The Many Lives of Heartbreak
I’ve felt heartbreak several times in my life. I have felt it through short-passion-filled love and long-term sturdy relationships. Each one was unique yet the foundational feelings were the same. To discount your heartbreak, let alone anyone else’s is a disservice to yourself. I think heartbreak can take many different forms. I believe grieving a death is a different category of heartbreak than the end of a relationship heartbreak. While they have many similarities, they run on different trajectories that come with different emotional responses and grieving. The end of a relationship heartbreak can feel as if it is crushing you and it becomes difficult to have clarity of the future. However, to feel this type of heartbreak means you have truly loved.
I think most people experience heartbreak that comes from losing the person they romantically loved at least once in a lifetime. It is one of the most complex, painful, and important events we can feel. Within moments you move from having a person you became one with and who became your constant, to learning how to live on your own again. A strong and healthy romantic partnership is more than romance. It’s a deep-rooted friendship, it’s vulnerability, and it’s trust.
I had my first heartbreak at 16. Anyone who laughs at a young person’s heartbreak either never felt young love or they have buried and forgotten what it felt like. My first heartbreak hurt the most and I have never felt a pain like this since. Maybe it was my age and the newness of the feeling, but during those weeks I sat in heartbreak I felt physical pain and full-body confusion all of which were tied to this new feeling of being rejected. It was the first time I had someone I loved push me aside. Now I was 16, as was he, so our behavior and how we treated each other was childish. Of course it was, we had no idea what we were doing or how to build and strengthen a relationship. However, that love we felt was real and I look back on that and smile. Grateful for those experiences and painful heartbreak. This heartbreak prepared me for the many years ahead. While it created a bad habit of fearing heartbreak and being vulnerable that I later had to work through in my late 20s, it also softened the blow of each heartbreak to follow and along my journey reassured me that I would survive.
Through college and my early 20s, I built up barriers so no heartbreak could destroy me. I focused on friends and a good time without ever letting any man get too close. I look back on this time as exactly what I needed to do. I was free and discovered who I was as a woman. I will be forever grateful for this time and version of me as it created the foundation of who I am. This time formed the groundwork for the insane amount of love I have for myself today.
When I later opened my heart again it was to a man I reconnected with at the base of the Havasupai waterfalls. I fell in love with him under the stars lying awake in a hammock to the rush of the turquoise water. I knew so little about him yet the pull to each other seemed as if we had been connected for years. He stole my heart and weeks later left it to bleed out with no explanation or closing.
I inconspicuously fell in love with a man I never saw coming. It wasn’t fast and there was no raging fire between us at the start. I found love through his consistency and will to want to be with me. When my friends described that he looked at me with heart eyes at all times, I laughed. I never fully valued or connected to what we could have been. When I look back on this time I remember loving deeply and wanting to be with him, but the passion was not there. I cruelly left him and closed another chapter of my love story forever regretting not treating him kinder. I pushed down another heartbreak I felt for a lifestyle I would no longer have but also no longer wanted.
A whirlwind of heartbreak came to me in my mid-20s. An older man I thought could be everything. Our secret love burned quickly and bright in the beginning, but the hurdles of contrasting lives made that love fizzle out until I no longer knew the person I once thought I loved.
My last and most tender heartbreak was that strong love heartbreak. It was beautiful yet tiring and by the end caused me to fall to the ground in pain when he left. Unsure if I could pick myself up again. My heart still breaks today but I am learning to feel and take it all in. As I navigate this new reality I hold close to me the knowledge that I can get through this and I can learn to love again with a heart wide open.
Through each of my heartbreaks, I have endured. I have come out the other end looking back vaguely remembering the person I was before I entered that dark tunnel. From heartbreak, you grow. You become something new you never could have pictured. You get stronger. You get braver. You learn about yourself. You find your real friends. You take things a step at a time. And you find a new way to live.
