Dedicated to you: one of the strongest women I know, and always an inspiration!
After a break up, love seems to be plastered all over the place. Love songs become the theme of every radio station, distant happy memories resurface at every hour of the day, all your closest friends have recently found love or fallen deeper in love, and your horoscope keeps telling you how delirious you are.
This is just the nature of one’s new single reality. Our world is sickly obsessed with love (this blog = case and point). You can’t flip a page, turn a corner, or change a channel without a bombardment of L-O-V-E. My advice: you might as well get used to it now, because it’s not going anywhere - despite your heartache.
While break ups can be devastating, we all manage to get through them. After you’ve cried your eyes out, eaten an entire tub of ice cream (okay, maybe two or three), and successfully rebounded with that cute guy from the gym it’s time to get back to the love obsessed real world.
The purpose of this article isn’t to give you some magical formula to make break ups easier (though I’d suggest switching the ice cream to tequila). Instead, I’m writing with a sincere warning: just when you think you’re okay the universe is going to throw you a sucks-to-be-you bone! When you least suspect it the most trivial and mundane experience will bring you to your knees and will unleash “the ugly cry”.
Let’s take a minute to look at a completely hypothetical example of what I like to call: ‘Seriously? I’m crying over THIS?’
A sweet and sophisticated lady named Lilly had recently come out of a crippling break up with a standard, but adored, loser. Lilly had the same old story, “I thought it was love. I thought he was the one. I gave myself to him… and then he turned out to be a psycho.”
On day one of the break up, Lilly found herself in disbelief. She spent all day in bed with a bottle of wine, Ben Harper’s “Walk Away” playing on repeat, and her 5 cats. On day two, Lilly remained in bed (but this was more so to do with her hangover than her heartache.) Day three to five, Lilly spent bashing him to anyone who would listen. Day six to eight, she demolished any and every tangible memory of the relationship. Day nine to twelve, she began to stabilize (and finally turned off Ben Harper), and early into the second week she felt like she was finally back to herself. As the weeks went on the pain decreased dramatically. There were even times when Lilly thought to herself, ‘this is actually kind of easy.’ She had fully accepted the relationship and the break up for what they were, and she had finally moved on. Lilly was, once again, happy!
Then all of a sudden: BAM, it hit her smack in the face………………….
It was that barbecue sauce they had spent weeks trying to find. They had gone to twelve different grocery stores. They even spent a weekend out of town just so they would have an excuse to hit grocery stores along the way. They had never actually found it. It had been like this unattainable dream of barbeque utopia. The memories flooded Lilly’s head as quickly as her tears flooded the isle. It had happened. She had let her guard down for one second and it had happened, and now the ugly cry was happening (to her and to everyone walking down isle eight).
Stay resilient!
