Learning To Love Losing You

On By tiffslife14Leave a comment

It’s Sunday, and I’m tired. Its 1:30 in the morning and I’m here awake, rocking in my hammock outside dazing into my phone screen. I lay here and think about all the valuable and essential factors my heart has taught me over the past year and how much I have grown as a person in all aspects of life. I can say without a doubt that it’s been one hell of a year. I lost, learned, experienced and forgave but I also grew and became stronger as a person.

I lost parts of myself and gained new parts, parts that were wiser, kinder, softer, bolder, and parts that roared in new ways. I found happiness in my own arms, and in the arms of people who settled inside my soul. I discovered friendship. The kind that leaves you smiling at the memory of easy experiences and endless laughter for years to come. I also lost love, the one I thought was forever. Losing a huge part of me too.

And for the very first time I experienced heart break. I experienced someone breaking up with me and loss. Heartbreak is definitely one of those things that you cannot understand or even comprehend until you go through it yourself. I didn’t. I thought I got it, I thought from my high school infatuations that didn’t turn out, from the silly boys I cried over, and all the sad love stories I watched in movies that I could empathize with heartbreak. But those didn’t compare one bit. My heart honestly felt like it broke into a thousand pieces and the strong foundation I thought sat beneath me, shattered too. The hardest part of it for me was that there was no fix, no cure. I couldn’t get rid of the intensity of how I felt. The sadness and feeling of loss wouldn’t go away and I honestly couldn’t see a time that it would. We all deal with heartbreak in different ways. Some throw themselves straight into a new relationship, some into food, some into substances, some into work and some into travel. My heartbreak encouraged me to push my career forward and concentrate on strengthening my personal foundations. To work on yourself is the best thing you can do. Doors and pathways start opening when you put yourself first, when you spend time with yourself. You begin to gain an understanding on life and love that you never thought you would be able to and that…..

 

SOMETIMES YOUR HEART NEEDS MORE TIME TO ACCEPT WHAT YOUR MIND ALREADY KNOWS.

Time is the most important factor in life. There is sometimes never enough of it but it’s also a never ending figure when it comes to healing from something that has caused you grief or pain. Time to heal yourself, to believe in yourself and to love yourself again is not a set amount of time, there is no limit, and it should never be rushed or forced to a certain time frame. Allow yourself to feel the rawness of different emotions, and take as much time as you need to work through them. Because time can’t be fast forward, it can’t be paused and it can be rewound. So take as much of it as you need to heal completely from what has caused you pain.

What I have begun to recognise in myself is that, more often than not, the fear of letting go isn’t really that at all, but a fear of trying again. It’s not really about the person you have left, but all the uncertainty and possible disappointment that now lies on the road ahead. Letting them go seems unthinkable to us, and discovering one again, frightening at best so we hit pause on our lives while we standby indefinitely feeling sorry for ourselves. We withdraw from the world and keep to ourselves completely disinterested of any new potential love interests that come our way. Well, hell no with that. We deserve better. We must come to understand that the people who tear our hearts to pieces do not have the power to put them back together, not even if they wanted to. That only we have the tools, care, and understanding within ourselves to make our heart strong and whole again.

 

In life we often loose ourselves in the course of it all and we sometimes forget to pick ourselves back up again. We then wonder, why isn’t anything ever working out for us? It’s not working out because you aren’t focusing on YOURSELF. You begin to check if the grass is greener on the other side and forget to water your own plants. You begin to wonder why are they happy and why can’t you be happy? It’s all about mindset and how you view your life in your hands. Learning to love yourself is one of the greatest things, hardest too of course but believe me, it is memorable. From learning how to tell yourself every day that you are beautiful, to realizing every single thing you have to offer to the world, to finally feeling comfortable in the silence of your own home. I know that I certainly wouldn’t have achieved the extent of what I have in the last 13 months if it wasn’t for being single, strong and independent. You see, being single is a damn privilege and if you are single use this as an incredible opportunity to get to know yourself inside out, to invest in yourself and in your long term happiness. Please don’t listen so deeply to society and feel like you aren’t complete without a boyfriend or that you aren’t enough because you don’t have one. You are enough and you are completely whole as a human being without one.

YOU ARE YOU, AND THAT IS ENOUGH.

Moving on, and the reality of this phrase in all honestly I don’t think anybody could ever describe to you. What they did in full sentences in order to move on or how they got rid of the feelings that ran through their veins because in all honesty, we simply sum it up with “it takes time.” Which is true. Moving on does not come easy and I feel everyone needs to understand that. You’ll go through days and nights feeling as if you are the absolute tiniest spec on this planet to feeling the happiest, just to come home and cry yourself to sleep. We all look for distractions and we look for things to block the thought of what we are moving on from. Moving on takes time, and that is something you can’t rush.

No matter what happens, there is always something positive that you can take out of every ended relationship.  If it lasted seven years or four months, that other person you connected so deeply with has taught you something. Even if this relationship didn’t go the way that I wanted it too, I’m proud of myself for being able to actually move on. I know now that I’m capable of doing so and when the time is right I’ll find someone again. It’s been said that life begins at the end of your comfort zone.  For most of my teen/adult life, I’ve been comfortable with someone else by my side. Even though it’s hard at times and I honestly do get lonely.  I feel like I can start over now and be ok.  I know I’m going to be ok. The pain will lessen.  The clouds will lift and the sun will shine again. Every day you breathe it’s clear that you’re living your life without that other person.  It really is a powerful thing to know, at least for me.  

MY WORLD ENDED THE DAY HE LEFT, BUT MY LIFE DIDN’T.

The Story So Far

On By tiffslife14Leave a comment

”Sunsets are proof that endings can be beautiful too”

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All my life, I have been ruled by fear, a powerful, underlying emotion that has determined much of my behavior. I was never conscious of this driving force, nor the stranglehold it’s had on me, until a year ago when my greatest fear was realized.

After an emotional roller-coaster ride, my first long-term, 6 and a half year romantic relationship ended. My deepest insecurity was confirmed: I was unlovable. My previous fear of loss and rejection had now become an unbearable reality.

I felt as though I had died, that my world ended, as if all the love I’d known had been ripped out. I felt worthless. My greatest dream to be loved and accepted had perished, the love of my life just walked away 5 months out from our wedding. Gone, in the blink of an eye. Without a second thought, vanished. And nothing was changing his mind. Not even me. It felt like I wasn’t enough even after the sacrifices I made.

I left home, and everything I knew at just 19 years old to follow his career and provide him with endless encouragement and support. I moved every 2 years to places I had never even visited, to places I didn’t know one single soul. To places where I had to start over, find a new job, and make new friends. Every single time we moved. But it was okay, because I had him, we had each other. And that was all that mattered to me.

But…….

In spite of his willingness to let me go that easily after 20 years of friendship and 6 and a half years together, and engaged…. I held onto him, to the hope that this despairing situation would somehow turn around. If only I could win back his heart.

The week following his unexpected departure out of my life, I created a scrapbook, filled with photos and our favourite things. I wanted to present this to him in hopes that he would want me back, want us back together as a family. Mid-construction, I realized that this was a desperate attempt to earn his approval, and I feared that all of my labor would only yield greater rejection and sorrow. Despite me wanting to show him how much he’s worth to me, and that I am worth holding onto, I never finished building that scrapbook.

My close friends simultaneously encouraged me to let go. After all, he had already articulated his belief that we would be better off apart, and I needed to respect his decision. Although surrender seemed impossible at the time, my first milestone toward healing eventually came from self discovery.

To my shameful acknowledgement, my motivation for holding on was actually self-serving. Even after our relationship ended, I wanted to feel loved; I clung to him, because I had become emotionally dependent on him to make me feel loved and secure. I was afraid to lose him, fearful that I would never again or experience true love.

I wanted a solution, I wanted closure and I couldn’t get either. I wasn’t used to feeling this way. I knew I had to let go for this painful feeling to stop.

3 months after, I was still so caught up in the intensity and actually, even 6 months later, I realised that if i didn’t want to feel like this and I couldn’t find a way to get rid of it – I would have to find a way to deal with it. For it to live inside of me but for me to work with it and continue to seek the happiest version of my life out there.

After this experience, and what felt like emotional torture. I went head first into my career and subconsciously my barriers came up. I finished that teaching qualification I never thought I would finish. I enrolled into a new university to start my nursing career. I made new friends, I bought a new car and I started a brand new life on my own. I slept alone, lived alone and I ate alone. I did things independently and that is something I never thought I would be able to do.

I was brave, I was strong. And I had gained my own independence and realised that I can do life on my own. I found happiness within myself and found new exciting things I enjoy. I found myself laughing more, and concentrating on creating the best version of myself. I discovered I am in fact enough and I’m unique and most of all, I am loveable.

People always tell you about how to get over the wrong ones, how you shouldn’t chase the ones who left, how you know within your heart that they don’t deserve you. But they don’t tell you that sometimes you think you know, and you get it completely wrong. They don’t tell you that sometimes you have to get over someone that you don’t hate, that you can’t hate and that you feel you are totally in love with. Well your mind is anyway.

My mind was in love with the idea of what I wanted him to give me. I had totally obsessed over him and what I wanted us to become. So much so that I had created a bubble of illusion that I got completely carried away with and then… bam, reality hit.

Some people will always hold a little space in your heart. And that, I think was what I found the hardest. Ive learnt “What’s meant for you will not pass you. And what passes you is not meant for you.’

So… to anyone that is reading this that is grieving a lost love and feeling like their world has stopped spinning…
I feel you.

I feel every inch of that heart wrenching pain that you’re feeling right now. Or those questions flooding your mind at this very moment. Those silent tears that you cry yourself to sleep. It has been weeks of sleepless nights and loss of appetite. You’ve been having unexpected episodes and withdrawals. You have been carrying all this weight inside your chest and yet you smile like nothing happened.

We may have had different stories and that you may think that the pain you are going through right now isn’t even half of what I’ve been through. But let me tell you this, it doesn’t matter. Because pain is still pain. And for what it’s worth, it still demands to be felt. And it hurts… That feeling of not being able to get up in the morning just because you keep on remembering everything. Or that feeling of numbness and you don’t even know what to feel. You just lie down there contemplating every question inside your head.
“Am I not enough?”
“Am I that easy to leave behind?”
“Am I that hard to love?”
We all have these puzzles scattered everywhere and it feels like every answer to those questions is a part of you that you will never get back.
But you will get better. Believe me​,​ eventually you will. When you learn to accept that broken hearts are a part of life, and that we all go through it. That it is necessary for us to get hurt for us to know the true meaning of love. When you learn to accept that the past relationships you had will be the reasons you will need someday to understand why it never worked out. To know what you’re made of and most especially, to know your worth as a person….

To understand that YOU are in fact ENOUGH.

That acceptance is the only closure you need and it comes with forgiveness. To forgive them and to forgive yourself.

Now that I feel i’m getting through the other side, I can finally stand testamont to knowing after heart break or heart ache, I will be okay.

And for anyone else experiencing heartbreak you will be okay too.
I promise.

 

xx Tiffany