What I learned from my worst breakup
I have an anxious attachment style. I over-analyze, over-think, over-obsess over conversations, choice of words, looks, messages, the frecuency of said messages. I re-read text conversations over and over again thinking about what I could've said differently, I replay conversations in my head. I backtrack when me expressing my feelings or wants makes my partner upset in any way for fear of losing them. I over explain myself when the panic of being misunderstood starts to show its head in an argument and I will talk myself into circles to people that might be commited to misunderstand me. I simply cannot let go.
If that resonates with you, chances are you have an anxious attachment style too. Even if you don't, you're probably going back and forth between r/nocontact and r/breakups and all the other breakup subreddits and websites and YouTube channels and coaches and instagram pages that post those inspirational breakup quotes that make you feel better for 0.5 seconds, like I was. You've been going over and over the breakup and the last conversation you had with your ex and the conversation before that one, and that one fight one and a half years ago in which maybe if you'd done something different or said this instead of that it wouldn't have led to where you are right now, or maybe if you didn't say that one specific thing during the breakup, or during the 3rd time you broke no contact when it seemed that they were receptive but you ruined it yet again in some way, like I was.
Maybe you think about them so much that you think you're going crazy, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. And you hate yourself because you miss them, and you hate yourself because you can't stop.
Maybe you're trying, REALLY trying. You're going to the gym and working extra hard at work and being as social as you can and meeting new people and trying new hobbies and you got a haircut. But you can't stop thinking about them at the gym, and work seems almost impossible to focus on, and being in groups and parties makes you wish they were there and no one you date compares to them, and being alone with your thoughts while doing your hobbies is torture, and you wish you could show them your new haircut; they would've liked it, and they would've said something that made you feel good about yourself.
My last breakup was the worst one I've had. When this person let me know they didn't want to be with me anymore, alarms started going off full blast in my head. My stomach felt like a dark hole and my brain was yelling at me that we were being abandoned by the person we loved the most. I didn't beg (though I did cry and sent about 20 voice notes over explaining myself), and just as nonchalantly as you can do while crying I asked if they were sure, since it seemed the issues we were having could be fixed with a conversation. "We've had enough conversations and nothing changes", they said; "it shouldn't have to be this hard". And they were right.
After staring at my phone for hours hoping for a next message that it was becoming obvious wasn't coming, all my insecurities and fears and anxieties and abandonment issues just engulfed me like a ghostly, sticky darkness that suffocated me. I felt like I couldn't breathe, for days. I ugly cried in the bathroom floor every day for weeks, talked about the realtionship (and cried) to my friends for months going over and over the same things, cried myself to sleep every night, thought about them so much that I feared they were gonna feel it somehow and be even more repelled by me than they (I was sure) already were, and ruin our chances of getting back together with my... sad psychic energy, I guess.
I broke no contact like 5 times with various results from their end. I wrote the letters I never sent and cried to the songs and threw away the gifts and battled with checking their socials or asking the mutual friends about them. I did the therapy, the hobbies, the gym. I celebrated when I was able to eat again. I celebrated the first time I noticed a couple minutes had gone by without me thinking of them. I celebrated when I discovered a new hobby. I celebrated when I felt that I was ready to go on dates again, and then cried myself to sleep after almost all of them.
I want to share here the things I've learned in this process, because I keep seeing the same questions and obsessive thoughts I had: "did I mess up for good?", "I will never love again", "I'll never like someone as much as I liked them", "I messed up a good thing", "I hate myself for still wanting them even though they hurt me", "I can't let go". I understand the self-deprecating feelings and thoughts, the desperation, the fear, the all-consuming anxiety. So maybe this will help. Here's hoping.
1. There's nothing you could've done
There's so much liberation that comes with really incorporating this thought: there's nothing you could've done. And I don't mean there's nothing you could've done to stop the breakup: I mean that there's nothing you could've done BEFORE. If you failed to meet their needs, if you couldn't figure out what was wrong, if you were too anxious about some things, too jealous, too distant or cold to protect yourself, if you were too intense when they were being aloof or viceversa, if you weren't attentive enough or assertive enough or intuitive enough, if you didn't stand up for yourself, if you went Y when you should've gone X: there's nothing you could've done. Why? because you did your best while being the person you were at the time. Maybe you screwed up even if you didn't mean to, maybe you were mean because you felt threatened by something, maybe you let them treat you poorly in order to keep them around: there's nothing you could've done. There's no point in wishing you were a different person back then, because the knowledge you needed to be different came from the breakup, and there's no point in wishing you could've changed earlier because we don't change when we want to, we change when we're ready. We do the best we can by ourselves and others with what we have in the moment, and the reason you notice that you did something wrong is because you're not that person anymore. We learn more from our failures than our successes, and this ass-kicking lesson taught you to be better. And now you are ready to change. You deserve to be free from regret: There's nothing you could've done.
2. You have to forgive yourself
Forgiving yourself is tough. It's something you have to choose every day, every moment, every time you slip into self-destructive thinking patterns whether you mistreated someone or let someone mistreat you. Remember you did the best you could with the person you were, you didn't know any better. You were trying to navigate -and come out of- a difficult situation as unscathed as possible, and in doing so, behaved poorly or allowed someone else to mistreat you. Forgive the version of yourself that tried to keep you safe, thank them, and let them go. You know better now.
3. Feel all the feelings
What you resist, persists. You have to cry, scream, talk, beg to the gods on your knees, pillow punch the pain out of your body. This could take weeks, months, years. You could go three months feeling amazing and then one day it hits you again and it's as if the breakup was the day before (this doesn't mean that you've made no progress by the way). When this happens, you have to let it out again. Shaming yourself out of feeling will never EVER work and it'll only set you back. As they say, you will deal with it now, or you will deal whit it later, but you WILL deal with it. You have to let your feelings out, every single time they appear.
4. You can want them back
Sometimes we feel so much shame about still wanting someone that hurt us or rejected us. After all, they took one good look at us and decided they didn't want us in their life and we STILL want them. Rejection hurts because we're human, and wanting back someone that made us happy is even more human no matter what they did. You can be at peace with both wanting them back and knowing they're not good for you. You can be at peace with wanting them back knowing they don't, that they moved on, that they don't wanna hear from you again. Don't feel shame for wanting, don't push those feelings down, being in denial about this will only hurt you more in the long run. You can want them back and at the same time acknowledge it's not going to happen. I promise there will be a time when you don't want them back anymore, but until that time comes, don't lie to yourself, it will only hurt you more. It's okay if you want them back. There's no shame in loving.
5. The world will get a little bigger everyday
Sometimes we are in so much pain that the world seems unable to fit it in itself. So we wake up every morning and start inhabiting a pain that is so big, so all-consuming, that not even planet Earth is big enough for it. But, as time goes by, the world gets a little bigger day by day. It's so gradual that you don't even notice, but it happens. So one day you're living in a pain that's 5 times the size of the world, but two months later it's only three. One month later, it's two and a half. Four months later they're the same size. Ten months later the pain is still gigantic, but the world is a little bigger, and so on. One day, without you realizing it was happening, your pain will not have shrunk, but the world will have returned to it's original size and can now contain your pain in it again like a house contains a shoe or a cat toy. It's still there, you can still pick it up and focus on it, but the world is just so much bigger now that there's almost no point on wasting time on such a thing. This has been the case for everyone that's gone through a breakup, and it will be the case with you. The world will contain your pain again.
6. You WILL love again
I know how it feels like when people try to refute "I will never love/like/desire someone like that again" with "there's so many people in the world!". Because you don't want the people in the world, you want them specifically. If it's not them, it's no one. But the thing that gets me thinking about this is, how many people on this subreddit feel the same way? "They were the best, most special, most beautiful, most amazing woman/man in the world", how many people can be the most special most awesome EVER? Only one person in the world, by the logic of the claim itself. And unless I dated all of you that means that the world is full of the most beautiful amazing people ever. And THAT means that even though I´m sure they had great qualities, we are able to find those qualities in multiple people, because people aren't special, we MAKE them that way. The most amazing person in the world to you, to me is only your average looking unremarkable ex. People marry people that are, at the time, the most beautiful human in the world, ant then they change -as people do- and get a divorce and remarry, again, the most beautiful human in the world TO THEM, AT THE MOMENT. "But I will never connect with someone the way I did with them" you're absolutely correct, because you will never be the person you were again. You will change, and your needs and wants will change, and when that happens you're gonna look back on the ex you thought was the most amazing person in the world and that relationship is going to feel like the boyfriend/girlfriend you had in primary school: you're so far away from the person you were at that time that the relationship will seem almost comical.
There's also a chance you haven't gone through enough people to realize that the vast majority of us are ok looking, of ok intelligence, and nice enough. Good people are more or less the same, the norm, and then we make them special. How many times did you have a friend that got into a new relationship and couldn't shut up about their new partner, how amazing, kind, sweet, funny and beautiful they were, only to meet them and think they were just a normal, good looking enough, nice enough person? Exactly. We make people special. You will make someone special again. You will love again.
I tried to approach this in the most self-loving way I could, since that's what I am (or was) lacking. I know your ex is maybe an asshole, I know maybe you were an asshole, but I believe that, whatever the circumstances, abandonment gives us an opportunity to redirect the love we were giving someone back to ourselves, and the pain we feel will show us exactly where we need to put it. Sorry for the long post, be gentle with yourself, and I promise you, without a shadow of a doubt: you will be happy again :)