You ARE Resilient.

I’m getting “Resilience” and its dictionary definition tattooed on my forearm Saturday; A snippet of text straight from the dictionary and etched into my forearm as a constant reminder in case for one second that I forget who I am.

Why?

The short answer: Because I’m young & can do whatever I want.

That may sound defiant to you. You could be rolling your eyes at me saying “Yeah, but what about when you’re 80? Are you still going to like it then?”
Well, when I’m 80, I’ll be lucky to have made it there. When I’m 80, I’ll look back on my life and realize that I’m one hell of a fighter and I hope you can all say the same. I’ll remember that we are not defined by one single hardship, but instead by how we overcome the collective sum of all of them in our lifetime.

The time he broke your heart, the time someone was taken too soon, the time someone dared to make you second guess your value, the time luck wasn’t on your side, the time you felt alone, the time the world seemed just too heavy: NONE of those moments define who you are.

You are worth more than the time he told you he didn’t love you anymore.
You are worth more than the emptiness that creeps up on you.
You are worth more than the weight of all that negativity.
You are worth more than that broken heart.
Let it go.

You may be broken in this moment, but you are NOT a broken person & don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise.

You ARE the dictionary definition of resilient. You may lose sight of that sometimes, but don’t you dare forget it.

Things I KNOW for Sure.

The human brain is such a complicated thing. It’s amazing what it will do to protect your well-being; what it will do to keep you sane. If only you had been the same.

Even now, I find myself omitting details. Blurring the lines of the hurtful things he said and trying to look for the fine print that might not even be there. Though there is no blurring the bold statements, none of it adds up. Every hurtful thing he said, though permanent, was laced with such confusion. The person I had known for 2 years wouldn’t say all those hurtful things to me. He just wouldn’t. But maybe I didn’t know him at all. & maybe that’s just my brain trying to protect whats left of my heart.

Things I KNOW he said:
1. I don’t love you anymore.
2. It was starting to feel like we were just friends
3. I used to get excited to come see you, I don’t anymore.
4. I don’t want to be with you anymore.
5. I feel like the relationship ran its course.
6. I don’t see marriage & kids with you, maybe not with anyone.
7. I find myself looking at other girls.
8. We didn’t talk for 4 days & I was fine.
9. I felt like I was just going through the motions.
10. I don’t feel the same anymore.

ALL 10 of these statements are complete and total opposites to what he led me to believe not even a week prior. They are foreign to me.
Maybe everything else he said in between was just to soften the blow.
10 big blows to the chest.
Even now, typing them out & letting myself re-read them, I feel sick.
When did he become this person? Did I miss something? How could I miss something so big?

I will forever miss the person he was before the one night that everything changed.

I wish I could say that any of what happened a week ago made sense to me, or to anyone else for that matter. I wish I could could say that we fought all the time, or the laughter stopped, that there was someone else, or that everyone knew we were wrong for each other. I WISH. It might make it a little easier to swallow if there were people to rally with who were waiting until this exact moment to tell me all the signs they saw. I wish I could say that I appreciate the silence because we had spent X amount of time doing nothing but screaming at each other. But, none of that would be true. It just wouldn’t be.

Everyone who has found out the the relationship ended, spends 20 minutes trying to pick their jaws up off the floor, repeating “wait.. what?”. I could wrap myself in a cocoon of all the “I thought they were the real deal!”‘s or “you should see the way he looks at you” from those within an arms length of our relationship. I could build a house of all the sentiments he brought to my work not even 2 MONTHS ago (flowers, treats, notes..), plans we made for a future that now won’t ever come.

I’m not a naive girl. I’m quite possibly the most cynical person alive. I wouldn’t fabricate a relationship in my head because its easier than being alone. I’m not crazy. I didn’t ignore the signs or brush our issues under the rug because it was easier than being wrong. I couldn’t have been THIS wrong about him. When I say that this relationship ending has literally knocked the wind out of me, I mean it; ran right into a brick wall at full speed kind of breathless.

The clearest analogy I can make of the situation is this: The relationship was like curling up inside a good book. Your favorite book. The warm comfort of a book you could lose yourself in. Just when you think you’re getting into the middle, the part where all the biggest and best changes happen, suddenly the book is closed. The story is just over, but I can’t let go of the characters. I can’t stop trying to figure out how it all would have worked out had the pages not been torn out & the book held closed. 

This feeling is UNLIKE anything else I’ve ever felt before. I’ve had breakups. I’ve had broken hearts. I’ve been sad before. None of those words fit inside this situation. People try to relate. They try to give you examples of their lives, words of advice or try to help you analyze. But their situations don’t fit inside this. Everyone is trying to stuff their experiences inside mine but it just doesn’t move the same.

The only honest thing I know right now is that I don’t know where to go from here & maybe I never will.

I hope that some day I wake up & I’m not trying to figure it out anymore.

I hope that some day I wake up & I’m not trying to figure it out anymore.

Sometimes, when I’m lying awake at night, I can feel myself replaying everything from the start; hitting pause, rewind & play over and over again until my fingers bleed; trying to figure out at what moment everything changed. I spend hours trying to re-fit the puzzle pieces together and see if the big picture would have changed if I had done something different. The hardest part is that even if this change isn’t about me, even if there is nothing I can do, I’ll always look for a reason. When you don’t hate him, its easier to blame yourself. It’s so much easier to be given all the facts and told how they fit together than it is to have to sift through a bucket of them and figure out how it makes any sense at all. IF it makes any sense at all.

The calm part of me, scares me to death. How can I be so miserably sad one day & then spend the next two days at peace? What exactly am I at peace with? I read an article recently that said we actually CAN predict the future in terms of our feelings; that gut feelings really are a “thing”. The article said that if we are in-tune with those emotions, if we really LISTEN to our gut feelings, we know what’s coming. Is that true? Did I see this coming? When he told me loved me only A DAY before he told me he didn’t know anymore, did I know it was coming? Am I calm because part of me knows he’s going to come back because it wouldn’t make any sense if he didn’t? Or am I calm because I know the issue isn’t with me, it’s with him, and that at the end of this long, dark tunnel the light is brighter than I expected? Is this sense of calm actually a sense of hope? If so, hope for what? Hope that he will come back? Or hope that he WON’T & that that is OK?

Is it even possible that he could come back? Could I ever let him near me again? Or is there really no coming back from “I don’t love you anymore”? My God, if you only knew what I saw looking back at me when he said those words. Like he was somebody different. Like I spent 2 years holding hands with someone I couldn’t live without only to look down & see that I wasn’t holding anyone’s hand at all anymore… That apparently he COULD live without me and was already trying to.
He looked so detached.. Like someone I didn’t know. An outline of someone I could have loved before.
I remember sitting down on the wet grass, just staring out at the neighbor’s window, counting the window tiles. I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t even sure I was breathing. I felt like this is was happening AROUND me, not TO me.

I could hear myself repeating “this is just the end?”. Even now, I wake up in the middle of the night and hear myself saying “this is just the end?”. I’ve never gotten an answer. Not then & not now.

God, I hope that some day I wake up & I’m not trying to figure it out anymore.

What Happens When He Stops Loving You

I’ve always been the “let’s talk about our feelings” kind of girl in relationships. I’m a “fixer”. I want to take the broken pieces of you, of your past, and I want to be the one to right them again.
And before you shake your head at me and say “that never works.”
I know. I KNOW. But don’t you always want to be the exception?

I spent the last 2 years in a relationship I was comfortable with; that I was sure of. He made me laugh, restored my faith in men, gave me butterflies & turned my upside-down world right-side-up again. I thought, “This is it.” This was the person I was going to marry. We had a spark that lit up everything we touched; we made promises of a future and we had the comfort of a friendship. We were going to go the distance, because isn’t that everything you need in a relationship? All the boxes were checked for me, but the most important one wasn’t checked for him: “Are you happy with your life?”

If someone is deeply unhappy with their life that unhappiness bleeds into everything else it touches. Even though that unhappiness may not have started with your relationship the sad part is that sometimes you’re just collateral damage. There are things in life that although they control the reigns of your happiness, you have NO CONTROL OVER THEM.  And sometimes your relationship is the ONLY thing he feels like he has control over in the mess of all the other things he doesn’t.

I don’t think it’s possible to wake up one day and decide you don’t love someone anymore. I do however, think it’s possible to wake up one day and decide that you don’t want to try anymore; to decide that there is too much life you need to sort through to drag someone along with you. He can very well wake up one day and decide that the heaviness of unhappiness is just that: too heavy. That’s his right and it’s your right to feel however you feel about it. But, there is NOTHING you can do about it. There is nothing you can say. It’s just out of your hands and you have to let it be. You have to wipe your hands of it because you don’t deserve anything that isn’t completely and entirely yours.

So now what?

When he thinks he has stopped loving you, you start remembering how to love yourself.
The cold reality is that he can’t take back the things he said. You may never be able to look at him ever again without hearing him say “I don’t love you anymore”. Statements like that are bold & they hang in the air heavy and thick.  They can’t be taken back. You can’t rewind them. What happened might haunt you for a while. You might not be able to make polite conversation with anyone for a while without hearing “I don’t love you anymore” from the mouths of strangers.
You might wake up every day for the next month and be stuck in a cloudy limbo where you don’t know how to feel. However, it’s entirely possible that not being sure of how you should feel is EXACTLY how you should feel.
Will he come back when he sorts himself out? Maybe.
Do you really want to be just another thing he had to sort out? Maybe not.

This is just the end.
Or maybe it’s not.
The only thing you can be certain of is that life is going to be full of a whole lot of uncertainties for a little while longer.
But just like he woke up one day & decided it was all too heavy, you’ll wake up one day and feel lighter.
Of that, I’m certain.