Heartbreaks Kill, or do they?

I’ve had my fair share of heartbreaks. Heartbreaks that taught me new lessons. Heartbreaks that changed me. Heartbreaks that remained in the back of my mind, even as I got to know new people. Heartbreaks that haunted me each night. Heartbreaks that I got over quickly. They are still heartbreaks, even if they don’t last as long as those that came before them or those that will arrive after.

The reason for this is because I categorise heartbreaks in this way:

ii. Facetious heartbreaks – heartbreaks that you think are heartbreaks but aren’t when you look back after a few months.

ii. Friendship heartbreaks – heartbreaks where one out of the two like the other but the feelings aren’t mutual.

iii. Nearly-there heartbreaks – heartbreaks where they could’ve been the one, but things don’t work out and as time goes on, you realise why they weren’t.

iv. Painful heartbreaks – they’re just as real as the others, but these are the most painful ones. The ones that cause the most amount of healing. The ones that you take forward with you for the rest of your life.

One heartbreak isn’t any more real or legitimate than the other. The only difference between the different heartbreaks is the intensity of pain, the duration of moving on, the healing, the change they cause in your life and the lessons they give you.

When you think about it, your heart can break for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t always need to be as a result of losing the one that you love. Sometimes your heart breaks when you lose a friend. Sometimes your heart breaks when someone close to you hurts you. Sometimes your heart breaks when things don’t go the way that you want them to. Sometimes your heart breaks because reality doesn’t coincide with the dreams that you’d created for yourself.

And sometimes your heart breaks when it doesn’t work out with the person you felt you truly loved.

When you experience heartbreak, it’s as real as any other. In the same way that when you believe that you love someone, it feels just as real as the first time, or the second, or the third. That’s why, one heartbreak isn’t more ‘real’ than the other because if there was a rulebook of feelings, every time your heart breaks, you can feel it inside your chest.

It’s up to us which ones we want to categorise as more painful than the others, but it doesn’t mean that the ones before that or the ones after aren’t going to be any more real than the one that you’re experiencing right now.

Often, we think that heartbreaks destroy us completely, but I’ve developed a fresh new perspective on heartbreaks – every time your heart breaks, you truly come alive. I believe this because, time after time, whenever I’ve felt like things are completely falling apart in my life, that’s when they’ve come together. It hasn’t happened once, or twice, but again and again and this has me thinking that perhaps we treat heartbreaks harshly.

Of course, none of us want to get our heart broken. It’s the worst. It causes you pain. You can’t focus on anything else in your life because you’re profoundly consumed by this one experience. It’s not pleasant and I don’t wish it upon anyone. But when you think about it, if we don’t break our hearts then how will we become stronger? How will we understand what is good and bad for us? How will we be able to distinguish between friendship, crush, feelings and love?

And if we take the categories of heartbreaks that I’ve provided above, then we’re bound to get our hearts broken, and broken badly, before we learn whom to trust and whom not to. You see, experiences teach us invaluable lessons and it’s not just the feeling of love that shows us what love is, it is the feeling of hurting that shows us what love should be and shouldn’t be. If our hearts didn’t break, we wouldn’t know that we were denying ourselves of self-love. If our hearts didn’t break, we wouldn’t know that we were settling for something less than what we deserved. If our hearts didn’t break, we wouldn’t know whether we truly loved someone or whether it was merely an infatuation. If our hearts didn’t break, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the love that we want and the love that we deserve and how, sometimes they overlap but often they don’t.

If our hearts didn’t break, we wouldn’t fall apart and then come together again – in the way that we were truly meant to. So, I’d like to think that even though heartbreaks are messy and bitter on your soul, they’re a vital mechanism in the pattern of life to show us what we need and what we should accept. Heartbreaks don’t just make us fall apart; they make us truly come alive.