Before I get into it, this Sunday I’m re-opening the books for Personalized Meditations! Spots will still be fairly limited but you can get on the waiting list to be notified via email as soon as they open.
Recently someone asked me for break up advice, noting that I hadn’t written anything on it. While I am far from that feeling now, I know the depths of heartbreak. Even now, there is something about love that lends itself to heartache. I just spent the past couple days in Albuquerque visiting my boyfriend, leaving brought the kind of sadness that is only available because I enjoy his presence so much. It’s silly, even though it’s real, even though it’s temporary. Previously I would have thought that this sadness meant that I was weak. But this person has me viewing relationships in an entirely new way. I’ve found the experience of deeply loving someone contains multitudes.
For many years, I didn’t want the multitudes. I didn’t want to share my complexities with another person. I didn’t date because I wanted my life to be perfect before I let someone in. If not perfect, I wanted to at least have a lot of it figured out. This sounds like a line plucked from the mouth of a leading lady in a 2000s rom com, but I truly felt this way. I didn’t know life could be any other way than mostly alone. My parents never called on friends for help, preferring to retreat inward when my mom got sick rather than have to explain her illness. Community wasn’t a word I knew and to this day, I’m still learning how to access external help. I always hoped I could be strong, interpreting strength as doing everything by myself.
When I met a person, I didn’t want to envelop them in my messy personal struggles. I would be whole and it would be simple.
That fell apart when I met someone in 2016. At the time my view of life and sense of self was scattered in that early 20s way. Little did I know, one of the hardest years of my life was coming around the corner at full speed. But I persevered with this imperfect relationship, threw my dreams and even some of my personality into this tender space condoned by love. Good things came from it, I saw the world from a point of view that had never been available to me. There were bursts of affection and growth that wouldn’t have been possible without that relationship.
But like all doomed love stories, the negatives overshadowed the positives. Every time the boy left on a trip without me, which happened often, I felt empty inside. I thought that if I gave enough, at some point our incompatibilities would rectify themselves. I spent so much time catering to another person, that I lost touch with what it meant to be me. Such a severe imbalance doesn’t do any relationship any good, eventually our loosening bond frayed and unraveled.
He broke things off, but it was in the midst of my father’s surprise battle with cancer. He said he wanted to be there for me. I didn’t have my wits about me to decline this half involved support so the break up was very messy and drawn out. I went into denial about the finality of the break up, hiding the news from my parents so those pesky emotions wouldn’t be an added burden on their shoulders. The relationship was on and off as I took my dad to radiation and immunotherapy and changed jobs to take care of my family. I echoed the actions of my parents, distancing myself from friends in lieu of being too vulnerable, being too heavy. Reaching a breaking point, I found a free therapist through the hospital system. The therapist specialized in family counseling during cancer treatment, but she listened while I strayed away from that topic again and again, crying over the timing of the break up. I was afraid that I wasn’t strong enough to deal with everything at once. Everything alone.
When I finally ended the relationship for real, we didn’t talk for several months. The first few weeks were brutal, but after they passed I could feel I was cultivating space to heal. I started to finally recognize myself in the mirror again. I didn’t have to hide the decaying relationship from my parents, I didn’t have to field questions about where my boyfriend was. I didn’t have to explain to my friends that actually, I was going to see him again and actually, that was a good idea! I didn’t have to worry about getting a phone call outside the grocery store that would leave me in tears while I shopped for my dad’s weekly food supply.
In break ups, you have to totally cut communication. Take it from someone who did the exact opposite for way too long. It’s a crucial element to successfully moving on and reforming the relationship with yourself.
The mind loves to travel down well worn neural pathways. If you leave signs of the relationship lying around the house, you will fall back into an unwelcome pattern of memories. My last break up aligned with my old iphone crashing, which meant I got a clean slate. I highly recommend clearing your phone of old photos, screenshotting whatever you need to and uploading it to the cloud. While this all sounds intense, it’s all in the name of ease. Don’t enter the battle dome with ghosts of the past.
I got a cactus, placed it at the foot of my bed and used it as a resting point for my eyes. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up, the last thing I saw before sleep. It gave me a place to gaze that wasn’t my phone. Plants listen, take in the thoughts and help convert that energy you can no longer hold. A year or so after the break up, the cactus began to rot from the root. I tried to save it, but it had carried the pain that I needed it to. The time had come for the plant to move on and take my grief with it.
Have my ex and I talked since? Yes, but after several months passed. I gave myself enough time to renew. And we’ve never reached the same level of involvement, I respect the space that time has grown between us.
The good news? Going through a break up provides a premium opportunity to live in the present. Living through heartache is in fact a professional course in intentional thought.
Letting a relationship go is a heightened process of grief, one that feels so pointlessly difficult when we’re in the midst of it. But like every challenge, it offers way more than may appear on the surface. It’s a magnification of how we handle the most monotonous ups and downs.
Do we dwell on them? Is there a constant revisiting of narratives? Are we living with a scarcity mindset, believing nothing better is out there, or can we trust that love will come in other forms?
The mind will want to run through memories or search for reasons, but in a breakup, you may never find a satisfactory answer. Sometimes I still find my mind revisiting old conversations that hurt me, or things that just didn’t make sense. But as soon as I catch myself, I pull back into the moment at hand. The other person’s narrative is always going to be somewhat inconceivable. The best thing you can do is reorient yourself as the main character of your life and find ways to redirect the love you felt for that person towards yourself.
I threw myself into video art and installations, I meditated every morning and night. I went to exercise classes and stopped eating foods that didn’t sit well with my body.
Opportunities began to present themselves to me, I socialized and danced and discovered that a single date could tell me if I liked somebody enough to invest time or move on.
Lonely nights came, but those nights also went. When you have a sense of imagination, you are never fully alone. There’s always something to create, a flame that wants to grow from the ashes of your heartbreak. Whether your creations travel anywhere in the world is beside the point, it’s about the companionship that you develop with yourself through a creative medium.
It took about a year to fully recover my sense of self, but the discovery process became enjoyable. I became more intimate with my own being.
I became that stronger individual I always hoped to be.
When I met the person I’m with now, life wasn’t perfect but I had found a new level of stability. I knew what I wanted from a relationship. I knew what I was willing to give and what I needed to maintain the self I had grown to love. The person I’m with now has helped me expand, uplifted me and I haven’t sacrificed my own power for any of it. In the past I would have thought this level of support would come with a price, but that’s not the case. A lot of things that I used to see as insurmountable elements of a relationship have been the most joyful parts. The person I’m with now gives me something to be grateful for everyday, which is something I never thought I’d say.
In fact, I’m even not reaching for perfection anymore—it’s the biggest con of all. I’ve found I can be whole, life can be complex and there is someone who will want to be your teammate through it all.
Heartbreak feels like a loss because it is. But letting go is a constant in this life.
When something departs, the space left behind is sacred. When you get past the initial pain, the opening in the heart becomes a window into the world that waits for you.
Step into that space and embrace the divine unknown.
xx
James
p.s.
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