No one is a stranger to heartbreak. It eventually catches up to everyone, one way or another. A brutal break up with the guy you thought was ‘the one’, the separating of a friendship, the death of a beloved family pet. It comes in every shape and size, a gentle tug on your heart to a complete crushing and tearing blow.
I’ve been grappling with trying to make sense of it all. Can there be multiple breaks by different events and different people at once? How do I recover from this, how do I manage to hold together the pieces of my heart? The brutal and beautiful truth that life is going to be heartbreak, over and over and over again, often without warning and without much reason either.
I remember being a teenager, and the first boy I ever loved broke my heart. It was a toxic and unhealthy relationship, I didn’t know that then, I didn’t know that love wasn’t also supposed to be suffering. I didn’t often cry and rage though. From that first relationship and heartbreak onwards I would keep my emotions to myself. I would cry a bit, sure. Usually alone, at night when there was no one else around me. I would talk to my friends and tell them the drama. But I kept most of the pain hidden away inside of me and I didn’t understand how to process emotions. I eventually leaned towards unhealthy coping mechanisms, which only made everything to follow even harder.
My dad was in the hospital for the majority of the year 2012, as I was entering my freshman year of high school and starting to explore what freedom was. I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t let my new friends at school know that my dad was potentially dying. I kept most of it inside, I didn’t know how to express it nor did I want anyone to see me suffer. I still remember my mom sitting my brother and I down at the kitchen table and telling us that our dad might die. They were both crying, and I was just there. Frozen, not letting the emotions penetrate through the layers I had built around me. I then felt that it was my job to be the “strong one”, the one that was always there and steadfast.
When I was a junior in college my boyfriend at the time had broken up with me, and I still don’t blame him for doing so. I was quite the chaotic mess at the time. I never learned how to properly express my feelings and would keep them in until they broke out. I remember actually crying at that time though, of sitting with my roommate and crying at how I felt. Sitting with my mom and asking her why does it hurt so much. It was like I had allowed myself for the first time to properly experience what a heartbreak feels like and not just sweep it under the rug. Oddly enough, I look back at those times fondly as it was one of the first times I allowed myself to express the entirety of what I was feeling inside.
I thought I had matured by the time my grandma died. It was 3 days before my 22nd birthday, and I grieved- at least I thought I did. I cried, and I cried some more. I let my boyfriend hold me and see me crying in my grief of losing her. I thought about all the moments that she would miss out on in my life and of all the memories I shared with her. After a few weeks I shut it down though. I thought I had given it enough time, let’s put these feelings to the back now.
I want to clarify that I’ve always been a crier. I cry when I’m angry, I cry when I’m arguing, I cry at the sad commercial on TV. It was never more than that though, and I could rarely verbalize why I was crying other than the fact I was experiencing emotions I didn’t know what to do with.
At this point my heart had many little cracks in it. Some big, some smaller ones from the loss of my dog and losing touch with friends. It continued like that for years, I would try to “properly” express an emotion and I’d then bury it. Oftentimes, these suppressed emotions would come flying to the surface when I got drunk. It was a main factor in why I got sober. I wasn’t able to deal with the tide of crushing emotions the next day. My barriers had been broken, the emotions had rushed in and I would drown in them until I got the floodgates back up.
That all changed in 2022 though when I tried to come off of lexapro. What I never realized until that point was that not only did I not know how to handle emotions, I hadn’t actually fully felt the enormity and complexity of my emotions since I was 12 years old when I first got on the medication. To say I was a complete mess would be an understatement. To say I knew how to handle it would be a bald faced lie. I was absolutely and completely crushed by it all. My boyfriend helped the most that he could. I ended up moving back in with my parents hours away because I could not crawl out of the hole I was in. My heartbreak, all the little cuts and knicks and stabs my heart had taken over the course of the previous decade, consumed me until I didn’t know up from down.
I spent the next 3 years trying to understand, to unlearn ingrained ways of being. I had a therapist tell me I needed help with simply putting words to the emotion I was feeling, to treat myself like a toddler just learning how to express themselves for the first time in their life. It was embarrassing at points, downright infuriating sometimes. I had gotten back on lexapro to be able to function in my life again, I needed to be able to hold a job and not spend my days legitimately crying in despair and pain.
I eventually came to the conclusion that I needed to once and for all be done with medications. They’d caused me enough harm, they blunted my heartache and then subsequently quadrupled it dozens of times and if I was ever going to be able to be in harmony with myself I needed to do it without a mind altering substance.
It was hell, pure and unimaginable fear and panic that I could barely cope with. Now, a good majority of that at first was the actual withdrawal from the medication itself. Most traditional doctors believe there are little to no side effects from discontinuing psychiatric medications, and it’s one of the most damaging and harmful lies to ever be told to people trying to improve their mental health. I eventually did it though, but the lasting effects are still at play.
That leaves me in my current position. The grief I’ve tried to cope with, learning that I can trust myself and my feelings. How to manage my emotions to not have them explode out of me, how to function through them in the first place. It’s taken years, years to deal with the decades worth of beatings my heart has taken. The hardest truth for me to accept is that a lot of it was and is my fault. Maybe not totally, maybe not completely, but I am the keeper of my own emotions so there isn’t blame I can lay at anyone else’s feet for how I deal with them.
The only path forward is to feel them. To allow myself to cry, to get mad, to be happy and to physically express myself again. To not keep everything tightly trapped inside myself waiting for it to explode. To trust myself, to trust that no matter what emotions come my way I am in fact able to handle them. It’s a slow going process, with lots of road bumps and roundabouts. I’m not perfect, I still lash out in moments of extreme feeling. I still don’t trust myself wholly.
But I trust myself more than I ever have before, and that counts for something. I’m slowly filling in the cracks that have formed in my heart and putting it back together. It might never be whole again, I’ll always carry parts of my losses with me. I’m learning to love my little heart though, and to be thankful it’s been there for me this whole time.