For The Young Hearts Out There That Have Already Been Broken

When you’re young and your heart gets broken, the world is over.

People – older people – tell you that it will only be temporary and that time heals all wounds and that this is ‘just the beginning.’ And one side of you tries to believe them, one side of you knows that they’re being logical and that they’re probably right and that they are the ones you should listen to, because they’ve seen it all already.

But when you have a young heart, a heart that’s just barely beginning to understand all the beauty and all the pain that can come from loving another person in that kind of way, a heart that is just now getting capable of awakening you to every cell in your own body when it falls in love – that heart wants to believe that these adults are right. That you’ll move on and you’ll be okay. But it can’t. Because right now, all it can feel is the sense that the world is over.

It feels like it’s over because this wonderful and painful burst of growth that you’ve experienced (maybe for the first time) has introduced you to one of the first real experiences of being an adult. Not the typical, tangible kinds of experiences that we all first instinctively think of in terms of first becoming an adult – learning how to drive, getting your first credit card, starting college, perhaps buying your own car, moving into your own place.

This is a different kind of entrance to adulthood – the one where you learn, for the very first time in a way that is a thousand times more real than the crushes you had in your coming of age years, that love can burst into your life and shake you to your bones and bring you a kind of joy that you didn’t even know existed until now.

But falling in love, for the first real time, can also bring you a kind of pain and emptiness and torture that makes you feel like a shell of yourself, like a light was wiped out within you and you have no idea if you’ll ever get it back.

The truth is that you will hurt for a while. Your heart is tender, and so big, and so new to the experience of loving so intensely and breaking so intensely. It has not yet learned how to put itself back together.

But it will. Because if you were capable of loving someone deeply enough that your heart got shattered, you are capable of being the one to put it back together, too. Love is a multiplier, an intensifier. Where there’s some of it, more of it is created. And so as empty as you might feel, take solace in this: there is love hidden all over, in the cracks of your brokenness. And it will come back, slowly but surely.

You will heal, your heart will heal itself. And it will be stronger for next time. The important thing is that you don’t allow yourself to be afraid of it, to be afraid of the way that it can bring you so much joy and so much pain simultaneously.

As scary as that is, it is also one of the most beautiful things about your young heart. That it can experience such pain and yet keep going and keep opening, because it knows that when it finds love again, after knowing pain, it will be that much sweeter.

Hang in there. Don’t worry about ‘time heals all wounds’ or ‘this is just the beginning.’ Just let yourself be. Let yourself be sad, let yourself feel broken, let yourself cry, let yourself lean on the people who will carry you through this until you can stand up again.

And don’t be scared. You’ve already proven how strong you are by being willing to feel this much. Keep going.