The Inevitability of a heartbreak

Hi, there

Let’s get one thing out in the open. Heartbreaks are inevitable. In the course of your life you will get your heartbroken and chances are you’ll break someone’s heart too. That’s just how things are. There’s no alternative, there’s no safe path. You can’t anticipate it and you can’t save yourself. You can’t save others either. Oh and just like how love happens more than once, so does heartbreak. To be honest, heartbreaks are far more frequent than love. Now that I’ve sufficiently scared you let’s see what can we do about this inevitable hell that you’ll go through, that you are going through or you already went through.

 

Heartbreaks are of different kinds. It can be due to the loss of a loved one, the breaking of relationship, the death of a pet, even the death of your favorite musician can shatter your heart ( R.I.P Chester). A friendship coming to end, You trying your best and still failing. When heartbreak happens the world loses its color. You end up categorizing people around you in 2 distinct categories. Those who don’t care about you and those who just pity you. And you hate both of them but more than that you hate yourself. You hate yourself because how could you let yourself get hurt like this, how could you lose a relationship you cared for so many years, why didn’t you do more? Congratulations! You have successfully reinforced the feeling of helplessness upon yourself. It’s hard not to blame yourself for all the heartbreak in your life but Captain Picard in Star Trek once said that “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” And I think that pretty much captures it, you can do everything right and still end up with a broken heart because that what loving someone costs. This doesn’t mean that every relationship you make will break your heart, it just means most of them will. However, it also means you have broken your fare share of heart.

The fallacy in avoiding heartbreaks. 

Now if people cause heartbreaks the simple way to avoid them would be to avoid any meaningful and intimate relationships. Sadly it is more of an Ek Taraf Kua Ek Taraf Khai situation. Say you avoid opening up, you avoid any meaningful relationship but then you’re just on your own. Congratulations! You protected your heart from breaking by letting it rot in the walls you created. I can assure you it’s intact, there are no broken pieces it is just rotten because it never experienced the warmth of companionship. You’ll hate your heart and you’ll hate yourself. You don’t even know what love feels like because you were too afraid to get hurt, you let your fear get the best of you and now all you are left with is a rotten heart and regrets of all the love that could’ve been. Now let’s shift the attention to someone other than yourself. Say you aren’t afraid to get hurt but you fear that you’ll end up hurting the people you love, you’ll have to live with the guilt of breaking their heart, it’ll weigh on your conscience like an anchor pulling you down. What you’ll do now? How will you save others from yourself? Honestly, this is such a conceited thought. The idea that you can save others from yourself when most of the time you struggle to even save yourself. Everybody hurts the people they love, that’s just how things are. Parents hurt their children and eventually children hurt them back. Sibling, friends, a lover no matter who they are we all go around hurting people and breaking hearts. You can be as careful as you want to be but sooner or later you’ll hurt the people you love. And it will weigh on your conscience as it should, if you hurt someone and don’t feel even a little bit bad about it then you should probably get yourself checked out. The cost of loving someone is to open yourself to the possibility of hurting them and getting hurt by them.

Embracing Heartbreaks 

Sounds painful, I know. John Green wrote that “Pain demands to be felt” and I agree. See the only way to move past heartbreak is to accept it. To embrace all the pain and hurt. It’ll be painful sure but that’s the only way. If you think you can move past a heartbreak by acting strong, by thinking nothing hurts, by denying the very fact that you are in pain. You are just gonna suppress it, and it may not hurt right now but it’ll come back someday. Some day someone will say something that will just hit that one nerve and you’ll explode. And it’ll be ugly and unpleasant and then you’ll just hate yourself more. Also when you deny the hurt, when you try to devalue it by saying it doesn’t really bother you. In one way or another, you are also devaluing the love that preceded the hurt. On the other hand, if you accept the heartbreak. If you accept that whatever happened was never in your control,  when you accept that it’s not your fault that you got hurt and sometimes it’s not the fault of the other person either. It’s just the way things are at that point in your life. You accept that you got hurt and things have changed and yet the love that preceded the hurt remained the same. With all your might when you accept the hurt, you get a real idea of how strong you really are. The only way to piece back your heart together is to first acknowledge that it is broken. If you keep on pretending everything is fine as your heart shatters, you are just being ignorant towards yourself. Let life hurt you, that’s how you know you’re living. Otherwise, you are merely existing. And once it hurts you, cry! Cry like a damn baby, cry your heart out. Listen to sad songs and realize how suddenly all of them make sense. Read melancholy poetry, Watch a tragedy. Find yourself relating to Hamlet and all the other tragic heroes. You are experiencing one of the most basic feelings in the universe, don’t be ashamed of it. Proclaim it with pride, Let people know that you took a leap of faith and you got hurt. Talk about it, Talk about what you learned from it, Talk about the love that preceded the hurt. Give your heartbreak its rightful place and it’ll eventually stop bothering you.

Now that you know that hurt is inevitable there are two things I would want you to keep in mind. The first one is quite simple and yet very difficult. I want you to be kind. Just that, be kind. Because now you know that everyone is hurting and a simple gesture of kindness by you can make their life a bit easier. Being kind is important for the second thing that I want you to do. I want you to not lose hope. Love is lost, friendships break, and people leave.  Despite all this I want you to hope, I want you to carry the lessons of all the past heartbreaks with you and hope for a better tomorrow. I want you to know that your worth hasn’t changed because of a failed relationship. I want you to believe in love, even if you’ve failed at it a thousand times. Make someone smile, be kind to a stranger, help a friend, catch up with old classmates, water some plants, cook, and fall in love again. Stop being afraid of getting hurt and go have yourself a heartbreak, they aren’t as bad as people make them out to be.

 

Au Revoir