Inside Out

 

     Heartbreak feels like your whole body is inside out and you’re scrambling to figure out how to put yourself back together. Your body does not even feel like it is yours anymore, it is now owned by your grief. Walking through life, I feel like my name tag should say “Hello my name is: A Shell of a Person.” I don’t want to compare my grief to anyone else’s, because we are all individual unique people with different relationships, experiences, and feelings. My heartbreak is not like yours. It is not easier than yours, nor is it harder than yours. My heartbreak is just mine.

     They say grieving someone who is still alive is harder than grieving someone who has died. I can’t say that for a fact, all I can say is it fucking sucks. I can say that with the current heartbreak I am experiencing I have sobbed at the same extent and volumes that I did when the most important person to me died. When someone dies, they do not choose to leave you. When someone chooses to leave you, it feels like they died because a relationship has died, a future you built in your head has died, and the person you imagined they were has died. A small sliver of you dies that you can never get back, but something else grows in its place.

     The cold hard raw truth is that heartbreak makes you feel like you exposed every intimate part of yourself to someone for them to inevitably be like, “You know what, I decided I don’t like what I see.” Everyone feels different during heartbreak but if anyone can resonate with anything it is that you wonder why you weren’t enough. And the only thing that will make you slowly change your mind until you realize you are more than enough for yourself, for your friends, for your family, and for whoever your future partner is someday is time. No words anyone will say are going to make you feel better. Cry the tears until they don’t come out anymore. Cry every day for a month until you don’t cry for 1 day. Then cry every day for another month until you don’t cry for 1 week. Then 1 week turns into 2 weeks. And when the wave comes crashing back over you and you feel like you’re drowning, let yourself drown.

     Last week I told my friend Meredith, “You know it’s strange I feel like I’m okay. But I’m afraid because I feel like this pain is just lingering in the shadows haunting me waiting to pull me back under.” And then it did, and I let it. We’re always afraid of the shadows in the dark because it’s what we’ve been taught growing up. What if instead of being afraid of the shadows we learned to live in coexistence with the shadows. We learn to look at the dark, scary parts of life with acceptance knowing that after the darkness engulfs us, the sun comes back up releasing us back to life with a new sense of relief.