How A Breakup Got Me On The Right Path

In the summer after my high school graduation--when one phase of my life had ended but the other hadn’t quite begun--I was frozen, mid-leap, hanging in the air, trying to figure out who I was and how the hell I was supposed to know how to be an adult.

That liminal space of uncertainty threatened to swallow me whole. I was 18, clueless, and felt as if I were standing with one foot planted squarely in the past where it was safe, as the other slipped slowly toward a future that scared the hell out of me. I was lost in the turmoil that comes with transitions.

As if that weren’t enough to deal with in the midst of my existential crisis, I also had to endure a break-up that literally changed the trajectory of my life.

His name was David, and he was my boyfriend through most of my senior year. Like most kids in suburbia, we lived in choppy little neighborhoods where cookie-cutter houses lined the shores of the asphalt river that connected us to our homes, our high school, the mall, and McDonald’s after football games on Friday nights.

I was convinced our love was true love--the forever kind that teenage girls dream about. We were a hot item throughout my final year of high school and continued dating into the summer after I graduated. But as summer waned and fall approached, we suddenly found ourselves living in different worlds.

He had become a high school senior, and I was a clueless, clumsy freshman trying to find my place in college. Months before I graduated, I had scrapped plans to go away to attend school with my friends because I was devoted to him. I wanted to be wherever he was so I decided to attend a college in my hometown rather than go away the school I had really wanted to go to.

Unfortunately, the thread that bound us together all summer had begun to fray. His world was moored inside the bubble of high school: high-fives in hallways, Friday night football games, inside jokes, gossip, and passing notes in class.

My world might as well have been on the moon. I spent my days on a college campus, trying to juggle a full-time class load, a job, expenses of living on my own, and a relationship that was slipping away.

Our end came abruptly on a sunny fall afternoon. He had been acting distant all week because he had finally mustered the courage to admit he wanted to break up with me. His small world no longer included me, and my world--by comparison--was a vast, wide-open space that he couldn’t even imagine.

He looked at me with pleading eyes, begging me to let him off the hook, to cut the ties and move on with my life. In retrospect, it’s clear that I should have been the one who wanted to be free of him. He was younger than me and I was beginning to outgrow him. But the truth is I was terrified and unprepared to embrace my new life and its responsibilities. Staying with him meant staying close to my past, where I felt safe.

My new life was too much; I was too afraid to move forward and unable to move backward.

When he finally told me it was over, we were standing at the edge of his driveway next to my car, face to face, unsure what to do next. I was crying and he was frustrated. We were locked into a dance that neither one of us knew how to get out of.

The shock I felt the moment he uttered the word “breakup” must be what the trees feel on the night of the first frost. I felt ambushed and like I had been punched in the gut.

We stood there hurling hurtful words back and forth, defending our choices and blaming each other. Neither one of us wanted to give up any ground. I questioned him relentlessly, and his flim-flam responses only revealed how far he had already drifted away.

“Why? I don’t understand why you want to break up?!?” I cried. And as those words spilled out of my mouth, something so bizarre happened that I still question myself about it to this day.

“Moooooo …”

We stopped talking, eyes wide, mouths hanging open, and quickly turned our heads in unison toward the sound. Standing at the end of his driveway in the middle of the cul-de-sac in the suburbs was a car-sized, brown cow. A living, breathing, cud chewing cow.

It was as if it had dropped out of the sky like a meteor.

“Mooooo …”

A massive cow was literally standing where it had no reason to be, blinking its round, dewy eyes, and looking as confused by its predicament as we were.

The situation was so surreal that I wondered if I were hallucinating from the shock I felt after he admitted he wanted to break up with me.

“Is that real?! Is that really a cow in the street?” I asked.

“What the fuck?” he said. “Yeah, that’s a real cow.”

The surprise we felt was like a pin prick that popped an over-inflated balloon, spilling a bizarre hilarity all over us. We laughed until our ribs hurt. It was all so damned odd. The cow’s interruption was the pause we needed. It snapped us out of the loop we were stuck in.

Then, just as suddenly, the cow turned and ran out of the cul-de-sac toward the main road. It must have walked up quietly while we were locked in our argument.

I later found out a truck pulling a trailer of cows had been in an accident not far from his house, and a couple cows escaped.

Not so surreal after all. But, the memory of that cow has stuck with me as a turning point in my life.

After we stopped laughing at the cow, we were able to back into our separate corners. I pulled myself together long enough to clear my head, grab my things, and drive away. I wish I could say I never looked back, but that would be untrue. It took me a while to get over that day with him and that cow.

Looking back now, I see how our break up that afternoon was an unanticipated fork in the road of my life that ultimately led me to where I am today. My path shifted, and in an instant I had to find a new one.

In the months following the break up, I was lost, depressed, and overwhelmed with heartache and anxiety, so I decided to drop out of all my college classes. I spent the next year working odd jobs, saving money, mourning the loss of my old life, and slowly getting comfortable with my new one. I eventually re-enrolled in college classes, met new friends, and found a steady job. In the meantime, I also found my confidence and my strength. What I know now is that what I needed was a gap year. I’m not sure gap years were a thing when I was going through my funk. I needed a year off to find myself and figure out how to be on my own.

But I couldn’t have figured all that out back then, on my own. I needed a break up and a cow to show me the way.