5 Lessons To Remember Through Heartache

1. Life won’t stop.

Even through feelings of indescribable misery, sometimes sadness just isn’t enough. Sometimes you can’t afford to take a step back and get a hold on life, to just breathe. Life’s continuing, and you’re expected to keep up with it, even with your thoughts running rampant in your mind. Yes, you’re sad, but that doesn’t stop the fact that you have obligations and people relying on you. More importantly, your life and your future will rely on your ability to continue. You may want to shut off, to sit alone for hours, and it’s OK to feel that way, but what isn’t OK is allowing it to consume you. What hurt you was in the past; it’s time to brush yourself off and focus on the present. Focus on learning from this, so that you can better your future.

2. Regret will get you nowhere.

You can wish you did things differently, you can regret the choices you made, but no matter how much you wish, it doesn’t change the fact that it happened. You were hurt some way or another, and if you’d done things differently you could have saved yourself a lot of hurt. But by dwelling on the choices that were made, you just bring it back to you again and again. It’s time to forget, to move on, and cherish the lesson you were taught, as opposed to resenting what hurt you.

3. It’s OK to feel.

Your world has been shifted. You are sad. You are recovering. Embracing what’s happened will be your best bet at getting better, at learning to cope with what’s happened. You cannot deny that what happened hurt you. It’s OK to not want to share how you feel with others, but you need to share it with yourself. You can’t push back how you feel; you can’t repress this. Though pushing through it is the most important part, it doesn’t change that you’ve been knocked down. It’s best to acknowledge and accept what’s happened when you’re ready, whenever that may be. Feelings are a part of being human, and without feelings of sorrow, we’d have no feelings of joy.

4. “What Ifs” need to stop.

“What if things were different?”

“What if it didn’t happen?”

“What if I were different?”

You’re going to wonder, of course you’re going to play all the scenarios and imagine how different it would be with all the different factors that caused your hurt. The thing with the what ifs, though, is that isn’t how it is, that isn’t how it played out. It happened, and you need to embrace that so you can recover and mend. Once you’re done trying to think about how different things could be, you will be on the road to getting better, on the road to being a better person because of everything.

5. The future is beautiful.

Right now, things are hard. Today isn’t your day, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, and in a year and ten years from now. Things do work out, and you might need to work it out, but life will be fixed one way or another. The future, near or distant, will be brighter. Life has a way of giving second, and third, and fourth, and fifth chances. Happiness will come; you just might need to find it.

Life is like the sky—sometimes absent of light, sometimes dim—but always, without fail, it will get brighter. The sun will shine though, it will break through the clouds, just like you. Chin up, smile, and take things one step at a time. Everyone gets knocked down, but happiness will find its way back to you. Happiness is inevitable.