Last year same time one of my very close friends and I parted ways. It was an important friendship. I had sleepless nights with the thought that we are no longer on talking terms. A part of me hoped it to be just a phase. I wished like every time, we will work through our differences and will be friends again. Trust me, for days I kept wondering how “this” moment would show itself where I am no longer friends with someone I believed was one of my soul sisters. Each festival that went by reminded me of how with more time the friendship that I thought would magically revive itself, was fading. It really ended.
Early this year another of my very good friends and I had a fall out. I wasn’t over the fact that I had lost a friend already and was on the verge of losing another one. For days I felt a deep sadness because of what was happening to me. I couldn’t communicate what I was feeling to anyone because I feared people telling me that my pain was an over-reaction. Friends fade away. Relationships end. This is life, suck it up. I tried telling myself this. No matter how hard I tried, I still kept feeling the sting again and again. Some days were really smooth, but others were really difficult to wade through.
Amidst all this, Covid hit all of us and life halted in an instant. I was trying to meditate, work, move through my sadness but I couldn’t understand why I felt deeply wounded. I still kept praying and asking the Universe to show me the truth about this consistent feeling of loss. I was led to a quote on Courage by Brene Brown from her book, Rising Strong. I was in luck that I had that book. At the time I didn’t realize this was the Universe talking to me. I read half the book in one seating.
In one of her chapters, “the brave and the brokenhearted” she talks about Rumbling with Love, Belonging, and Heartbreak. She writes, “Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost. The loss of love doesn’t have to be permanent or even tangible. There are two reasons why most of us are slow at acknowledging that what we’re feeling is heartbreak. The first is that we normally associate heartbreak with Romantic Love. This limiting idea keeps us from fully owning our stories. The second reason we don’t acknowledge heartbreak is its association with one of the most difficult emotions in the human experience: grief. If what I am experiencing is heartbreak, then grieving is inevitable.”
When I realized my heart was aching due to a broken friendship, I could understand the root cause of my hurt. We are of the opinion that heartbreak = a relationship ending, an un-reciprocated love, a feeling of not being loved back etc. But never quite look at it from an aspect of extreme loss we experience, hence we fall short of how to move through that pain, because we don’t know how to define the pain. Pain that each of us experience comes in many forms - having lost a significant other, parent's divorce, sexual abuse etc. Every time you let your guards down, got vulnerable in a relationship, you showed immense love. When the relationship breaks, it breaks you into pieces as well. The pain is bound to surface because a part of you lost the love that was shared, that was reciprocated. A feeling of loss so strong that the only way to move through it is by bringing it to the surface.
If the loss of love, romantic or not is, Heartbreak, then coming face to face with that heartbreak is Grief. We cannot deal with a broken heart by just “moving on”. We have to recognize the pain, bring it to the surface and live with it in order to fully release it. Grieving after a heartbreak is what puts us on the path to new beginnings. Till the time I did not grieve the loss of my lost friendship, the times we spent together, the shared memories, I couldn’t move through it fully.
Our cultures are based on getting over with discomfort quickly. So even while we feel the need to grieve deeply, we are led to believe that we need to get over it soon. We cannot spend too much time to move on. But I can assure you it doesn’t work. Closing the loop on what once was can be challenging. Never let anyone tell you to move on too fast or to just “get over it”. Take as much time as you need to mend your heart before deciding that you have completely moved on.
Did you know hearts are never too big to mend, too small to rebound or too tired to love again? On that note, please know you will mend your broken heart and reach a peaceful resolution. Hope all of us find the root cause of our pain and move through it with ease and grace.
Love,
Charvee!
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