THE RECIPE FOR MOVING ON

When I was 18, I met someone and I fell in love in a way I somehow convinced myself that I never would. I told him he didn’t love me enough while in the back of my mind I remembered how we fought for hours to the point I was nauseous and he still slept right next to me on the bathroom floor until morning. We spent four years together meeting each other over and over again as we navigated through ourselves and our college years. I taught him how to be himself no matter who is watching and he taught me how to surf. I showed him that life is much better when you don’t care what people think of you and he showed me that anger doesn't have to be loud, it can be calm. Often he switched between liking hot coffee or iced coffee no matter the season. I Couldn't tell you which one he chose this year. It's been a few months since this all ended and I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I'm never going to forget how much he loved the ocean because everytime I see the beach I think of him. The irony of the beach being my favorite place on earth. I resonate with the saying that everything I let go of has claw marks in it but I have claw marks in me too, scars on my body from everywhere he touched. I hate you but I love you. I hate what you did but I loved you more than myself. I have sat with my anger long enough and have realized it is only just grief and I wish that weren't the case because it's much easier to walk away when the only feeling is outrage. But my heart is not strong enough to carry the burden of hostility so I carry the burden of hurt because it is lighter. My heart will always be strong enough to carry love, and that's to a fault. I threw out my perfume that smells like the dates we went on, but everyday I continue to put on the ring he bought me. I deleted our pictures on instagram but his letters are still in a box under my bed. 

You make plans and God laughs. When I sat there on my drive back home from Boston and I cried so hard I couldn't see the road, I asked myself If I was going to die. Everything that I was afraid would happen to me, happened to me. And yet I'm alive, I'm still alive, I will continue to be alive, and that is a good enough reason to keep moving forward. The word heartbreak is not dramatic enough, there is no word that will ever be able to represent that feeling in your body. But when you know, you know. I think it's ironic that a sentence like that can be used for both love and for the end of it. Good and bad will forever coexist. I don’t know much, but I do know some, and one thing I know for sure is that you cannot find peace, and you cannot find happiness, by avoiding life.

These are the ingredients for how to keep going ; 

The first thing you need to do is give yourself the permission to feel the loss. Give yourself permission to be sad even if you were the one to leave. Grieving a person who is still alive and breathing is confusing to the mind and body, and it hurts like hell. There are going to be times where you feel as if everything is okay because the sun is shining, other times you'll be mad at the sun for shining because you just want the weather to match your mood and have it rain. Then it does rain and you’ll convince yourself you won’t ever get over this so what is the point in even trying. But you can let yourself sit inside looking out the window listening to the rain, or you can go outside and let the water from the earth fall on your body and have it remind you that your life is going to keep moving forward. I'm not sure who I am even talking to when I write this but I want to let you know that you are not to blame for acting how you did when you were sad and angry. Oftentimes people can get caught up in thinking they aren't going about something in the correct way, but there is no correct way. This is where giving yourself grace comes in. Heartbreak is an unpredictable outcome in a very unfortunate situation and humans are not typically used to that. In order to get over something, truly, you have to be able to move through it. You are not a lazy person for sleeping all hours of the day, you are not a shitty friend for shutting everyone out and canceling plans you thought you could make, you are not a bad person for drinking more than usual if it helped shut your mind off. If you got no sleep at all, if you screamed at your mom because your anger couldn't just stay in your body for any longer, if you called out of work, if you stopped eating. There are a hundred and one ways we attempt to kill our sadness and no matter if you picked one of them or all of them, you are merely just a human who is looking for a way to survive. Love yourself for at least choosing life. 

Healing comes from two things ; feeling and time. I know it's uncomfortable to sit with this pain, but you are doing it for your future self. You can go outside and go on with your life and distract yourself with everything imaginable. But then you come home, and it's night time, and you sit there with no distractions for the first time in a while and you feel the true weight of everything that has happened, and you don’t know where to go from there. I know it is an awful, weird, terrible feeling to let yourself experience this specific type of pain and  I know it feels much better to just run from it. My whole life has been a series of receiving hurtful news and letting it soak into me like a sponge until three months down the road all of that suffering and discomfort would pour out of me at an unstoppable speed and I would drown everything in my path. There is no worse feeling than living in the body of someone who bottled everything up for the sake of avoiding discomfort. Accept that the stages of this are closely related to the stages of grief. Soak in each stage and let it run its course through your body. Let yourself get completely lost in terribly sad music, let yourself scream into the void and break down with anger, drive around all night in the dark and tell yourself that this is for the better even though you don't believe that and it sure as hell does not feel like it. You are going to feel this sadness weigh you down like nothing ever before, and you're going to cry on your bedroom floor because your bed has been soaked with enough tears. Then one morning you will wake up and be angry at him, angry at the world, angry at God, angry at yourself. This will repeat itself until it can’t no longer, until you come to terms with the fact that this is just how things are now. But you need to sit with what you feel. Sit with it until you understand that everything is going to figure itself out. Understand that one day this suffering will strengthen you, but that day is not today, and you need to let yourself be okay with that. 

Possibly the most important ingredient of this recipe is a handful of really good friends. I want to really emphasize the fact that in order for someone to be a good friend does not mean they constantly need to ask you how you are doing. They know how you are doing. Friendship can look like a million different things, but you need people in your life who aren't going to get mad at you for working through this at your own speed. Not only is it helpful to say “I'm really sad today and I don't know why, I'm sorry I'm not being fun”, and have them say “it’s okay. Me too” but it's also helpful to have people to remind you of the goodness of life when you find it increasingly difficult to find that. You see, there is no romantic tie to friendships. In relationships, there is some sort of unbreakable code. There is a small chance this person is keeping you around for reasons that are selfish. Because they are lonely, because they like having someone to sleep with, because they don’t like themselves and need someone to validate everything they hate. Even though my relationship was never like that, sometimes I felt like they would have been happier with someone else. You can be told a million times over again that that assumption is not true, but when the feeling keeps you awake at night it's difficult to convince yourself otherwise. With friends however, there is no reason to choose to stay friends with someone other than the plain reason of liking who you are. When you finally feel like you can handle seeing people, go to those who you love the most. You’ll look around and understand that they are amongst the biggest reasons why you will decide to keep going. When you ask yourself “how am I going to get through this?” you will look at your friends and think “Oh, this is how I get through it. I care about these people, they care about me, we love each other, we make eachother happy, and that is enough of a reason to get myself out of bed for another day”. Sometimes the meaning of life comes down to the connection between you and those who you want to call when you have a funny story.

1 cup of hope for what's to come next 

2 cups of faith in what comes next is going to be amazing

3 cups of the realization that it can take a very short amount of time for something wonderful to happen

A promise to yourself that someday soon you will stop dwelling on what could have been. Memories will drive a person crazy. All those text messages you still have, the pictures you just refuse to delete, those are sometimes just meant to sit there untouched. Closure doesn't come from sifting through everything and throwing them in the trash, it comes from deciding you will not ruminate on them any longer. It's so effortless and almost guaranteed to get caught up in how things could have been if they worked out a little differently. But they were not different. Things happened exactly how they were meant to happen and no amount of wishing is going to make you go back and change things. There is so much good in goodbye even if you can’t see that in the moment. Your mind will tell you it's worth giving it another shot, but you know better. No matter how much you think you want to, or even do want to, your body knows that you can't. The body will save itself from the mind. When all your mind is telling you that everything could go back to how it was, and you are clouded by the love that is anchored into you, making irrational assumptions in the sake of hope, deep down in the very bottom part of your heart, somewhere that pokes you like a gut feeling you want to ignore or a guardian angel that won't leave your shoulder, you will know that it's not your place anymore. And in the name of love for yourself, you have to let go. You have got to let it go. Memories are paradoxal ; they are beautiful and they are terrible. At times It's the only thing left that we have to hang on to, other times they are flashes of what once was. And it burns. Most of them will truly never leave your bones no matter how much you continue to grow, which is wonderful just as much as it is dreadful. They will fester in your body and you’ll think you're getting better when one day you are talking to someone and they’ll say something he used to say. And it will stop your heart for a second. And the terrible feeling of your past will wash over you and leave you aching. The abundance of memories leaves this feeling inevitable, and you probably won’t ever forget them. But you can push them so far behind you and stack them up against other memories that have passed and make a choice not to think about them too much. I don’t agree with people who say you need to delete everything in order to move on. No matter how many things you delete you’ll still think about it. You still miss it. All erasing does is get rid of a physical form of someone but that doesn’t mean the echo of that person will just disappear. One day you’ll be able to look at the pictures and the texts and letters and be able to appreciate that for a little while, you were lucky enough to experience unconditional and transformative love. And that’s a beautiful thing really. 

One big step of courage to do the hard things so that one day they will be easy. I compare this process to being a babysitter. Rotting away in bed crying into your sheets is only going to feel good for so long. You’re going to be uncomfortable in this routine but still not have the energy to actually get up. Force yourself to get up, drag yourself to the gym, carry the weight of your body to the grocery store, push yourself into the shower, clean your room, make your bed, force feed yourself even though your appetite is long gone. All of those which feel impossible are going to feel good someday soon, and one day you're going to look forward to doing these little tasks, but since you can’t just sit around and wait for that day to come, you have to make yourself get through the first week of it. As I stated before, distractions are only going to last you so long. Out of sight out of mind. It was easy not to be sad over something that wasn't right in front of me. When people would ask me how I was doing right after I ended things, without fail I would say “honestly im doing really great as long as I don’t think about it” but that just led me to more problems. You have to think about it because it's happening to you. You can't just pretend like it's not. And sometimes the ability to think about it will come to you when your heart is ready to carry it. But until that happens, you have to cross that line of doing things to distract you and doing things to help yourself.  Even though you feel like you lost half of yourself when you break up with someone, the good thing is that you didn't. You are still your full self, you still walk away with your entirety. I know it feels like there is a big gaping hole in your life and in your heart but that feeling will slowly go away as time goes on and you’ll start to feel at home again in your own body rather than putting that feeling in someone else. Sometimes it happens like a flip of a switch. One morning you're washing your face through your tears, and you feel like the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do was get out of bed. The next morning you wake up and make the decision to love yourself in all the ways you swore he didn't.  And the skin care gets better, the food becomes healthier, the gym becomes your outlet, your to-do list is full, and you feel like you’re ready to actually want to get better, so then you do. You love yourself when you talk too much, when you're too loud, when you're messy and anxious. You love yourself when you hate the way you look, hate the way you feel. When you are quieter than normal and when you fall into the same patterns that you hate. There is a freedom in having the time to only invest in who you want to become. A certain kind of joy that comes from realizing you have all the time in the world to make yourself who you want to be. 

You can let this pain kick you down 10 times out of 10, or you can believe that God knows what he's doing and let the hurt drive yourself to become better. Feeling sorry for yourself is part of this process, it's beneficial and it is necessary, but it can become unrealistic. Yes, you will suffer. You will have dark days and darker nights and you will convince yourself that all this suffering is going to kill you. But all that suffering you will feel cannot even compare to the greater joys you will soon experience. If there is any reason to keep going after a breakup, it's the fact that some of the best days of your entire life have yet to happen. You simply cannot wait for everything to be perfect in order to be happy because you will miss out on life's greatest pleasure. Experiencing happiness is almost entirely up to nobody but ourselves. Walking out the door and choosing to see the world in ways you rarely do will change your life for the better. You can make a conscious decision to tune into your life intentionally. Everything that you do, see, and hear can become wonderful. You can be excited about everything. Interested in everything. Intoxicated with the feeling that everyday is a new beginning. Obsessed with the small pleasures of life, like warm days and birds singing. And when you feel like you can’t see the beauty in those things quite yet, decide to make everything around you feel beautiful, and your own life will follow suit.  

There is no deadline that you need to meet when it comes to getting over something. This is not an instructional on how to get over it, because the truth is maybe you never will. But you will most certainly be able to keep going. In the face of despair, there is hope. I can’t be sure of anything when I am not yet on the other side. Although I'm on the last leg of it, moved on and happy, I'm still not finished with the process just yet. I’m still being reminded somedays of everything that used to be. I still wake up and realize that the ways he hurt me still impact me. I still have bridges to cross and hurt to heal from and lessons to learn and forgiveness to give. But what helps me to be okay with that is the idea that nothing is infinite, not happiness nor hurt, not even life. Whatever I feel today I won't feel forever. It's okay to think you have healed and realized you have not. Your progress is not lost the second you feel sad again because progress and healing is not and will never be linear. At the end of the day, I could sit here and I could pretend to really hate him. And I could call him every name imaginable, and I could write out everything that he ever did to me, or list every reason to be mad at him. But that would get me nowhere. I loved him. I still love him. I still hope my love changed him that same way his love changed me. And I just have to live with that. But living something doesn't mean that you have to let it consume your entire life. There is more life to live and mountains to see and great things to experience than dwelling on all of the feelings that you’ll carry with you your whole life. Let it hurt, let it linger, then let it go.