I Hope You Know There Is A Silver Lining To Your Heartbreak

It’s in the moments of anguish and sorrow we don’t wish it upon anyone, especially ourselves. It can feel like so many things: a crushing weight on your chest, a fierce kick to your stomach, or like you’ve forgotten how to breathe. Sometimes you almost believe you can feel your heart pulling itself apart, fracturing itself into pieces. If you ask any normal person, “What is your biggest dream in life?” they aren’t going to respond with “To have my heart shattered beyond all recognition.” No one wants their heart to go through the agonizing process.

Honestly, I wish we lived in a perfect world. A place where we never had to question if he or she was the right one because we would all just as equally give our all to make another person happy if we said we loved them. Yet we don’t live in that world; We don’t have that luxury.

Barely any of us make it through this life unscathed and unaffected by pain.

When your heart breaks, the aftermath can do so many things to you. It can make you scared. Vulnerable. Reckless. It can also make you strong, resilient, and wise. Once you face the storm head on you realize you are still standing, or even if you’re just crawling, that you’re still alive. This wasn’t the end for you. You faced down something you were terrified of and you came out on the other side different. I know when you look back on it you might wish you hadn’t had to go through it. We say “But what if?” or “It could’ve been different.” Yet there are no what ifs. It wasn’t different. So now you take the hand you were dealt and you learn how to become better because if it. Because guess what? Being heartbroken has the chance to let you do that.

When your heart shatters, and the cracks form the spaces the you feel the cold air blow through, it can be tempting to fill them with various different things. We might want to seal it up with cement, holding us together and making it harder to get through. We can fill it with hatred or vengeance, and let it consume all that we are, cursing the people who put us in this place. We might try to fill it with temporary happiness, only to watch them dissolve and leave the cavities open again.

Yet we also have a chance to fill it them with empathy, expanding ourselves to understand others better.

Or fill them with hope for when the next time love ends up coming our way again. To even fill them with memories, so that we don’t forget the lessons we learned before.

When your heart broke, it gave it a chance to expand and stretch beyond anything you could fathom, and guess what? It’s still beating. It’s still going.

And so are you.