Here Are The Lessons We Can Only Learn After Heartbreak

Our heart can break over a handful of things: a friendship that ended that we thought was the forever kind, an article of clothing that no longer fits us properly, our favorite restaurant closing, the death of a loved one, or the news of a tragedy that is occurring somewhere else in the world. Obviously, these are all varying kinds of heartbreak, but the one I am here to talk about today, is the one most of us associate with heartbreak: the romantic kind.

Now, if you have never had to go through this life lesson, don’t exit out of this page so soon. There is still a lot for you to take away from what I have to say about it, something, I believe, we should all take away from what it means to feel broken.

Heartbreak does not care who you are, what you have already been through, what you have accomplished in this life, or how kind of a person you may be. It just barges in, steals everything you thought to be yours, and leaves behind the pieces of yourself it didn’t want.

It is going to either come as a shock or something you have been anticipating for some time now, but just didn’t know when the rug would be pulled out from under you. Regardless, it is never easy to accept the fact that we were capable of being walked out on. It is meant to hurt, shake you up, break you open, and ultimately, show you who you really are. Heartbreak is a cruel thing, but above all else, it is a blessing in disguise.

There is not one timeline for healing from a broken heart, but I can tell you this: Staying heartbroken is a choice.

In my own experience, I kept myself in pain for far longer than I needed to be. I was refusing to cope with it in a healthy way, which in turn, kept me hurting as long I kept refusing to deal with it. An important thing that you should take away from this is that heartbreak’s intention is not to break you forever. Its purpose is to show you that not everything is going to go your way, but you can survive all things that you once thought would kill you. After a while, it’s important that we decide when enough is enough, and choose to start healing what hurts.

That whole cliché of you one day just waking up and realizing that you deserve better is true. That other cliché of time healing all is true. It’s important that you realize your worth through the process of this. It isn’t going to happen overnight, and you are most likely not going to heal that quickly. These are the sad truths, but these are the reasons we change; the reasons we grow.

Eventually, we get tired of feeling bad for ourselves, and we start to remember that we were people before someone else came around. Your existence is not validated by the presence of another person. Repeat that to yourself. Too many people are under this false belief that to be whole, we must have someone there to love us. This is simply not true. This is something we have always been more than capable of doing on our own.

Heartbreak is many things, but for the most part, it ends up being the positive things that we will remember about it. Sure, I remember the pain it once caused me, but do I keep myself there? No. Instead, I am grateful for it, because, without my experience through breaking open, I would have never found what I was meant to find inside.

Maybe instead of thinking that being heartbroken is the worst thing, we should change our perspective, and be hopeful for the person we will become once we survive it.

None of us enter situations that we see ending up in heartbreak. That is why it initially hurts us so bad; we don’t expect it. We always think we are invincible to certain kinds of pain until we are going through it ourselves. It is hard to see past what we feel in the moment, and sometimes, we often convince ourselves that it is never going to feel better.

I am not here to tell you that heartbreak is easy, nor am I saying that you should “get over it.” The moral of this story is that you will, and what you learn about yourself at the end of it, is a gift, and something you will eventually be grateful for.

Most of life’s greatest lessons are learned through the pain of an ending, and our life’s greatest gifts come with the acceptance of new beginnings.