When ‘Happily Ever After’ Doesn’t Work Out The Way You Thought It Would

Your eyes tell a story of a girl who used to believe in happily ever afters. A story of a girl who no longer does.

Happily ever after didn’t turn out so happy for you. While your friends were falling in love, you were falling apart. While your friends were getting engaged, you were disengaging from life. While your friends were getting married, you were getting divorced.

You were the one who always had a plan, and now that plan laid shattered at your feet. You stared at the broken pieces, wondering. You wondered, if you had been more careful, could you have turned your plans into something beautiful? You wondered, if you had been more stable, could you have stopped them from shattering? You wondered and you wondered. With every ounce of energy, you wondered.

Sometimes you’d stop wondering and try to pick up the pieces and continue your story. And yet, every time you’d try, you’d get cut on one of your jagged edges, because they no longer fit quite right. With each cut, you lost more of your self-worth—your toxic thoughts entered through each wound, your aversion to self-care allowing the toxicity to fester. Wondering turned to anxiety, and with anxiety came depression.

You learned that depression is a more addictive state that happily ever after because you don’t choose it. It chooses you. It tells you that you are unlovable, unworthy. It blames you for all the shattered pieces that you’ve been unable to put back together. It tells you that this is exactly how your story should end.  It tells you that there isn’t a happily ever after.

But what depression doesn’t want you to know is that its power isn’t infinite. No, in fact it is the very definition of fading. And that’s because it finds its power in how committed you are to sticking with the storyline you planned. It knows that when those plans had to change, it could take advantage of your unwillingness to revise.

Like you, I used to pray for new beginnings. Since I couldn’t restructure the shattered pieces, I thought maybe I could just leave them behind. Maybe I could call them a rough draft. Maybe I could just forget. But that’s the thing: you can never truly start over.

While the broken pieces will never fit back together the way you planned, they can form a plot twist into an even more beautiful ending. So with your plans laying shattered at your feet, stop focusing on the beautiful stories that others are creating around you. Those stories are not yours to tell.

Let your eyes tell a story of a girl who used to believe in happy endings; a story of a girl who, in spite of it all, still does.