The Future Belongs To The Brokenhearted

There are many quotes about who the future belongs to. The many quotes tend to involve people who are daring and outspoken – people who walk into a room with an air of confidence about them that causes heads to turn. But I’ve never been a person, a girl, and now a woman, who causes heads to turn. I slip in and out quietly in places, and I often go unnoticed. I never imagined in my younger years that I would still be so forgettable to the people I cross paths with. Alas, here I am. Forgettable. Forgettable and with a broken heart from too many of life’s pains.

But I do not think I am alone. One of the greatest things about being so invisible in the world around you and rarely making a sound, is that you get to watch people, you get to see who they really are. Many people are walking around with great pain, great sorrow in their hearts often caused by the hands of others – others they trusted too much, too quickly. Others they expected to look after the imperfect heart they gave away. Still others whose hearts are broken because they’ve never even given it away at all – that is heartbreak too.

The sadness of heartbreak is like no other. It consumes your entire being – your thoughts, your words, your actions; it consumes everything. And sometimes I wonder if we truly learn to overcome heartbreak, if we ever pick up the pieces; or we simply learn to go on with holes in our heart and broken pieces all around us. The brokenness becomes something we often hide, and we tell ourselves it’s the bravest of us who learn to hide it well. Some of us, however, have little choice other than wearing our brokenness as our armor because it is all that we have for protection.

And maybe that is why no one wants to look at us in a crowd – no one wants to look at something broken. Because they may see something terrifying, like their true reflection; the mirror they often avoid. The past often feels like a dream until it feels like a nightmare where we remember the battles we have won and lost; the battles that still haunt us. I know that I am often haunted by mine. And sometimes, maybe far too often, I let them steal my presence. The pain is not an addiction, it’s just that it never seems to go away. And every time I think it has, my heart gets broken some more from those wishful thoughts.

Yet I still get up every morning however hard the night was, I still get up because I am here. I am here. And I can hope and I can believe, even with a heart that has become so fragile, with so many pieces chipped away from it, and with so much loss and disappointment. It gives me the courage to say that I think I can still love, maybe even greatly, maybe even in a way that will eventually break my heart some more. But I can still love. And for me that is enough to whisper quietly to myself and to those who forget me easily: The future belongs to the brokenhearted.