GETTING OVER THINGS

A Love-Letter to My Breakup (but more importantly, to being alone, and to feeling, and to myself and to ridiculously human courage)

Written in the height of lockdown, at a time when focusing on the breakdown of a relationship should have felt ridiculous; instead it came as a welcome reminder of what humanity and hope mean.

Adrift. Alone. When my relationship of fifteen months (almost my whole uni life) ended, I sat down and started to write these words, in a pointless exercise to try to make sense of how I felt. I was confused and drained: unsurprising. Not unhappy though; something about my confusion seemed almost reassuring. What hit me, as I scrolled through the many, many photos and videos of a shared reality that no longer exists, was how grateful I felt. Not just grateful for the happy moments, but grateful too for the pain, which right now feels almost overpowering; I’m not trying to escape it, I want to embrace how it makes me feel.

What's hard about getting over this relationship is that he was such an integral part of my life, someone who dominated so much of my time. So I can't simply move on or forget, because there are so few things that don't make me feel a connection. At one point, the shelf next to my bed made me cry thinking of him. Over the next few weeks, as I come close to healing, I expect that many more mundane objects will bring me to tears; not just because of the memories we made, but also the memories I’d hoped to make, imagined realities fleetingly brought to life in my head. And it will never not make me sad to think that someone who, for the better part of a year and a half, was so central to my life, can now be someone who agrees that "if we see each other around, of course we'll still say hi."

Right at the start of the pandemic, I talked with a friend about her recent heartbreak. She said she took comfort in the fact that she could still feel this pain even in the middle of everything going on- some strange spectre of normality, humanity even, in an unrecognisable new world. Even as I thought how strange this sounded, I was reminded of a previous breakup, from a pitifully short, overwhelmingly insignificant relationship (or so it seems now; when things ended I still felt stranded, unsure how to be alone). It was the type of thing where I now wonder if it was anything more than the hope of a relationship, unfulfilled-, certainly not worth the tears I cried. He ended things after a half-hearted attempt at some sort of vague long-distance romance. From that moment, I felt a constant, desperate desire to text him. Each time the reply would be polite but not encouraging, a reminder that we were done, that my feelings needed another outlet. Somehow the knowledge of this inevitable shutdown never stopped me trying, and never stopped me feeling almost satisfied with the rush of pain that followed.

It was only many months later, on a solo trip to Italy, returning home slightly drunk one night and giving in to this compulsion, that I realised it had nothing to do with the ex I was texting. It was simply a desire to feel. That's not to say I had no other emotions: I was enjoying my busy gap year; I loved my family and my friends; I was nervous but excited about the impending start of my degree at Cambridge. But there is something comforting in feeling pain. Because pain means we care, it means we have had high points that can be recognized and missed. Right now, the all-consuming, shattering feeling that something significant is lacking in my life is merely proof that I was blessed with having something amazing- not something as long-lasting as I may have hoped, but that's something we accept, isn't it? As humans, with a need to love and to be loved, we know that most of our romantic relationships will end in hurt. Yet that doesn't stop us. Somehow, we find the courage, time and again, to put ourselves out there and to risk the pain, and this incessant cycle of suffering and happiness keeps repeating, no matter what else is going on around us. Within pain, there is always hope, the promise of something better.

So I'm grateful to my now-ex for making our breakup as painless as possible. But I'm also grateful to myself for finding the guts to risk feeling, knowing this pain was almost inevitable. And I know things will get better again, and eventually there will be a time when I can look back to now and realise that I'm not lacking anything, that my pain today is simply a part of who I will be tomorrow.

Perhaps it seems frivolous to become so caught up in something so tiny as a breakup in the middle of a pandemic. But for me, this is a grip on an old reality, a memory of a time when this pain would seem like the most important thing to me. It’s more than that, though. It’s a reminder of what it means to be human, of what it means to feel, when we risk losing our sense of anything more than survival from day to day. So ultimately, I’m grateful to the pain that grounds me, like an anchor in this chaotic sea of fear and restrictions, a reassurance that our lives remain about more than survival, and that we can always look forward to the future. Somehow the ability to feel pain represents hope, and that’s something we all need right now.