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 whether I did something—or I didn’t—to contribute to how he was feeling, he always had the choice to communicate that. And he chose not to. And even more than simply choosing not to—he chose to treat me in a way that caused me to literally look at his face—into his eyes—and see a completely different person standing there.
I did not want that. I was sure of it.
That absolute certainty is always my initial phase post-breakup. Maybe it’s shock. Maybe it’s because I haven’t yet had time to process what it all means just yet. Maybe it’s because reconciling two completely parallel realities—how we were supposed to head out of town that weekend and instead I was looking at someone I didn’t know that was telling me things I couldn’t understand—takes time. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. But that’s always my first thought with bad breakups. That I don’t deserve this. And even more—I don’t want it.
And you know, maybe that’s just life being kind initially—because it knows full well the next morning it’s going to sting in a way none of us are ever prepared for. But that’s what happens. After I go to sleep that first night—and by sleep, I mean after I toss and turn and wake up to question whether this is really happening over and over—I wake up to phase two. And phase two is the complete polar opposite of I don’t deserve this. Phase two is the maybe it was all my fault place. The one where strength is completely gone. Logic and reason are completely gone. And now, the job of healing becomes piecing together what it means to be in this new world where you are—without that person. And I’m not sure why, but this is usually the time we blame ourselves for some, or all, of what happened.
But we’ll get to that.
Look, I’ve already broken this news to you, but—when your heart is hurting, your mind is not your friend. I’m sorry for that. But—it’s just one of those unfair little yin and yang conundrums of this crazy old world. While your mind struggles to understand, it’s going to seek answers to questions that might not actually have answers. Or at least not easy ones. And in that lack of clarity, it is going latch on to whatever information it can find, and try to construct a story to tell you. Even if what it knows—isn’t—enough to build the story.
You understand that, right?
For me, I had actually started to convince myself that asking him several times (like, literally, three) over the course of a week what was wrong was enough to end the whole relationship. I mean, maybe he got frustrated with my questions. Maybe I was being too sensitive. Maybe there actually wasn’t anything wrong and I did this—forcing him to talk about something that wasn’t real or he wasn’t ready for and it was just—too much.
No. I’m just going to tell you (and remind me) right now—that is not a possible story.
You know what is a possible story? That me asking him those things could have frustrated him. That he might not have liked them. Sure. But again, we are all adults here. And he had the opportunity to communicate to me what he needed, so I could change how I was responding to the situation.
And he didn’t. So I couldn’t. And it broke.
The nuances of how we process these things in our lives that don’t go quite as planned are pretty complicated. They just are. And maybe it’s because we are complicated. And while we constantly bombard ourselves with questions and blame—especially in hindsight—I need you to remember one really important thing here. Communication is always a choice. It’s where we make and break just about everything in love. And while I’m sure, like in all relationships, there is shared blame somewhere—I am just not going to take the blame for asking for more information
