When Life Brings You Heartbreak and Hope

*I've written this over the last couple months, it's different moments of my growth in time. I started writing the beginning of it in early August and ended it just yesterday.  While I’m in a different place since I started, I find it an important part of the journey.

I haven't written in a long time. I needed a sabbatical. I've been growing, thriving, blooming into a person that is more myself than I have ever been. 

The freest I've ever felt. 

I fell in love for the first time. I got my heart broken, or maybe broke my own heart. 

I've been living with an ache inside of me where everything hurts. What do you do when what brought color to your life is gone, and you only remember gray before?

When your best friend is the person you can no longer go to?

At the same time, this is different from how I used to be.

This is not abandonment trauma, I am stable, I am okay. I am safe inside and outside of my own body.

This is the first time I am just heartbroken. I never knew how much pain this type of love could cause. 

While at the same time, I don't regret a moment of what is now causing me all of this pain. 

In the morning, I wake up in a living nightmare of what happened. Realizing all over again what I've lost. When you go to send the good morning text you no longer can send. When you're waiting for the morning routine you're used to.

When it's late at night and you can't call the one person who used to answer. 

You lose so much and on top of that, there's the loss of hope you found where you could be happier than you ever knew you could be.

And yet… now you know you're capable of the pinnacle of happiness you didn't know you could reach. A level of happiness you thought was withheld from you because you didn't deserve it.

The grief is intense. I've been through every stage maybe 24 times per day. And the ups and downs are constant. One moment I'm in denial and bargaining, the next I'm angry and the next I have peace in acceptance. I think the depression part is present for quite a while. 

The pain is unbearable. Everything hurts. And there is no way but through. And you don't know when it won't feel this bad, ever again. How it possibly couldn't feel this bad someday. 

You would do anything to make it work, but there's nothing in your circle of control. It's in the other person's hands, it's in fate's hands. What a terrifying truth, and what a relief. It's out of my hands.

Still, everything is a reminder to you of your person. 

Love might be the most foolish thing we fall into. And yet the most life-changing. 

I am a new person.

The last 8 years have been a lot of pain, to say the least. This last year of my life has hands down been my happiest, discovering love. 

For once in my life, I feel safe enough to make decisions without fear of losing everything. I trust myself. I know logically I am safe in my own body. In my own world. I never thought I would use the word "safe" in a vocabulary describing myself. 

I have grown more than ever. When I once could not get myself to eat without my life revolving around the intrusive voices following, food is no longer a thought in my head. 

When I once thought my brain  wasn't designed for this world nor was I meant to be a part of it, I have hope for my life. I can go on adventures. I moved to California! Maybe to run from the darkness of my past, maybe to chase the prospect of fullness. Maybe I just found a cool job and apartment. 

What do I know now? 

"The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." ~Indigo Girls

If I've learned nothing else from loving, it's words a wise woman used to tell me all the time: "Love is never wasted. Love all the same". 

One of the most important things I've learned in life is to trust myself.

Every time a trauma response is triggered inside me, I learn something new. I've learned to let it inform me, even if it renders me weak and scared. 

When I make decisions that actively hurt me, I look deeper now. I let myself sit through the shame and pain until I'm ready to look at it without judgment, and I learn what it was about.

3,000 miles across the country, and different triggers cause the same reactions. These maladaptive coping mechanisms that may have served one purpose have become my natural reaction to all triggers. And now I know that. I can look at it with compassion and love myself past the shame, and understand the scared girl who made the old self-preserving decision. 

While I need to trust my gut when I make life decisions, I also need to trust that my body had a reason to respond in a way it thought it was protecting me. My body and I, we need to trust each other. When my body knows I trust it and its intentions to protect me from danger physically, physiologically, and mentally, it can trust me to tell it I'm safe now. I can nurture instead of punish myself. 

How my life has changed since I've introduced compassion into it. It's as though shame was my biggest enemy, when I thought that it was me. 

Do I feel fuller and richer? Yes… I'm living in Sunny California. 

I'm working a dream job. 

It's the first time I walked into a room and felt like I belonged. Who knew. Never have I ever believed there was a possibility of a place in this world for me. 

While demons follow, I followed my truth, and it took me here. It invited newness into my life. It also invited back a relationship I had previously let go of, that the loss wasn't worth the pain of losing.

Life turns out to be full of compromises. Every decision we make is a compromise of another. Every compromise I make makes me truer to myself and honors my integrity. All my mistakes inform me of where I am compared to where my truth is. Not for shame, for growth.

I know myself, and to follow what I know is the truest I could ever be to myself and to God.

We follow ourselves wherever we go, and our trauma lives in our bodies. I'm going to find where that fits in a new environment. I'm going to grow despite my body thinking I'll always be stuck in the moments in time that my life froze. 

I've been more myself than ever, and I never knew who that was until I started listening to her. 

Some say love, it is a river

That drowns the tender reed

Some say love, it is a razor

That leaves your soul to bleed

Some say love, it is a hunger

An endless aching need

I say love, it is a flower

And you, it's only seed

~The Rose, Bette Middler~