“I don’t know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other part of my body is broken too.”~Terri Guillemets

There is a large part of the population that subscribes to the notion that “it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”

I call BULLSHIT.

Actually, I call COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT.

I mean seriously? Do people really believe this?

When you are in the throes of having had your world railroaded by some jackass that “just wanted to sleep around” instead of having to adult, does this notion bring you comfort?

When someone you believe you knew becomes someone so foreign to you that you can’t even fathom WTF happened to create such a 180 degree turnabout, are you still glad that you got to love the real/fake them?

Do you tell yourself, “Well, at least I got to experience all that love n stuff.”

Hell no. You curse them to hell and back again and then back and forth 20 more times. We don’t think about the lesson the heartbreak has taught us or how we are going to spring forward into a “new and more wonderful you.”

We cry. We scream. We curse. We tell them where to stick it. We try to understand the un-understandable. We beg for God to erase the memories (good and bad) that are flooding our memory banks and making it hard for us to function as productive humans. We question ourselves. We question the other person. We blame anyone and everyone (including ourselves) that we can possibly think to put blame on. We feel weak. We feel inadequate. We lean into the feelings even when they bring us to our knees in the shower. We lean into all the people that love us that want to hold us up. We fall. We get up. We repeat the fall/get up process 26,783,470 times. We slip into a pit of quicksand with a never ending reel of negativity circling through our brains. We fake like we are ok when we know good and damn well that we are not. We close ourselves off to the outside world so that people don’t see our weakness. We try to hide the new gashes that the failed love has caused to our hearts/minds/souls. We try to protect ourselves unable to remember how exactly to do that.

We are not thankful for the thing that broke us down, the thing that made us stumble, the thing that crushed us, the thing that shattered our world, the thing that crushed our spirit…

I am not thankful for the love that I just lost.

I want back the person that I was before I encountered that love. I want that woman who was happy, fulfilled, whole, floating on air, excited about life. And, yes, I would trade all the wonderful moments I experienced in this love to get her back. This new person I am right now is foreign to me, as foreign as the person I loved that I believed I knew. I am not thankful to have loved and lost, I would have rather never loved at all.

To love, to truly love another person, we open our hearts/minds/souls. We expend an incredible amount of energy to build something with another person. We create shared hopes and dreams. We make sacrifices to accommodate them into our worlds. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable with another person which in turn gives them the power to not live up to their end of the bargain. We know all this but we do it anyways because we want to believe that what we feel is real and powerful and won’t be taken for granted. But sometimes it is taken for granted… Sometimes it is not cherished… Sometimes it is not raised up in the glory that it should be…

The pain from love lost is, at times, unbearable.

I can honestly say that I am a lucky person because I have truly surrounded myself with such a fierce conglomerate of people that are there at the drop of a dime to remind me of who I am, lift me up, push me forward, make sure I keep moving even when all I want to do is lay down. They refuse to take no for an answer when I want to be left alone. They show up to my door. They lay silently in my bed simply holding my leg as I cry myself to sleep. They show up and force me to eat donuts and pizza and drink wine. They join in on cursing the jerk that put me in the position to feel this way. They tell me all the things that I should be able to hear to try to take away the pain even though it does not. They recount every good quality they can see in me. They remind me of all the things I have endured to make it to this moment in my life. They remind me that I have been torn down before and I rebuilt myself, bigger and better.

But sometimes… sometimes I just can’t hear it… The pain is too fresh, it is too loud.

You see, I know who I am. I know what I have lived through. I know what I have endured to become the woman I am today. I know that everything that has happened to me in my life has created the person that I am today. Every lost love that etched its hurt on my soul created this woman that I am now, this strong incredibly amazing woman.

But… I can’t see her right now. She is hidden under a blanket of hurt and pain and sorrow and grief. So much grief…

Even though those past experiences, specifically the lost loves, built this insanely determined, driven woman, I am not thankful that I loved and lost. I am thankful for the strength, for the growth, for the journey… But, I am not thankful to have loved any single one of those people that caused me pain by somehow trampling on my heart. If I could erase them without losing the growth, I would.

I know that some would disagree with me; I can own that my pain may cloud my view right now but this is my truth as I see it in this moment.

I know I will survive this setback and I can only hope that I will also thrive in the face of this pain. I have survived so much worse but, unfortunately, that does not lessen the pain that has currently grabbed ahold of my heart.

Now I wait for “time.”

Because time heals all…

Tick. Tock.

Tick tock goes the clock.

I keep waiting.

Watching the minute hand tick on by as tears trickle down my already soaked face.

I try to believe the adage that ‘time heals all.’ But again, I call BULLSHIT.

Time doesn’t heal all. Time dulls the pain. Time becomes the proverbial band aid that hides the pain. Time helps us to stand back up, dust ourselves off, and begin to function once again.

Time removes the rawness of the pain, lessens the sting, let’s us take a step back and look at it differently. That step back unclouded by the anguish is what gives us the new perspective, allows the growth and change to set in. THAT is what time does.

You see, the pain lives forever inside of us. We don’t always remember it, we don’t always feel it, we don’t always cry because of it, but it is ALWAYS there. Every once and a while something will happen that loosens the grip of the band aid and allows some of that pain to escape out and that is our reminder that the pain continues to live on within us, the pain is a continuous part of our story…

Pain is part of this chapter of my life right now but pain is NOT my story. Loss is NOT my story. Betrayal is NOT my story. Heartbreak is NOT my story.

I may not be able to feel it at this very moment but…
Strength IS my story.
Perseverance IS my story.
Determination IS my story.
Overcoming IS my story.
Confidence IS my story.
Fearlessness IS my story.
Growth IS my story.
Love IS my story.

I may be down but I am not out.

I just need a hot tiny minute to catch my breath and remember that I’m still alive and kicking…

“When those we love betray our trust,
We find the depth of human pain;
Oh, let me rise above these hurts
Until the sun shines, once again!”
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, “My Prayer”