The hidden beauty in heartbreaks

Post Inspiration – The broken tirade by a hopeless romantic – Karthika

The questions are endless and the nostalgia is overwhelming. How do you go from waking up in your happy paradise to waking up with that sinking feeling in your gut of having to spend yet another day missing them? How do you go through the day by making one cup of coffee instead of the usual two and wonder if you ever cross their mind while doing every single task as they cross yours? How do you prepare yourself for yet another day of realizing your collective dreams without them? How do you go without thinking about how happily perfect you guys were one second and how you broke up the next? How do you go without realizing how broken you truly are and how much you need to pretend to be strong?

Loving can hurt and it hurts because you were making the best memories of your life with the person who is now a painful memory.

It is a sad, miserable hell of a place – heartbreak; a never-ending tunnel of melancholy with no rays of hope and joy, but the truth is, you have never really known love until you have survived a heartbreak. You never realized you were capable of loving someone the way you did until your heartbreak. You never imagined you could feel a myriad of emotions with an intensity that breaks every inner corner of your being until your heartbreak. You never knew the limits of your compassion until you find yourself forgiving them and still willing to change and compromise with every single penny of your identity for one chance at making it work. You never fathomed your vulnerability until you find yourself collecting the broken pieces of your wall that you had once promised never to bring down. You did not know you could feel so much until you fell in love and your heart got eventually broken.

You go from suffocating your mind by replaying all their hurtful words and actions to the point where none of the replays evoke any kind of reaction from you. You go from feeling every inch of hurt and betrayal thinking of how this person had promised to be the last person in the world to bring you to this position to feeling nothing but emptiness. You go on a wild ride of emotional roller-coaster every day by replaying all the happy memories and wondering how you could have saved your relationship. You find yourself going back and forth between holding on and letting go and you just can’t decide for yourself whether you should love yourself more and hate them for making you damaged goods or overlook the pain and continue to love them.

You know that you would emerge out of this, eventually; whether you let yourself feel every bit of pain or not and yet you choose to feel.

And that’s the beauty of love and heartbreaks. You evolve and heal, always emerging as a better version of yourself, for that is what love does to you. It makes you feel- you come to terms with the raw unfiltered pain and happiness, every inch of it, with all their intensity.

It was never love until you had your best and your worst memories together. Life is a paradox and love is how you live in paradox.

You know that when you love someone, you are giving someone else the license to hurt you and you still choose to love. You know you are letting someone in your darkest sides knowing that the person may walk away and you still choose to love. You know how much it would hurt and you still choose to love.

You now know that the biggest mistake you can make is taking what you have for granted.

You now know how strong you can be after being your weakest self. You know you thought you won’t have any love left to love again but you do fall in love again- with a renewed intensity and a better understanding of love.

You did not know empathy the way you do now- the way you can now relate to other people’s pain and feel for them. You now know that nobody willingly chooses to be in pain and that no amount of carefully measured words and advice work. People heal at their own pace and you no longer judge them for ruining their life as nobody does it purposefully. You now know that some of the brightest days come after the darkest hours of rain and you can never force something. If it is meant to be, it will find its way to you. You now know that everything in your life happens for a reason and that every event seems to fit in like one carefully planned piece of a master jigsaw puzzle- a puzzle that shaped you into who you are today- of which you have no control on; except for how you choose to respond to those circumstances.

So live, love and laugh when in love and scream, cry and heal when in pain but feel every bit of these emotions because every laugh line is a reminder of how beautiful your life was and every internal scar is a sign of how you survived the darkness, eventually making it to a star-filled night after having survived some of the worst, never-ending grey nights.

Photo credits – Mami Gibbs