A few weeks before the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I broke my ankle in my backyard. I remember it with perfect clarity: a flash of pain followed by a period of surprisingly little discomfort as my body flooded with adrenaline and my brain assessed the damage. Just as I started to entertain the optimistic idea that “maybe it’s not too bad,” WHAM! Here was the real pain, the unrelenting pain, the pain that made me feel like I might throw up or pass out.
Something about the experience felt eerily familiar even though it was my first broken bone. Perhaps because it’s the closest thing I’ve felt to the strange progression of pain that comes with a breakup.
Heartbreak is cruel in many ways, but one of its most devilish features is the false hope that the breakup act itself is the low point. If someone you still love tells you it’s over, even if they try to do it kindly, it seems like the ultimate hurt. It can’t get worse, right?
The first time a boy broke up with me, I thought he had simultaneously punched me in the stomach — a feat that was in fact impossible because we were on the phone. News like that affects us on a full-body scale.
But then our brains do what they’re supposed to do and try to protect us. Our minds fill with messages like: 1) It’s their loss! 2) They don’t actually mean it! 3) I can fix this!
Whatever serves to help calm us down temporarily. Thoughts of that nature can last for days or even weeks, and even though we’re miserable, it feels ever-so-slightly tolerable. And also, it doesn’t get worse than Day 1, right??
Then the real worst day will come. That day looks different for every person suffering from a breakup, but it arrives when you finally realize the truth you tried so hard to reject.
The truth is: 1) Yes, it is their loss, but you’ve also lost something and you’re probably not getting it back. 2) They did actually mean it. 3) You can’t fix it because broken love is not a broken appliance.
The truth removes that final protective layer of hope that you won’t actually have to go through the full heartbreak experience — that you can skip ahead to the stage where you either get to joyfully reunite with your ex and have it work this time, OR you get to move on stronger and wiser.
In fact, you are a mere mortal and you will have to grieve and heal, and stop and start, and get a bit better and get a bit worse, and so on and so forth for however long it takes. I wish I could tell you otherwise, because then I could tell myself otherwise too.
The post-breakup reality check is more painful than the breakup itself. It’s a simultaneous feeling of emptiness and heaviness, with a hefty scoop of hopelessness on top. But the worst day of a breakup is also ground zero for starting to heal in a real, lasting way. So although it can feel like a setback when it happens, it’s actually crucial progress.
And slowly but definitively, it actually will get better from there.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Jackson Simmer on Unsplash