All I’ve ever wanted since I was a little girl was to feel the emotions of love. True and undeniable love. The love you see in movies and crave for a lifetime. The fairy tale love that can do no wrong and only bring happiness and peace to your heart. That is this vision that is built up in our brains from the moment we are able to recognize emotions. We prepare ourselves from a very young age to get married and have a family that we can be proud of but nobody ever prepares you for heartbreak and the feeling that consumes your soul on a level that you feel nobody can understand.
When the average person thinks about pain it is automatically associated with physical pain. The pain you get when you break a bone or have a baby. The pain you get with a migraine or with a stomach ache. Pain that can be subdued with a simple pill or time. As a mother of two I can honestly say that heartbreak hurts more than giving birth. It’s a pain that cannot be seen but feels like a million knives twisting through your heart, over and over again. It lingers and lingers, becoming mentally, emotionally, and physically draining. As the international day of love has come to an end and the roses begin to wilt and the balloons begin to deflate, reality hits. Love isn’t the fairy tale story that always ends with happiness. Love can end in heartbreak, something our five year old rambunctious brains would’ve never believed at the time.
Studies suggest that it can take half the length of the relationships duration to recover from a breakup. While this may be true, a relationship can live for years with no love. What does it really take to move on after you’ve opened your soul to someone? That’s what love feels like. The strongest form of vulnerability left at the hands of a person who can take your emotions from 0 to 100 within a matter of seconds. To most, that’s scary. More and more people are embracing the single life because heartbreak is too hard to bare. Why fall in love when there’s a chance I can be brought to my knees with a pain that is shunned upon and can’t be explained?
Truth is, true love never dies. Whether it ends happily or in heartbreak, your soul is opened to another human being and there is no turning back from that. You may have to love them so hard you have to let them go. Is it easy? Hell no. It lingers and sends you reminders at the worst times. It holds onto you so tightly you feel as if you’ve been swallowed whole with no chance of return. It pains you so deeply it effects your daily routine and breaks any hope of happiness you may have thought you had. Years and years may pass but the ones you love stick onto you like a leech, sucking every ounce of emotion out of you. Does it suck? Yes. Is it frustrating? Absolutely, but love is not only limited to loving another soul. While loving another person can take you to another world of happiness, loving yourself can take you to a universe of peace. Loving yourself can give you the strength to say “I love you but I love me more.”
A broken soul may be hard to bare but it isn’t impossible to recover from. It may take time and you may get frustrated but know that loving yourself will give you power, accepting the past will give you wisdom, and moving forward doesn’t mean that you’ve moved on but rather you’re stepping in the right direction. That is something to be proud of after heartache. The ability to love those you’ve loved from the sidelines but never forgetting who you love most.