When you go through a breakup, it's easy to feel like you're going to die. A breakup literally feels like the end of the goddamn world. Suddenly, nothing feels as good as it did before. You feel like the world is more subdued and disjointed.
Whether that breakup is with a friend, a work husband or wife, or a lover, it sucks. It is devastating. You feel more alone than you ever thought possible. You chastise yourself for letting down your walls once again, only to be brutally sabotaged by heartbreak.
The thing that makes it so hard to get over a breakup is the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies it. It's hard as f*ck to come to terms with the fact that you cannot make someone love you.
After a breakup, you believe you will never be whole again. You told yourself a million times that your best friend or lover would never hurt you. This person was your ride-or-die, your everything, your other half. You'd always have each other's backs. It was 100 percent real.
Until it wasn't anymore.
How could this happen? How did you let yourself get so low? And how did you allow someone to have so much power over you, just when you thought you'd finally mastered the delicate and unbalanced game of not giving a f*ck?
For long hours, days, weeks and even years, you ponder what went wrong and how you ended up in this hole. You despise the hurt, but you also wallow in it.
It's only after you actually meet someone new -- someone who makes you laugh and heals the hurt, someone who makes you stop thinking about your regrets -- that you realize one of the saddest and most beautiful things about life: Everyone is irreplaceable until you replace them.
You have to face the fact that people grow apart.
Any force that isn't positive is toxic to your mental health. This can be a very hard reality to face when you love someone.
One of my best friends and I became vastly different people once we graduated from college. Coming to terms with the fact that our friendship wasn't working anymore was seriously horrible, but people grow apart, and that is the realest sh*t there is. People grow and change all the time. Who you are at one stage of your life can be totally at odds with the person you evolve to become in five years time.
It's human nature. And sure, it would be nice if we could all grow in the same direction and at the same pace, but that would take away from the beautiful, confusing, mystifying journey that is the path from adolescence to adulthood.
You don't have to hate your former friends and lovers. You don't have to curse them. Wish them all the best in life, and move the f*ck on. Friendships rarely last forever, no matter how f*cking BADLY we want them to.
Real strength is having the self-knowledge and wherewithal to let something go that is no longer serving you, not clinging to something because it once meant everything to you.
You will move on even if you don't want to, which is both sucky and liberating.
This may sound kind of harsh, but get it through your head: You will move on from all your breakups. Whether the breakup is with your boyfriend, girlfriend or best friend since childhood, you will get over it.
Why? Because there actually are so many other people in the world who will make you feel good about yourself. There are other people who can do all the same things for you.
It sucks having to leave someone behind. It hurts like hell. But dwelling on it and crying about it for years is not going to make it hurt any less. Why should you have to be miserable when this person obviously doesn't give a sh*t about you?
You are the only person who is guaranteed to be there forever.
The older you get, and the more often people let you down, the more you understand that people really aren't that important. You stop putting so much emphasis on your relationships with others and start really caring about number one: you.
You're the only one who is going to stick around until the bitter end. Don't waste your time letting heartbreak suck your soul from the inside out. People will come and go. And the sad truth is this: People are all the f*cking same.
