Breakup Cluster-F: What Happens When You Do Everything You’re Not Supposed to Do

I can safely say, therapy doesn’t seem to be working on me.

Hence, following my grandmother’s brilliant advice, I got up, took a shower, did my hair and make up and put on cute clothes because even when you’re sad or ill or dipped in your blues, when you look at yourself in the mirror and you look good, your rewire your brain to think everything is swell.

‘Swell’ and I are sipping a matcha latte in this mesmerizing cafe, my marvelous brother sitting in front of me, as I will attempt to capture the immense cluster f&%k I created in the past couple of days of full blown abandonment trauma response.

By the way, if you’ve been reading this blog for a little while, you might remember the one guy I thought was The One a few years back and ended up breaking up with me over coffee from one Ischia vacation to the next day — I mean THIS guy: https://medium.com/@navigatingmy30s/should-we-dare-to-dream-or-prepare-for-a-potential-crash-e69b488201f2)

Okay, let me not get carried away and start at the top.

Cluster F Part 1: The Text You Should NEVER Send

I know, I know, I know.

Quick recap from the magic world of R, my new Christmas boyfriend. He came into my life like a tornado, he pursued me like his love depended on it, I spotted and loved the love bombing (I needed a quick love high at the time), I wasn’t even that into him, he said he loved me, I decided to try and see if it would work, he messaged he would fly in the next day at noon and ghosted me without even pre-warning me that he wouldn’t come.

In all fairness, it’s a little bit more nuanced than this but man did it take a toll.

It woke up all of my abandonment trauma leaving me in tears for the past two and a half weeks and now on Zoloft to try and regroup a bit of long lost serotonin.

Everyone and they mother told me NOT to text him.

The truth is, I hate games. I hate silence, it’s deafening. I like open and clear communication, I like to know where I stand, I like making sure I have tried absolutely everything I can to make it work before I throw in the towel.

This silence was imploding inside me.

Tears swell up the corner of my eyes every time someone talks to me and I can feel them coming directly from my chest.

I watched a video of a broken heart. That’s literally what happens when someone breaks it, this darker liquid begins floating around it almost as if the pain had perforated a hole in it. It’s real.

This time, however, I knew the response was disproportionate to the amount of pain this specific loss had given me.

Amidst my full blown pain I looked for every single coping strategy I could find and could actually utilize considering my body was already in breaking down mode with migraines, blocked neck, nausea, hair loss. It’s incredible how deeply we feel this pain, even when we rationally know it’s not commensurate to the amount of life lived with someone or feelings experienced.

With all of these contrasting messages and emotions exploding inside me, I decided it was time to put them all out in the open onto a white sheet of paper. Or on my iphone screen, in the middle of a dream.

At the fifteenth message I censored myself from sending, with all of my best friends agreeing on the non-communication strategy, I spoke with my brother who suggested ‘saying goodbye’.

Typically you ask for advice until you find someone who reconfirms what you were thinking, you then manually erase everyone’s wise words to follow only and exclusively the words most aligned to your own feelings.

I wrote the world’s worst post-breakup message EVER.

And before sharing it with anyone, I hit send.

Brace yourselves because it’s properly bad.

Last night you were in my dream, we were about to see each other on a beach. You had given me a black dress and I was checking with my brother if it was okay to wear it for the occasion. I saw you but you hadn’t seen me yet, I was a little nervous, I must have half woken up then because this morning I had three messages in drafts ready to send you directly from my dream.

One was quite funny — all the little things of life I wanted to tell you like Celine Dion concert, your aunt’s friend having dinner at the table next to mine, client crazy stuff…it was entitled ‘things I wanted to tell you’ with bullet points and all the little things that happened while we weren’t speaking.

Distance is hard. It’s hard because you need to build trust over time and you may soon discover that communication can slip in an instant when you haven’t built real understanding just yet.

The way you communicated another change in plans felt like pure heartbreak to me. A message of ‘I don’t care’. Not a sorry, not a message right away when you found out you wouldn’t be arriving Friday, as if my life, time and heart didn’t matter. Hard to reconcile with the man I met who gave me so much peace and serenity, who was so sure.

Conscious I also didn’t always give you just peace and serenity, I really never understood the never wanting to actually be in the same place, the lack of urgency to be together, to hold me, to make sure I felt safe and loved but also to experience what it would feel like for you to feel loved. And wow I was so looking forward to loving you.

I thought you were coming, I was hoping you would. I thought you’d surprise me and then in an instagram story I discovered you elsewhere.

I never saw it coming. We were so close to actually becoming us.

The most heartbreaking thing of saying goodbye like this is seeing something so special left un-lived.

Like reading the trailer of your favorite movie and then know you’ll never be able to watch it.

And what a trailer we had co-written!

There are so many people in the world (and I realize you’ve been connecting with other women this whole time) but I do think special connections don’t come around every day. What’s in our power is to choose it, to nurture it and to make sure nothing and no one ruins it. You have to protect it, and I think in protecting it and nurturing it, it becomes even more special and even more powerful.

You did that in such a beautiful way when I met you I almost believed this was it. I almost believed you would be the big love of my life and I of yours, the exceptional kind of love we know we are capable of building. For a second I thought you would show me the love I had given up on believing in, because I know you can still see the magic, it’s one of the things I love most about you. Despite everything a part of you truly believes in magic. I almost forgot it was possible until you told me to trust in you, until you told me it was real.

So here we are, saying goodbye to something that almost was.

I’m sorry for the silence, I was hoping you’d break it first perhaps because I thought there would still be a chance to catch us before we fell.

It was a beautiful flight.

Voila.

Don’t worry my friends, he never read it. Luckily even in the middle of the night, one of my best friends in Australia was still awake, told me to erase all of it before he opened it and sent me a shortened version of similar content to send instead.

So I did.

He replied in one sentence:

All I can say that I really like you

And from here, complete silence, once again.

What does that even mean if it’s not followed up by anything else? I already knew this!!!!

I thought I was putting a beautiful closure in place and instead I found myself in a ditch.

Cluster F Part 2: There is no limit to bad exes

Like any 39 year old smart woman would do, I tried to pick myself up immediately, refocusing on myself.

Learnings from 39 years of constant breakups:

The only way out is through.
You can’t self-isolate as a coping strategy, even when you want to become a hermit.
Do not text the ex.
Do not wear pink glasses and forget the bad to only focus on the good.
Do not jump on a dating app and go out with a rando just to cover up pain and forget — it will come back to bite.

The best way to get over a breakup, is to fall back in love with you.

You need to take all the love, attention, presents, thoughts that you were dedicating to the other person and redirect them onto yourself.

I know, easier said than done, but I’m trying.

And as I was truly trying I headed to the pub with my London bestie and ran into the most painful breakup of my life. The Australian who crushed my heart into pieces after telling me not to freeze my eggs, that we would have 4 kids in the upcoming future to then dump me after a beautiful vacation next to Capri by saying ‘right then, I have to end this’.

As we walked into the pub, there he was.

So tall (unlike R), light blue linen shirt perfect on the shoulders highlighting his perfect body underneath, glasses tucked into the first button of the shirt, and with a big grin he welcomed me to another universe.

My God.

He is so overwhelmingly hot I almost died.

I wanted to ‘help it’, but I just couldn’t. All of my coolness vanished in the blink of an eye. Is that how the expression goes? I have no idea if my eyes were even blinking like a regular human. It felt more like an outer bodily experience.

Honestly, I wasn’t even trying to act casually uninterested, I was so far gone I was just trying to seem human to the untrained eye.

He was trying hard to make conversation, and I was barely responsive. I think I was boring. And I’m many things but typically not boring, that only happens in my head with circular thoughts not on the outside.

I was trying so hard to control my mind, to focus on what he was saying while he was ordering my G&T and pushing the man behind me away telling him to give me space and not to come near me.

Oh my GOD!

My brother asked me what he’s now doing for work and I swear I could not answer. I have no clue. He changed jobs. He got married and divorced.

At this point I didn’t even care why.

We had dinner, the four of us, my friend, him, his friend and I. But in reality in my mind it was just us.

I couldn’t think of anything else. All the little inside jokes, the things we remembered of one another.

Thankfully his friend was his guest that evening, so we couldn’t go any further in our heavy flirting, however, my gosh I would have, my mind recalling the specific moment when I first walked into his place after our first date and, gin and tonic in hand, he slowly unzipped the front of my black jumpsuit and lifted me on the kitchen counter.

That’s it. Let me try hard not to call him today to see if he’d like to catch up over a drink.

I don’t want a drink with him.

I don’t want to wake up with my head on his chest and his hand in my hair.

I don’t want to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and him open up the blankets each time just to wrap me in his arms until the morning.

I don’t need to wake up at 6am with him attached to me already inside me.

I’m okay.

Part 3: Lord save me.

It gets worse.

I woke up this morning and I sent R a text message just to save myself from sending it to my terrible ex W.

I miss you.

I wrote.

Do I even miss him?

Now I have coping strategies from my coping strategy messing up the whole initial plan!

I proceeded to join my brother for breakfast, share my abandonment trauma, cry a bit for no reason — as right now I’m so upside down emotionally anything anyone says to me feels like massive heartbreak. I feel misunderstood, I feel defensive, I feel sad.

This is the time in which I should just attempt to be a hermit, isolate for a while and not talk to anyone to avoid any other disasters.

Consequences are not quite here yet

Truth is, consequences are not quite here just yet. I have just done the deed, let’s see how I survive it.

R has yet to respond — and even to open my text and stories (aka, he doesn’t miss me and I now lost all my power).

W is missing in action.

A bunch of useless other exes are texting me.

I need to get it together, eliminate this entire chaos yet I keep stepping further and further into it.

I know I like to end each post with something intelligent and a bit figured out but I think for today, let’s leave it in chaos.

I think I have figured out the strategy I have adopted, it’s called the ‘if you didn’t get hurt enough, hit the wall harder until you’re really done with it. Forever.’

I sincerely hope I am close to done because I am not sure how I will put the pieces back together when I’m done with this.

The ‘Fuck It’ strategy review

It’s easy to say ‘I’ll do whatever I want I don’t care what people think of me’, but, once that feeling of emergency has passed, all we are left with are the fragments of our actions.

Once the emergency levers are lowered, we can clearly see the damage that was there before we reacted but also the extra layers of pain we added to it.

And it’s hard.

It’s hard to face, it’s hard to experience, it’s hard to re-live our traumas.

I should have said goodbye to R on day two. I knew that was love bombing. I knew he didn’t know me, I knew he didn’t get me.

It was a brief cycle, a little over three months, but I must up my self-protection game just a little bit more, because re-living this ordeal was truly not worth it.

In the meantime I will focus on what I can do: read instead of watch TV series, spend time with friends, take care of myself a little bit more.

And with this I wish you farewell while I head to a meditation class.

In conclusion: if it makes you feel even 0.1% better — who cares. Do what you want to do, we all know the ending will be the same anyways.

And yes, this was TERRIBLE advice, try not to take it.

With much love, A

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This post was previously published on medium.com.