and loss. A relationship can be short and intense—or it can be long and intense. And intense can mean good things. Or bad things. Relationships can fizzle out quickly—or slowly unravel over the course of an entire decade. They can be complicated. Or perfect. Or confusing. They can move fast. Or so incredibly slow. And sometimes, they can be all of those things at once.
So maybe you’re dealing with a broken heart you got from your high school sweetheart. Maybe you’re breaking up after three months. Or three years. Or maybe, even three decades. Maybe you’re sitting there, alone, looking at this world and not recognizing it at all—because without them, you have truly known no other life. Or maybe you’ve been trying to leave for years—knowing it wasn’t healthy but couldn’t quite let go. Maybe it was kids. Or finances. Or family. Or health. Or—one of a million other really complicated reasons I’m not even going to pretend to understand. The nuances are always going to vary, love, but I think the rest of it—the feelings part? Those are mostly the same. And that’s the part I want to explore.
How you felt. And what you did with all that.
Anyway—just to round out this story, I need to share how it really ended. The next morning (like, less than twelve hours later)—when I was still reeling from what had happened and thinking he’d definitely call to say he’d made a mistake—he was already back on the dating site we’d met on. (Yes, I checked. Yes, dating apps are the bane of everyone’s existence. Yes, we are all still hoping we’ll run into the person of our dreams in the broccoli aisle.).
And this is the world we’re supposed to find love stories in. This is how someone who said they cared about me responded to—um, I still don’t even know what happened. Maybe it was something I did but will never know. Maybe something crazy was going down in his life that he just couldn’t share with me. But I’ll tell you—no matter what the reason was, I keep going back to one simple truth. He could have chosen to talk to me about it. And he didn’t.
And that is what grounds me right now.
**
So this is the moment it all starts. The untangling. And I tell you all those little details because I want to be real with you. I promised I’d be real with you. I mean, I almost want you to feel like you just read a part of my diary. Or you overheard me talking to my best friend. And I want you to feel that way because I know that self-help books sometimes have a stigma. And maybe the reason that stigma develops is because most of the time, they can seem sort of, textbook. Cold. Hard to apply.
And it probably doesn’t help that generally, when we arrive at the place where we actually need self-help books, things are already tough. We’re already struggling. And so when we start reading, we find the do this and try that doesn’t really come with any significant context about how it all feels. In the beginning. In the middle. When we haven’t quite figured out how to heal or grow. And we’re just treading water in the middle of a hurricane trying our best not to drown. So the way I see it, maybe we don’t need the roadmap as much as just the validation that it’s ok to feel the way we do.
However that is. At the beginning of the growth journey.
So, let me just start by telling you what I know you need to hear. Everything is going to be ok. It will be. I promise. And I also want you to know that one day you’re going to forgive yourself. For what you did. Or didn’t do. For how you feel. Or didn’t feel. We all make mistakes, love. We all act with our hearts first. We all hold on a little too long and a little too hard sometimes. And sure—we all eat a few lies when our hearts are hungry. That’s just how it works.
And look—I know my story isn’t your story. I also know that some of you will read this and say—she thinks that was hard? Please. And you know, I’m going to give you that freedom to decide how you will judge my story. Well—at least the part I’m sharing. But I honestly hope that’s not the angle you’ll take. Because how we get there is not the story I’m writing. It’s the beginning of the story I’m writing. And truth be told, the how is always going to be different. I mean, like we just talked about—maybe you got completely blindsided by someone you thought was your forever. Maybe you know exactly why it ended. Maybe you could have fixed it, but didn’t want to. Maybe you contributed to it—or it was outright your fault. Maybe it happened so slowly you didn’t even see it until it was already done. Maybe you’re coming out of a twenty-year marriage or emerging after your very first breakup. And I’m not going to pretend to know the details of what you’re carrying, love. But I do know that, unfortunately, most of us are going to experience a whole bunch of different kinds of endings. Some that will make sense. Others that just won’t. And whether we have all the information we need to understand, or we don’t, the next step is always the same.
Figuring out how to move forward without the need to go back.
And maybe that’s just one of those great simple truths. One that takes a lifetime to really understand. But the way I see it? Moving forward is that beautifully complex art of what we choose to do after we learn something we never really wanted to know in the first place. It’s how we teach ourselves to walk alone again, without the hand that spent so long holding ours next to us. It’s choosing to feel it rather than finding something to avoid feeling it. It’s teaching ourselves to look back at what happened. And learning from it—but not lingering on it. Not dwelling on it. Not burying it. And I’ll tell you, love, mostly—it’s what we choose to tell ourselves about what we learned in the days and weeks and months that come after.
Because that is where what we went through gets its label as a lesson. Or as a scar.
And that is the real story. What we do with what happens to us.
So, no matter how you got here, here you are. At the place where the healing begins.
**
Moving forward
is that beautifully complex art
of what we choose to do
after we learn something
we never really wanted to know
in the first place.
3. “I Do Not Deserve This.”
What you tell yourself at the beginning.
I’m just going to say it right now. And get it completely out of the way. You’re going to tell yourself a lot of things in the beginning. In those hours—days—weeks—after any kind of an ending, your mind is—and I’m sorry for this—but, it’s going to drive you completely insane. It’s going to plague you with what ifs. It’s going to churn incessantly during any moment you don’t keep it completely focused on something else. You’re going to spend so much time overthinking and overanalyzing what happened that you’re legitimately going to start wishing your mind came with an off switch.
I get it. But it’s the early stages, love. And these are the hardest—when you seesaw constantly between how and why.
When I walked home that night, after he had literally driven away and left me standing on that curb, I remember thinking through this space I was living in now. I mean, in reality—I was standing in my same world but—somehow, it looked like a completely different place. One I didn’t know anymore. That didn’t make sense to me. It was a Friday. I was supposed to be excited for the weekend. We were supposed to be going places and doing things. Relaxing. Laughing. Dreaming. Building. And you know, before I had come down to meet him in that courtyard, I had thrown away the last wilting flower from the bouquet he had brought me the week before “for no reason at all.” That’s some crazy irony, huh?
Anyway, I thought about what this new place meant and whether—even if he were to come back with more answers somewhere down the road—I could ever see him through the same eyes again. And for that moment, the answer was no. A hard no. Because—in those first few hours after this truth started to set in, I felt with absolute certainty that I did not ever want someone who could treat me like that to hold such an important place in my life.
I did not deserve this.
And