How I survived a break-up and what you must never do
Heartbreak.
Even when it's necessary and/or self-inflicted, it's still, well, shitty. And that's putting it mildly.
Even the amicable, no-hard-feelings, let's-be-friends ones have a way of making your insides feel knotted up and clamped, and your heart feels like it's been wrung out and left to dry like a fraying washcloth that's seen one too many tumbles in the wash cycle. All of us have different ways of dealing with the emotional debris. Some of us throw things in a bag and take off, physically removing ourselves from the places that keep stirring the pot of memories we're trying hard to forget. Physical displacement can be a powerful catalyst on the road to recovery.
Some of us get the haircuts we were too chicken to get earlier to quell the constant gnaw of this anxiety. Temporarily, at least; till we figure out the next move.
Also read: The night it becomes about making love and not sex
Some smart ones work, like beasts and make piles of money, it's so much better to be miserable in a Honda CRV than in an unmade bed, sniffling into overused tissues, no? Nothing wrong with any of those scenarios.
And some of us dive headfirst into our next love story. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
Even though it might seem like a very good one, initially. You get to skip the soul-searching, second-guessing, Facebook-stalking phase and land straight at the rush-of-endorphins stage of a fledging relationship.
Plus everyone knows that the first person to Instagram a photo with a new lover wins the break-up in the collective conscious of mutual friends that haven't been divvied up, post break-up. There has to be a reason the universe threw a perfectly acceptable specimen of the opposite sex your way at the exact moment that you went from being "in a relationship" to "single", right? It is a sign. It's almost serendipitous.
No.
Because here's the truth your ego will try very hard shush: no matter how long you've been considering it and how prepared you think you are to embrace the single life, most of us aren't actually people in the immediate aftermath of a breakup.
We're a collection of insecurities; vulnerabilities that will multiply like virile strains of bacteria, once the deed is actually done. And of memories - both emotional and physical - that still have another as their default setting.
A lot like a TV reporter who has suddenly switched jobs and is constantly struggling to sign off with the right channel's name at the end of a story.
Break-ups suck, but you have to allow yourself to feel wretched and incomplete. Not indefinitely, not forever, but until you've learnt the lesson life meant to teach you. You have to allow your heart to ache for the one who is no longer the one.
Also read: What love looks like, from 16 to 30, for this girl
To let your body conjure up memories that still light a raging fire in you. Of how your bodies fit, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The curve of his/her body melding into your own. The whisper of their breath on your lips. Your softnesses yielding and your hardnesses crashing against each other. You have to let your body burn a little.
You have to allow your mind to feel the agony of loneliness, which will creep up, unbidden and unwelcome, in the dead of the night. To ask uncomfortable questions, the answers to which will leave you cold and scared. To dig deep and find a new normal to make sense of the world.
I was in love, not too long ago. It was the overwhelming, all-consuming, can't-imagine-life-without-each-other kind... Until suddenly, it wasn't. Letting go of a relationship you've poured your being into can seem like a soul-destroying experience.
I tried talking myself into love, as an antidote to the poison of heartbreak. It didn't work, not once.
Which is when I learnt a life skill that requires shit to really hit the fan before you truly get a handle on it: relinquishing control. Because no matter how much I frothed and foamed, I couldn't actually do a thing to accelerate the healing process. The best, and only thing you can do is wait it out and believe.
The tide will turn and the storm will settle. They have to. And in the meanwhile, there's sangria.