Can you heal after heartbreak?

I often likened heartbreak to having the flu.

They both have a pretty sudden onset, both can bring you right to your knees hugging a questionable portion of porcelain or marble, curled up with your arms holding your gut, tears that you didn’t invite streaming down your face, expelled from your body in waves of pain you can hardly take. Food either loses all of it’s appeal or you want to eat it all just to make the emptiness go away, but no matter what you eat nothing fills the space and sometimes it comes right back up because your body is too busy trying to keep you alive to worry about digesting whatever it is you thought you needed.

You feel weak, weaker than you ever have and there are moments when thoughts of “am I going to die?” run through your mind as the ache reverberating from inside takes over your entire being and you feel something you’ve never felt before and you wonder if this is how it all ends and a part of you almost wishes that it was just for the sake of relief, you never knew it was possible to feel so incredibly weak.

Exhaustion consumes you and yet when you try to sleep you’re jolted awake with another round of either nausea or heaving sobs that make you wonder if maybe theres another being entirely taking over your body, you lose all control and you barely even recognize who you are anymore.

You look in the mirror and your eyes are empty and sunken in, framed in dark circles telling you and anyone who might look your way that right now, you’re not okay.

Your shoulders hunch forward and your chest is concave, the physical manifestation of trying to keep yourself safe.

You’re not sure you’re going to make it through this heartbreak.

Days pass by and little by little you start to gain your strength again, get out of bed on purpose again, take showers and participate in society again.

But something is different this time.

It’s impossible to go through the most painful experience of your life and not come out different on the other side.

A little more wiser, more aware of your surroundings, more tuned into your senses, more aware of every square inch of your being since you felt it ache down to your very core.

You’re a little more careful about the steps you take next.

Maybe you start with soup, not sure if your body is ready for a whole meal yet.

Maybe you start with a deep clean, removing anything that reminds you of the hell you just crawled back from.

When you emerge from the depths of a crippling heartbreak, you’re a little reluctant to trust anything right away.

Was it love?
Was it true?
Was it healthy?
Was that my last chance?
Will I ever love again?

Life after heartbreak changes you.

When you let it, it changes you for the better.

But things become different.

Dating again brings up old memories and old beliefs and you have to trek slowly so you can make sense of what’s true and what’s just an old story you have to change.

You’re outside of your comfort zone and it makes you want to go back, back to before it got so bad, back to the moments when you thought you had everything you needed, back to a time when you didn’t have to wonder what was real and what wasn’t.

You want arms that betrayed you to come back and save you, you want to crawl into a chest and lean into a heart that had no room left for you, you want to take it all back and change your mind and try again just one more time.

But there is no salvation in the past, in going back to what didn’t last.

So you must keep moving forward.

So acutely aware of yourself and your surroundings.

You tell yourself things like ‘never again’, or ‘not for a long time’ and you inadvertently start to build little walls around your heart and tell yourself it’s safer this way not realizing that you’re slowly cutting off your heart’s supply and it will only take longer to heal when you suffocate a wound who’s only remedy is love and oxygen.

And it’s scary sometimes and you just want to hide, remembering the tidal wave of pain that came from opening your heart and taking a chance.

But you understand this is all a part of this whole life thing and there will be highs and some low, but the lowest lows set you up to higher highs .

But you slowly move forward, getting back into the world and you start to trust yourself again, you start to believe again, you start to see the beauty again, you start to feel again.

You look in the mirror and you see a glimmer of hope in eyes that once only reflected darkness, your shoulders are wider and your chest has lifted and you see a side of you that you had no idea ever existed.

After coming back from the trenches of crippling heartbreak you learn a new way of being
You learn not everything is what it seems.
But you also learn to trust your body in a whole new way.

You look back at the broken, frail, undigestible version of you that felt like all hope was lost and you celebrate your comeback, your rising, your unbreakable resilience and you learn to love and accept the person it turned you into and you understand that all of this happened for you, not to you.