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"Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable." -Wizard of Oz
If heart breaks were uncommon they wouldn't be mentioned so frequently. From music, to poems, to novels, movies, TV shows, the list is endless and it is the one disease that every human suffers from at least once in their lifetime. This is a topic that will undoubtedly come up again and again, but for now I have a few thoughts on the matter.
First of all, sadly, some of you reading this are already recollecting your assumed heart breaks and commiserating along with me. At the ripe old age of 30 I have recently discovered that if you asked me at 29 how many heart breaks I had experienced, I would have thrown out a number somewhere between 10-15. Ask me today and I'll tell you my heart has truthfully been broken only once. The other assumed heart breaks I had experienced were nothing more than what I would refer to today as heart bumps and bruises. Allow me to explain: any time you make yourself vulnerable in the love department, and that relationship ends, whether mutually or by the element of surprise (i.e., "This isn't working out, it's not you it's me," "Umm, honey, who's lipstick is this on your shirt?" or my favorite, "I hate to do this to you after all this time, but I really need to do the right thing and stop screwing you on the side." Let me tell you, there are few things worse than finding out you are the side salad when you assumed you were the best damn filet that fool could get. At 18 I had deemed my heart broken so badly that I have a tattoo to show for it. Even that time was nothing more than my heart getting a TKO in one round with Muhammad Ali, bruised but not broken.
Ok, so now you are probably wondering, what is my definition of a heart break then? I think true heart break varies by person for sure. In my heart bruises, I cried for days, felt sick, thought I would never get over it, either ate or starved my feelings, wanted to disappear, tortured myself with pictures, had nightmares, and even tried fixing the situations out of desperation. (Hindsight has left me SO grateful I didn't have success mending any of those prior situations, ha.) The list goes on, the majority of which were all eventually healed with the help of friends, family, time, and Ben and Jerry. My heartbreak had all of those same symptoms, but there were some variations and certainly some additions, the first one being simply this, at a point in my life where I truly believed I had everything to live for and so much going for me, I wanted to die. The quote I began with by Stephen King really hit home when I read it a month or two after the Break. Let me be clear, I wasn't suicidal, it wasn't a desire to die in a literal sense at all actually. I was in such severe pain, physically, emotionally, and in every other way possible, that I just lost all desire for life. My world was rocked., no other way to describe it. It was like I was Dorothy starting out in Oz and got abruptly teleported to Kansas and suddenly my beautiful world was lacking color and a twister was headed straight for me. If you are one of the people who have experienced something like this then you know exactly what I'm talking about. It took about a week before I could even think or process normal thoughts, and one of the first things I realized was exactly what I'm telling you now, every other heartbreak was just a heartbruise in disguise. It was like a tragic epiphany! "Holy shattered dreams Batman! My heart was still completely in tact until now! Ka Baaaam!"
To Be Continued......
