When you’re in your 20s, you’re either single, in the butterfly stages of a relationship, or you’ve been in a relationship for quite sometime. The 20s are the years you begin to figure out what kind of person you really want for yourself, and what kind of person you know you aren’t compatible with. With this experimental season comes great excitement, joy, love, but there is also the unavoidable consequence of heartbreak. Every time you lose someone that once meant so much to you, it hurts. It’s inevitable and even when you think it doesn’t affect you, at some point, it will resurface. There is no sugar coating when you experience heartbreak. It doesn’t matter what people say to try to comfort you because, though those encouragements are greatly appreciated and welcomed, they only temporarily relieve wounds that are so deeply cut.
I’ve learned its a little cycle. At first you’re sad. You reflect on however long you’ve been with that person and you think about all your memories. You think about how good it was and how happy you were, and then you try to pinpoint the moment it went wrong. You start to question why things turned out the way they did, and you begin to blame yourself. You think about the things you lacked, or the areas you fell short, and you start feeling insecure and lose confidence in who you are. You become numb to anything and everything, and you find hardship in facing each day. You may appear fine on the outside, but you’re just desperately trying to keep your broken self together.
Once this sadness passes and you’ve expended so much energy in letting yourself feel the pain, you become increasingly bitter. The tables turn and you start to think about what they did wrong, how they didn’t consider your circumstances, how they were selfish. It then becomes a blame game of it wasn’t me, it was actually you. You feel a kind of refreshed satisfaction in this bitter state because, for a moment, you throw off the burden of the breakup by just believing it wasn’t your fault. It’s easier to suppress hurt when you camouflage it with resentment and anger, but the effectiveness of this mechanism is temporary.
What comes after these few stages? When you come to the realization of how vulnerable you actually are, and how much hurt your hiding behind, how do you cope? When your mind doesn’t allow you to let go, how do you force yourself to move forward? You live in a daze searching aimlessly for something to fill the void you’re feeling, not knowing how to come face to face with the situation at hand. You refuse to let yourself feel the emotions that you need to feel to move forward because part of you honestly doesn’t want to. You want to hold on because it’s what makes sense to you. You keep thinking if I let go, everything I believed in and trusted just perishes. But sometimes, the best thing you can do is to let go. For the other person and for yourself. Sometimes, holding on only prevents you from developing and bettering yourself and keeps you from really finding the person that was designed for you. You engage so much of your time into holding onto something that no longer exists. You may have fallen in love, but it’s just as easy to fall out of it. Just because you let go doesn’t mean you never loved them, or that the time was wasted. It just means the time you had was to edify you and prepare you for something and someone more perfect for you.
It’s never going to be easy, so don’t try to force yourself to think that it is. Let yourself feel whatever you need to feel, but don’t grow bitter to the point even the best memories together turn sour.
by nebs 