| posted on November 9, 2017
A BROKEN heart is something that never truly heals.
Yes, that sounds incredibly deep and meaningful coming from me, but hey, follow me on this one.
When you are a kid, your heart is bursting with happiness and smiles and love and innocence.
As time goes by and you get older, that bright, loving heart can shrink, or fall apart, or start to drain of its colour.
That’s life, unfortunately.
What matters, is how you deal with it.
Heartbreak can change your thinking on life.
It can force you to see toxicity in your life, or make you grateful for those around you.
It can help you learn coping mechanisms, or make you see another side of the human condition.
Heartbreak comes in many forms; be it seeing your parent walk out on your family for another, not seeing a loved one ever again, or saying goodbye to a beloved childhood pet, heartbreak is something everyone experiences in their lifetime.
As horrible as it is, heartbreak is something that helps define who we are.
At some stage in your life, you will lose something, because despite messages from jewellers, nothing is forever.
Part of becoming an adult is learning how to cope with that and maintaining the strength to keep going.
In my twenty-something years of existence, my heart has been broken three times.
The details of each of these three days will forever be etched in my memory.
When I was eight, I lost my nanna to cancer.
I remember pulling up the blinds on my bedroom window and sitting and staring up at the sky, endless tears streaming down my face as I kept asking the sky, why her?
It’s not fair.
When I was 18, I watched a beloved friend lay their father to rest.
I walked beside my friend as they carried their father’s coffin down the path, crying too many tears for me to catch and shaking under the weight of grief and loss.
When I was 20, I turned away from what I thought was going to be my ‘forever.’
My heart wrenched and tore into two as I drove away from him for the final time, caught up in a tornado of devastation and confusion and disbelief, feeling sick to my absolute core for weeks.
These memories will always be with me, no matter how much I try to push them away.
Whether I like it or not, these experiences have helped shape who I am today.
When shaken by this grief, I have learned how to deal with difficult scenarios and have built up my resilience.
I have learned it is okay to let your guard down and let feelings overwhelm you for a moment.
It is okay to shut out the world and just be sad, because it is important to let emotion have an outlet.
It is okay to talk to people or simply sit in silence with them, because simple companionship can be just what you need when you are sad or angry.
I am eternally grateful to the people who supported me during my three heartbreaks, but ultimately, I am grateful to myself.
I let myself deal with these emotions and I worked hard and I continued on with my life.
We only live once, so we can’t let things bog us down.
Book your stay at Heartbreak Hotel and stay for as long as you need, but remember: it is only a hotel, and it is only temporary.
Let yourself grieve or scream or rage or sigh.
But then, keep going.
Get back on that bike of yours, no matter how battered it might be, and keep going.
Even though you might have fallen off while trying to conquer those potholes and dips in the road, just tighten the grip on those handlebars and just keep pedalling.
