The Reality Of Meeting Someone Good For You When Still Have A Broken Heart

God & Man

I wasn’t ready for someone like you. You came into my life at a time when I was still healing. When I was still learning to live with the broken pieces of myself. When I was still learning to love the person looking back at me in the mirror when someone else made me question it.

I wasn’t ready for someone like you as I clung to heartbreak I thought I deserved. You know when all you’re used to is getting hurt, it becomes painfully familiar.

It isn’t so much pain I feared but rather happiness. I was used to pain. I knew how to respond to it. I was used to being disappointed and let down. I almost expected it.

I’ve never looked at someone with confidence. I’ve never seen someone look at me that way. But with you, you made it easy.

You replaced uncertainty with being sure.
You replaced mixed signals with keeping your word.
You replaced physical relationships with wanting to build an emotional one first.
You replaced my effort with that which was reciprocated.

It was calling me when you said you were going to. And hours on the phone.

It was learning about one another so quickly that I feared it a bit.

It was wanting to push you away but every time I did you’d pull me in closer.

It was letting you in so carelessly and telling you everything from the best parts of me to my worst mistakes I thought you’d hear about and take off running.

But you didn’t, you listened to me talk about the past that still haunts me and took it so simply like it wasn’t something so bad.

You took the pain and heartbreak I clung to and taught me I didn’t deserve it.

It was simple gestures like grabbing my hand when I was driving or kissing my forehead. Little things.

I was conflicted and overcome with two emotions that made meeting you so hard.


The excitement of someone new entering my life mixed the pain that was still present from someone in the past.

It’s the good morning texts that used to come from someone else.

It’s the conversations I had to get used to with someone new.

It’s someone in the past having a piece of your heart that you’ll never get back.

I think when you get hurt you never get back the pieces of yourself you gave to someone.

It was wanting to give you the best but I didn’t have a whole heart to give, so I did what I could hoping it was enough.

Moments where I had no reason not to trust you but the past taught me to be wary.

It was smiling and laughing and that reality hitting looking at you, that I had to move on and pretend I wasn’t still hurting so much.

But healing is a process.

And you meet someone new and there isn’t that wave of relief when you think, ‘wow finally.’ You look at them and it’s a slow process of not falling fast but stepping into something new cautiously.


Because when you are conflicted with two very opposite emotions, pain from the past and liking someone in the present, what comes out of it is something a little numb.

When pain is all you’ve known, everything else is unfamiliar and foreign to you.

I didn’t ask for you to come into my life. Because I thought I wasn’t ready. But what if none of us are ever ready for something good and right? What if we all stumble into these things and get handed the people we need most.

Part of me wished I could explain what it was I was going through. That I was still healing. That I was still getting over someone. But the furthest I got into explaining that was saying something ended recently.

I didn’t want to say more. I didn’t explain how I was still hurt. Or there were moments right there I still thought of someone else. I didn’t explain any of these things because it wasn’t fair.

I know you can’t use people to fill some void.

No matter who comes and goes there are some people who forever leave you empty and you don’t get over it, you just learn to function without them even if you miss them every day.

You keep looking down at your phone sometimes wondering if that other person’s name will appear. But it doesn’t.

And I know you might feel a sense of guilt being overcome with these emotions. Like you should be able to control it and you should be over someone in the past and completely invested in this person right in front of you. But all of those things take time.

Whatever pain you are feeling from someone else isn’t what you deserved at all. Maybe they aren’t what you want fully and completely but sometimes we come across people we need more than that. Sometimes not getting the person we want is a wonderful stroke of luck because it’s only then we get the person we deserve. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Writer living in Hoboken, NJ with my 2 dogs.

Keep up with Kirsten on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and kirstencorley.com

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