When A Best Friend Breaks Your Heart

When people talk about heartbreak, they often mean between a romantic couple. It’s what all of the songs are written about and some of the greatest poems- that infamous spark disappearing between two lovers. But what about friends? What about when the one person who is meant to stick by you through everything, who is meant to be the constant, the person who is meant to dry your tears and hold your hand when you feel yourself falling, becomes the reason you’re crying?

What about when your best friend breaks your heart?

Because it’s a different kind of pain. It twists deep inside you; its like a cigarette being held against your heart and forever standing on uneven ground. It makes you feel as if there is something fundamentally wrong with you and you begin to question your entire personality- Am I too much? Am I annoying? Do I obsess too much or talk about myself too much? Am I just unloveable?

And their words, their betrayal, it crawls beneath your skin, it stains your heart and runs in your blood.

It lurks in your mirror, it’s the shadow sat at brunch with you and your new friends whispering that they don’t like you either, they have a secret WhatsApp group dedicated to your demise.

There’s two faces to all of them smiling at you and you’re forever waiting for their masks to drop.

Because what you give to your friends, it’s different to what you give to your partner. It’s raw and authentic and it is 100% you.

And you should be able to share an achievement or repeatedly complain about the same thing every day without feeling as if you are annoying. And more than that, you should be able to trust that when there is a problem rising between you, you can talk it through and come to a resolution because you love each other. You should never ever have to live in fear that they are talking behind your back or just waiting for you to trip and fall.

Your friends are meant to be your cheerleading squad, your safety- net, your agony aunt. They are meant to be the people you fall back on, the people you can call at 3am when you feel as if you can’t breathe, when the world feels too big and too scary and you feel as if you’re drowning.

And when you realize they aren’t, when you realize you were wrong, that your whole friendship was a lie, that your pain lifts them up, your entire world begins to crumble. You go over and over everything- every moment you laughed together or shared a deep secret or thought as if you’d found your person and you try to remember the look on their face, the falter in their voice, and you wonder how you had never noticed it before.

How in the hell had you been so stupid?

And you begin to lose trust, not just in them but everyone. Girls, groups of girls, cliques and even men.

Trust issues do not have to begin with a boyfriend, no, sometimes they begin with the girl(s) who you thought would be stood beside you on your wedding day, whose faces are in every photograph and so many of your childhood memories.

Sometimes, the biggest heartbreak, the one which makes you lose sleep, which makes you forever feel just that little bit broken, which makes you question yourself, your worth and your ability to be loved, is with your best friend, your person, your partner in crime.

And there is no fixing that, no come back, no books on how to heal or songs to soothe your soul. But let me tell you a little something I have learned – the best way to rebuild yourself, to mend what they took is to just keep being brilliant.

Be unapologetically yourself because the right people, they will love you, celebrate you and never, ever make you feel less than what you are.