Broken hearts will heal you?
I have always been firmly again’st the quote, “Everyone needs their heartbroken in order to realize who they are”. I thought that was absolute foolishness made up by some overly zealous hopeless romantic.
Turns out, that was me.
My heart was like a never ending waterfall of love, affection and giving, all to my romantic partners but never to myself. I was the type of lover who would break my own heart into pieces and use whatever good pieces I had left, to fix theirs. Constantly ripping my own band-aids off to stop the bleeding on my other half’s wounds and leaving myself waiting for attention until I bled out on the bathroom floor. Graphic but incredibly accurate to the type of depression that comes from giving your entirety to another person for too long.
This pattern continued into all of my relationships and I continued being aggressively in opposition to that quote, until I got my heart broken. I mean broken for real, shattered into a million little shards like a children’s pinata at a five year old’s Frozen themed birthday party.
It took awhile, actually it took months. Let’s be real, breakups actually take time, effort, and sometimes therapy to actually move forward from and not be held down by every day. If we actually acknowledge how much people, words and relationships affect us, then of course it would break us apart to change even one aspect of that. We spend so much time trying to convince ourselves that we are made of stone that we push the healing process so far off, it’s sometimes untouchable. Once we all admit that we are more likely made of glass, I think the world would be a little bit brighter, even on our darkest days.
Anyway, it took months for me to get to the place of not understanding the quote but actually being like Damn it, they were right. My demolished heart lie on the floor in front of me and for the first time ever, I got to take a look at it and decide which pieces I was rebuilding and which pieces I was throwing away for good.
Caring about others more than myself? Gone. Doing things I didn’t really want to do? Gone. Allowing someone to treat me in a way I wouldn’t treat my closest friends? Gone. Constantly wondering if he was as broken as I was? (Almost) Gone. Ignoring that time to emergency-exit gut feeling? Gone.
Helping others whenever I can? Keep. Loving people as deeply as I could? Keep. My lack of caring about what others think of me? Keep. Incessant need to play my favorite songs 50 times in a row in one day? Keep. Genuine love for my life? Keep.
By accepting the injury and taking care of it gently, I had begun to heal into someone I had never been before. Sure, I still cry sometimes, I still think about my previous love sometimes, and sometimes I pull out those letters and hold them to my chest as tightly as I held onto him late at night. But now I loved myself so intensely that the original cut no longer seemed so deep.
My broken heart allowed me to heal myself and build a brand new heart, just for me. Made by me, perhaps for others in the distance…but for the foreseeable future, made just for me.
