How To Break Up With Yourself

In the end, sometimes the most dysfunctional relationship is the one between your head and your heart.

In those quiet broken moments when the obsession is still and the despair has picked your soul clean of hope, the enemy is no longer outside yourself. There we play the games with people who don’t even know they are participating. Outsmarting, outmaneuvering, outwitting the figment of our obsession until we’ve resigned to the loss, because triumph never lasts long in the imagination of a person destroyed.

Even when we’ve seen the truth – the compassion, and the regret, and the powerlessness to stop the bus they just threw us under – we demonize, we victimize, we terrorize the drowning pieces inside of us that just need a scratch of air to recover. Long after the blow that ended the world, we indulge in that feedback loop:

Head questions, Heart hurts.
Head obsesses, Heart sinks.
Head blames, Heart breaks.

Blames him.
Blames you.
Blames the fictional people forcing his hand and the girl inside you who wasn’t enough.  It’s all their fault. And the pain grows.

You can’t run from their drama. It will wait for you to come back like the killer bees do. It’s more patient than you. It will find your when you wake in a cold sweat, it will take that song you love and turn it into a sledgehammer to your solar plexus. The longer you avoid it, the worse you break.

And relief is never swift. It comes gently, subtly, after (and only after) you finally tell yourself “Hey… we have to talk.”

It doesn’t matter who breaks up with whom… Head and Heart will be friends again someday. But not now. Not until the drama is shut down… they aren’t allowed to speak. Head can work and think and do all the great things that keep the world turning, and Heart can find dozens of things to love – people and poems and flowers and snow. And separately, they will grow into whole versions of themselves again, no longer dependent upon the other to fuel our agony and keep the illusion alive.

We know.
We love.

It’s that combination that has the power to wither us into treacherous shells of ourselves like an ill-fated Tolkien character pining for our Precious.

They are fire and gasoline.

And the single most addicting high that nature ever invented… but not now.

My head and my heart are on a break.