I’ve survived two heartbreaks—one unrequited love and a heartbreak that almost killed me. All of you who have gone or are going through the same will know what I’m talking about.
It’s the feeling of emptiness. I felt like someone ripped out my heart and cut it into small pieces. I could barely breathe. I wasn’t even aware of my own existence.
If someone started making me laugh, it would take minutes for my lips to move and imitate a smile. Even then, I wasn’t aware of myself smiling or what I was doing.
I couldn’t eat. I would chew on one bite for hours. My mother would keep preparing my favorite food in the hope that I would somehow come to my senses and start eating like I’d never eaten before.
I was mad at myself for letting this happen to me. I said to myself: You’ll never love again. NEVER.
Looking at my friends and family trying to make me feel better made me feel even worse. One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and started yelling at myself, after which I ended up in tears.
A night in tears became my greatest relief. Tears were my lullaby, my biggest friend and my only escape from misery. I said to myself:
I will never let you enter my heart again. I will delete every single fragment of your selfish love. I will squeeze my heart and throw it to some wild animal to devour!
I knew this was only my wishful thinking. If I wanted to recover from it, I would have to find another way, a more practical way.
So, I decided to force myself to feel better. I decided to fake my smile at the times when I couldn’t smile. I decided to pretend that I was eating greedily at the times I couldn’t eat. I decided to feel happy even though I was miserable.
Perhaps if you pretend that you’re good, you’ll somehow start feeling good. I always believed that our mind is much stronger than our body.
If your mind orders your body something, your body will obey its commands.
So, I let my mind order my body that I was feeling good. In the beginning, it was not that easy but I was trying really hard.
My biggest motivations were my friends and family. When you’re in such a desperate state, you don’t care about yourself or what will happen to you.
You only care about those who are watching you. I couldn’t stand the fact that they were starting to feel miserable too, because of me. I promised myself that I would not let his poison reach my friends and family.
I would suck out his poison like you do after you’re bitten by a snake. I realized that he was not worthy of my pain or my endless, sleepless nights.
He was not worthy of being at the center of my mind.
I decided to get rid of every single thing that reminded me of him. I got rid of every letter, the teddy bears and some little figures in different animal shapes.
I made sure that I deleted him from my social networks and I deleted his phone numbers as well.
I deleted him.
I felt like a huge weight had lifted off of my shoulders. I felt like I was ready to start living again.
I focused only on the present and the thing I was doing at that moment. I did not let my mind wander and think about the past because that way I would never be able to start living in the present.
And if you don’t live in the present, you’ll never get rid of your past. During the day was easy because I’d always make sure that I was occupied with something.
But the nights were my mortal enemy. During the night, I would start roaming through the darkest streets of my brain and I would have to listen to the music until the feeling faded away.
Soon, I realized that I was no longer pretending. Slowly but surely, my smile became genuine and my friends and family turned into the happiest people in the world.
I was so proud of myself. The emptiness was filled with joy. My heart was alive again.
I would pinch myself for five seconds to be sure that it was not a dream. I wasn’t dreaming. I was alive again.
