I wish there were “Breaking Up Made Easy” guides readily available to approach the process of ending love from a holistic perspective. Unfortunately, I don’t know any better, so I choose to be honest because it’s all that love deserves. I focus on who I am to explain why things didn’t work out. I am incapable of giving my partner the world he needs for himself to feel complete.
I put myself first; I love myself more. I don’t blame him, and his ways I cannot change. The breakup is about me. I aim not to prolong the agony of any relationship, which is why I remove myself from the situation as quickly as humanly possible. I voice what I feel, and there is no going back from there. I let go. I break up because it hasn’t worked. I won’t try to fix something I consider broken. If I start to cringe at the mere attempt of any romantic gesture from the other person directed towards me, then I know I have no intention of patching things up. The space once inhabited by us turns into sadness and void of what it could have and now will never be. Ending the mental battle between my conscience and my reason equals moving on. I identify the latest stage of this process with the word FREEDOM.
Behind closed doors
There are no more boundaries, worries about how the other person feels, and no more misery and all the stuff that brought me to this moment. Some of my friends view my approach to breaking up as inconceivable. I spend the equivalent of a weekend bathing in sorrow and mourning what I had, and then, waking up in the morning, I resurface feeling fine. Life goes on. I am a creature of necessity and practicality. I do what needs doing for me to find balance and peace.
What happens behind the closed doors of my heart is something I don’t discuss. Call me old-fashioned, but I won’t use social media to share cryptic posts on what’s in my mind or how I feel. Let’s deal privately with matters of the heart, and let’s take the time we need to find emotional balance. I am a hoarder of the worse kind. I never forget. I travel through life with a heart filled with emotional clutter covered in dust, moments I cannot let go of, not even if I wanted to.
Family, friends, or lovers, once they make it into the chambers of my heart, there they will remain, long after they have disappeared from the horizon of my life. There is no need for these people to be aware of how I cherish them regardless of how things ended. None of them needs to know the truth because I wish them to carry on living, as I do.
Rollercoaster ride
All these people own front-row tickets. These are seats forever reserved for every premier and repeat in the theatre of my timeline. Although my approach to breakups is not for everyone, it’s an exact representation of who I am as a human being. When I look inside my heart, I see flashes of familiar faces, the way they were when they photobombed frame after frame of my life: smiley faces, funny looks, tears of joy and sadness, all the emoji under the sun eternally imprinted in my soul.
The movie of my life is a colourful rollercoaster ride of sensations that I wouldn’t change for anything in the world. I have no regrets for how things worked or didn’t work out. What matters is the journey that took me here and at times, breaking up is part of the process.
There is a direct link between letting go and our capability to learn and mature from experience. Growth occurs when we leave denial and resentment out of the equation and allow honesty and acceptance to do all the talking. If only we would view breaking up as the end of a cycle and not as a personal failure, then we would be able to embrace the unknown and uncertainty that follow the end of a story, with a positive outlook and as an opportunity to evaluate our lives and explore our options. Breaking up brings changes. Changes bring new beginnings. Where there is a beginning, there is life. It’s all we need to know to carry on living and thriving.
