Heartbreak Hotel: Rooms Available
Heartbreak is an inspiration for musicians, poets, artists, gossip columnists, girly chats, and locker room banter alike. It’s a daunting subject and far too broad for me to simplify into a single blog post… but you’ve asked Malee so here’s my take.
For the matter of this piece I’m addressing heartbreak in the romantic sense, I will cover other variables in the future. If you have anything in particular you would like me to address please write to me. I’d love to hear from you!
Many years ago I lived in a flat that just radiated the best energy, memories of the years I spent there are still some of my fondest. Within this apartment was a sofa that from first glance looked like any other sofa but I swear it held a magical power. This sofa would wrap around whomever sat on it and offered a sense of safety, which in turn allowed them to open up with a rare vulnerability. It became known as The Heartbreak Sofa. Friends and clients alike would gravitate towards my sofa, curl up, and begin their journey to heal after every kind of heartbreak you could imagine. I became chief tea-brewer and devoted listener and on this sofa we battled through emotional storms and travelled through planes of understanding. I witnessed and personally experienced the raw pain of heartbreak on that sofa so I want to share with you a little of what I learned. My hope is that I can offer you a little of the comfort from The Heartbreak Sofa of legend.
There’s so much advice out there to recover from a broken heart (“get back out there!”, “spring back!”), but it can feel so impossible and you can wonder if or when you’ll ever be ready. Babes, let me tell you, the fact of the matter is that heartbreak is grief. It is why it’s so painful. Of course, depending on the break-up, the grief is intertwined with a bunch of other feelings, yet it’s grief that often defines the desperate pain of the loss. Loss of your ‘what ifs’ your ‘shoulda-woulda-couldas’, loss of the person you loved, the person you were with them, and your attachment to the future you’d envisioned.
They say that grief is just love with nowhere left to go and they say that the only way to deal with grief is to grieve. So, as painful as it can be, grieve.
Be kind to yourself — now is not the time to give the voice in your head free rein to be mean — be your own bestie. Allow yourself time and space to grieve and, as much as it hurts, babes, sit with it. Don’t run from the pain or try to numb it in all the various different ways that feel so appealing in the moment. Do not allow yourself to linger in victimhood either, a place I recently realised I’m more familiar with than I cared to admit. Your power sits behind the responsibility of owning your choices and your part in the relationship. This can feel brutal but we do ourselves a disservice not to acknowledge and avoid the harmful patterns. How else do we evolve from this experience if we don’t recognise what we are responsible for?
Go gently. Listen to your thoughts and feelings, cry, journal, read life-affirming books, listen to music or podcasts that speak to your spirit, seek the comfort of trusted friends and allow yourself to be vulnerable. I like to think of the heart like all our other muscles; to grow they must first be stretched and pushed to their limits — they might break but they heal and grow stronger and so, therefore, will you.
Heal. To heal fully you must not ‘pick the scab’ and by this I mean that as you start to feel lighter, resist the desire to sabotage your progress. This can be anything from looking at your Ex’s social media, messaging them, browsing through dating apps for a new distraction too soon, etc.
Do the work and take your time. It may always be painful to think about a person or relationship we have lost but if you are committed to YOU, you will step into a new version of yourself, with those lessons learned, a renewed sense of your worth and a broader perspective of love. You will value not only the love you receive but the love you share.
Once you have allowed heartbreak its crucial moment of emotional education, your reformed understanding of love (and the gift of loving yourself through your grief) will serve as a direct connection to your soul — the understanding of yourself that is truly priceless.
