his company, but didn’t feel any desire to be with him. Only when he tried to kiss me and told me he made a mistake did the status of our previous relationship affect our present. All that pain returned because he was attempting to bring back what no longer existed. If he hadn’t made a move, maybe we could have remained friends and created a new sort of relationship for ourselves, but because he tried to bring the past into the present it all became too complicated.
To the girl who wants Google to tell her how to recover, it’s actually fairly simple. Look around and see what makes you happy right now. You were happy before him and you can be happy when he is gone. It’s easy to wait around for the pain to subside, but you don’t need to wait. The emptiness is caused by your human inclination to hold on to the past and the future you created for yourself. Instead find new truths for yourself that are solely for you, grounded in this moment. The sun did it for me.
Featured image via Pexels
