When Everything Falls Apart

Sometimes life has a strange and cruel way of teaching us lessons. Not just lessons about life, but lessons about ourselves. People pull away, fade away, go away and we are left to pick up the pieces. This is the time in which we will find out the most about ourselves.

So here you are with a broken heart and a broken spirit. You’ve lost everything that defined you. You look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person staring back at you with tired, drooping eyes that can’t seem to un-see the things that gave you scars and brought you to your knees.

You get up every morning with emptiness, with no reason to start your day. You run away. You run away from the hurt, away from the dreams, away from the dreary depths of your bedroom that is too haunted by memories to feel like home.

You try but fail to socialize. Looking at your friends and family and wondering what it is like to want life. You see their smiles, hear their laughter, feel their joy and want so desperately to join in, only to be abruptly stopped by the screaming agony in your heart.

You show up on the doorsteps of loved ones, who watch you cry and tell you that you don’t deserve this. You see their vulnerable, helpless eyes looking at you with fear and confusion. They wonder what happened to the strong person they once admired. But they are an ear to you. They will listen, if not out of desire, out of obligation as family. Maybe if you project some of this pain onto them and say it out loud, it will stop terrorizing your soul and you can go to bed with a dry pillow tonight. Maybe if they see the unfiltered hurt in your eyes, they’ll say something that will heal you.

Time goes on and the hurt transcends into numbness. It’s not always a fiery pain like it used to be. Now it’s a subtle misery. A cynical way of life in which you’ve forced yourself to succumb to. There are still tears and nightmares that you wish would subside but more often than not you learn to live as a shrewdly broken person. You no longer ooze and bleed, but the emptiness discretely looms over you in everything that you do.

Food doesn’t taste the same, cities don’t give you the excitement that they used to, new clothes don’t look right on your body. Life loses its luster for you, and you start losing hope that you will ever find a reason to smile again. You begin to lose faith that life will ever genuinely feel happy again.

Because there is no one to share it with. You try and enjoy life on your own after sharing happiness with a partner for so long and it’s impossible now. Life becomes miserable. Life becomes a chore.

And in this life as a broken person, you learn. You learn about yourself in ways that would never be possible otherwise. You learn about the nature of your character and whether or not you are spiteful or forgiving. You learn about your ability to cope. You learn about the way your body handles stress.

You see the strength you possess. You see your ability to feel. You discover the level in which you allow yourself to really experience pain and reduce yourself to ash, because believe it or not, there is strength in vulnerability.

You essentially have to start over. You have to re-establish yourself. You no longer have to adhere to the wants and desires of someone else. Within this broken state, you can create the person that you’ve always wanted to be without being limited by the standards of another person. Embrace every quirk and flaunt every facet of your personality that you were too afraid to display before. Let yourself be the kind of beautiful that you’ve always wanted to be. And through letting these traits shine, you will be noticed by different people, the kind of people that you’ve always wanted to know.

Within this process of re-emergence, something will change in you. You will be altered in an inexplicable way. I once remember reading that the hardest part about heartbreak is not being able to remember the person you were before. And I agree with this. You will not be the person who you were before, but that is not a bad thing. You will be a transformed person, a wiser person and a person who knows themselves a hell of a lot better than most people.

Falling apart is undoubtedly a terrifying experience. It’s emotionally draining, physically tiring and overall miserable. But it’s worth it. Every teardrop you let fall down your cheeks, every nightmare you endured, every sting of pain you let yourself feel is worth it. Because after living life as a broken person, you get to start over. And this time, you’re going into life so much wiser than before.

Life will be beautiful again, I can promise you that. And you will get to see life through an amazing lens, with eyes that have seen both hardships and ecstasy. Getting a chance to start over will be the best thing that has ever happened to you.