What You Need To Remember When You’re Dealing With A Broken Heart

Let’s take a second to talk about breakups.

You know it’s not going to work out before the first fight even happens – there’s a static energy in the air, you’re tiptoeing around this person trying not to awaken some deeply-rooted hatred that’s been boiling up in them for months and they’re doing the same to you. You think about everything you’re going to say or do before you say or do anything at all. You change who you are to reflect the person that they want you to be.

Afterwards, you’re scrambling to pick up the pieces that this person left behind, but you seem to fail at every attempt of putting your shattered life back together. Why? Why are they so hard to get over? Why can’t we just pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and move along?

The simple answer is that they’ve changed you.

Somewhere in the mix of each great moment you spent together, you lost a bit of yourself that they were happy to take. When you enter into a relationship with someone, you’re making a risky trade with that person that you might not even be aware of.

You give them a piece of your heart and fully expect that they’ll return the sentiment.

In a perfect world, you can make this trade seamlessly. I think that’s what real love is – when that piece of someone else’s heart that you’ve traded for a piece of your own fulfills the longing, empty, aching feeling in your chest you had felt before this someone came into your life. You feel peace. You let them break down your walls and hope to high heaven that they don’t break you in the process, but sometimes they do.

People will take liberties with owning a piece of your heart. The sad truth is that not everyone understands the fragility of this transaction. They crave the satisfaction that comes with claiming ownership over a heart that you worked so diligently to protect. They wreck the relationship and shatter you in the process.

Being brokenhearted is hard to get over. It leaves you physically altered. You feel sick. You are grieving, in actual, physical pain, nearly going crazy over the loss of this person. People always offer the same advice: pick yourself up and focus on something else. Focus on anything that will help you forget the loss you’re grieving. Even still, you can’t seem to put your life back together, no matter how fervently you scramble across the cold floor of your own rock bottom. You fail to realize that you feel empty not because this person is missing, but because a piece of yourself is.

You are never the same after a breakup because you offered a part of your heart to someone and unfortunately, what they gave you in return isn’t filling the void.

When you’re shuffling around those bits of yourself in a last ditch effort to put your life back together, you’ll find that you’re trying to complete a puzzle that has one piece that won’t fit with the rest of them. You could gather every single piece of yourself and something is still missing. Love is lost. It’s a flawed system, but this is the curse of being human.

Ditch those bits of heart that aren’t working in the bigger picture that is your life. File them away under life lessons and move on with an incomplete puzzle. Why?

Because you need a big enough spot in your puzzle for all of the love that someone who really, truly loves you will bring.

They’ll have plenty to share, and it will fit perfectly in your portrait of a heart.

Don’t try to reconcile with your broken relationships. Couples will break up and get back together, and sometimes it works. Sometimes people are able to set aside their differences and work things out for the sake of their happiness together. Kudos to those people, because that is probably the most difficult thing any two people will after have to do for one another. I have no words for how those people make it look so easy.

It simply doesn’t always work out that way.

Some people attempt to work things out with an ex only to find that the person they had fallen in love with, the one they sacrificed their heart for – that person is no longer home. Whoever it is, that person doesn’t exist anymore. Something between now and then changed them, and regardless of what you do to reunite that relationship, everything fails. The person you fell in love with is missing. They’ve died, in a sense. You go through the motions with them, trying to get back what you’ve lost, but you’re putting your happiness and sanity on the line for a ghost. A ghost and a shell of the person that they were. These ghosts will haunt you. Maybe this is why we feel so torn up after relationships.

Sure, it could be the rejection. It could be the feeling of not being wanted by someone who used to want you so badly. In the end, it’s because you’re mourning the death of the person that used to inject so much love into your life. That person isn’t there anymore.

Trying to make this afflicted relationship last is like being an actor in your own life. You and your significant other are pretending to be the two people that you used to be, but you aren’t those people anymore. Love is a drug in every sense of the phrase. You would sell your soul, pretend to be someone you aren’t and ignore telltale feelings of immediate alarm just to feel like you have that piece of your heart back. Don’t beat yourself down with this tragedy. Don’t replay a broken love story – don’t put yourself through that again. There are so many beautiful love stories yet to be told!

There is no point in trying to recharge one that wasn’t making your Earth shake in the first place.

Memorialize your losses. When someone passes, we don’t focus about the details of their end but rather on recollections of their incredible lives. As your split pans out and you’re drowning yourself in heartbreak, don’t. Just don’t do it. Quiet your sorrow and be happy that you were able to experience them at their best. Do not mourn over the loss of the person you fell in love with.

Celebrate the fact that they existed in your life in the first place.