It was the summer solstice, bringing with it the promise of more sun than we’d seen in a good, long time. That morning, I woke amidst the late darkness, climbed into my car, and found the right kind of song to greet the earliest sunrise: Murder in the City, the Avett Brothers, nostalgia and love through acoustic guitar. Windows down, I picked up friends and we grabbed coffee from a wearied barista.
But me? Well, it’s hard to know. I’d like to think I’ll be proud of the life I’ve chosen to live, that I’ll look back on the year…for evidence of courage, love, and sincerity, and I’ll see the fruits of my efforts.
But there are answers I cannot have right now. There are trails I’ll have to run, no promise of anything at the end, in the hopes that my hustle will not be in vain. I’ll dig and run and write and love and try anew.
I wrote these words at the dusk of 2016, a year that left me feeling uncharacteristically battered and bruised. I sat down, that evening, and allowed the pain I’d been bundling to unfurl: My heart was broken (still), my courage was tentative, and my direction was unclear. Around me, my country somehow cast its faith into a man who did nothing to disguise motives of division, oppression, and dishonesty. Through all of it, I discovered, I was holding onto hope. Obstinate, pervasive hope, beckoning my hands to search the night sky for stars.
I wasn’t sure where I was going, at the dawn of 2017, but I knew I’d need to run. I’d need to start showing up –– for myself and for the people I love, trying anew, letting loose my frayed and dangling threads and weaving new ones. And so it was that I set out into the new year.
Today, after work, I was jamming to a playlist that includes some of Ms. Swift’s work, and I realized the song –– ‘Come Back…Be Here’ –– perfectly captured the feeling of missing someone we know we might be better off letting go.
Then I thought, ‘Hey. I wonder if Taylor has written and performed a song for every step of a breakup?’ (The answer, I’m sure you can guess, is yes.)
There was a time, when you were running, that you glimpsed at the world around you and saw beauty in every direction. To your left, crops swayed gently in the breeze, and, to your right, a warm brick home sat amicably on a grassy knoll. Ahead of you, the morning sun peeked over the horizon, spilling golden rays onto all the everything. Lifting your arms into wings, your closed your eyes and basked, for a moment, in your existence.
This is you at your most yourself, reader. Joyful, hopeful, aspiring, and marked by wild gratitude.
To get here, to find yourself at this point, you will have to take a variety of steps. Now that we’ve reached the final section, we’d like to reiterate them to ensure you’ve properly reconstructed your broken heart:
You will need to learn to run again. When you set out before, when you chased after what you wanted, closed your eyes, and stopped counting your steps, you tripped. Your body was pulled to the earth, your hands and knees scraping against cold, cruel pavement. Your Heart was startled, your Mind rushing to compute: This is not what we’d calculated for! And so you hobbled onto your feet, onto wobbly legs, and took stubborn-ass steps.
Your first few steps of running again will, of course, be tentative. You won’t be sure your limbs are okay, and your Mind will find you scanning the horizon for pitfalls. Not on my watch, your Mind will say to itself, protecting your healing Heart from another jolt.
But, eventually, you will need to trust yourself again, to close your eyes, lift your head, and let your arms be wings. Yes, this will find you vulnerable, but, my God, you will discover you have missed this joy.
You will need to believe in it again, the beauty of it, the light in every direction. You will need to seek meaning from every corner of the world, to make mountains out of molehills, to continue deriving incredible significance out of ‘meaningless things,’ and to apologize for none of that.
To lift your arms, to truly allow them to expand, you will have to believe you deserve to expand, to stretch your limbs so emphatically in every direction that your being perpetuates love in supernovas around you. You will need to expand, expand, expand, until you’re no longer willing to give yourself over to anybody who asks you to shrink.
You will need to trust them, your words, and the role they can play in the stitching and the unstitching. You will need to believe in your strength, in the light that you uniquely bring.
In order for your fingers to know the breeze, they cannot hold onto what came before, onto heavy things like why somebody left when you were so willing to stay, and so you will need to be sure they are empty, cleared by forgiveness and acceptance and the summer winds.
Your eyes must be fixed on the horizon, no longer searching for love where it does not dwell, and your Heart must be at the helm of your existence, calming your restless Mind and paving your way forward with reckless, breathless courage.
A closing note: Sounding like yourself again, aren’t you? It seems that you’ve made it, shed what you needed to shed.
Well, we’re glad to hear it. No, no –– we’re okay. We’re just, well, we’re glad to have been with you through it.
Brave travels, reader. We’ll be here again if you need us, so w –– okay, enjoy the run! Congratulations on doing it, transforming those scars into stars.
Here’s a radical fragment of honesty: You saw him, as you see him now, the entire goddamn time.
You discovered that the man you loved could not be filed under People Who Stay, but instead under People Who Leave, but the truth was that a part of you suspected it all along. But the truth is you love as you live –– with stubborn conviction –– and your Heart drowned out your Mind.
But, the moment he left, whether you wanted to acknowledge it or not, a small part of you exhaled. Because you had begun preparing to lose him a thousand miles ago.
You prepared to lose him day that you sat down to talk with him about the writing you’d shared with him, the bits of your bared soul you’d shared so that he might see you, and he started listing out all the problems with your choice of words.
You prepared to watch him leave you behind the afternoon you drove him home from a weekend in the city together, when he subtly let you know that he didn’t want you to linger at his apartment for long.
You prepared to feel his hands let you go over the stories he told you of leaving his ex, and the time he ripped up the airport parking stubs and told you to ‘stop saving meaningless things.’
Part of the letting go, reader, is discovering that your heart didn’t actually shatter in a singular moment. Rather, he broke it in steps, in a series of stories in which no one meant to hurt anyone. This is the reason that, on the morning he finally told you, after all the tears and the shock subsided, you began to feel early rays of relief. He had been right.
And that realization, you will find, will have a way of unfurling your clenched fists. Your fingers, nails previously embedded in your palms, will soften and stretch unto the air. As you let go of him, the idea of him and the love you fostered, you will find that the past is not a place you hope to return.
Another part of the letting go, you will find, is deciding not to remember him in only these dimensions. Your Heart was not wrong to love him, to see the charisma burning in his body and the courage waiting to emerge from within him. You will remember the times you held one another, you lost yourselves in the magic of it, you laughed together, running with hands held beneath the stars.
If there are People Who Stay and People Who Leave, you have made peace with where to file him. Perhaps, to someone else, he will become one of the People Who Stay, but that is his story, and not yours.
As for you, reader, you have learned what it is to be somebody who stays, who shows up, who loves with courage and honesty. And you have learned, whether you liked it or not, that you will not die if your Heart is returned to your shaking hands.
So let go, one finger at a time. Exhale, inhale, exhale.
The moment he left, and your Heart fragmented in your hands, your Mind went to work salvaging you from the storm. ‘People who want to stay,’ your Mind begged your Heart over its cries, ‘stay.’
Your Mind beckoned you to run, to get a haircut, to seek new adventures, to kiss the cute man at the bar, to say no to the man’s request to come home with you, to break off all contact with your ex, to let the break be final and to close the door on your side, to decline his terms, to build new adventures, to stop looking for love where it does not dwell, to repurpose your energy toward healing and loving others better.
For a very long time, over the past few miles, your Heart sat in stubborn silence, hurting and healing, quietly holding out hope that ‘people who want to stay’ might just … come back.
Things began to change for you, your fists unfurling and beginning to let go, when your Heart stopped arguing with your Mind about who he is: the good, the bad, the fine-but-not-right-for-you. All of it.
It’s worth noting, lest your Mind grow a bit too proud of its abilities, that your Heart has had its own miraculous victories over the past weeks and months. It has been your Heart beckoning you to be courageous, to be honest, to be loving, leaving behind bandages in place of wounds, a trail of love rather than pain.
It was your Heart that wouldn’t allow you to be cruel, that sought to disarm and not to incite, that empowered you to err on the side of kindness, forgiveness, and grace. If your Mind sutured your wounds with stitches, it was your Heart that began to gently pull them loose, to grant your scars the opportunity to breathe.
If it was your Mind that fortified you in steel walls, beckoning you forward in stubborn-ass steps, then it was your Heart that ordered the deconstruction, granting you permission to unravel, to weep and to laugh and to find meaning in the world around you again.
They’re at their best, your Heart and your Mind, when they’re working together. You can feel it already, can’t you? The return of the softness, the gentleness, the warmth that so characterizes your being?
This is a tell-tale sign that your Heart has reclaimed the wheel, that your Mind has softly sighed and relented, sitting in the passenger seat and gently coaxing your Heart to pay attention to the signs, your Heart animatedly telling a story about the day it first discovered love.
We’re getting close, reader. There aren’t many pages left in this manual. You’ve got fewer and fewer knots to untangle, at least from this mess, and, my God, has the horizon ever burned so brightly?
CAUTION: You have reached an advanced section of the manual. It is essential that, prior to approaching Part VII, you have carefully studied and moved through the previous six sections. They are designed to prepare you, to bolster your broken places, so that you can trudge through. It’s okay to wait.
No? Okay, well move forward with care.
You will note, reader, that the manual, up until this point, has focused pretty exclusively on you and your journey following possession of a broken heart. This is, of course, a decidedly passive way to describe your heartbreak. Spoken this way, in this language, it sounds as though you happened upon a broken heart by accident, by happenstance, by random lottery.
But this is not what happened, is it? Like many before you, your heart was broken by a human. You held it out, handed it to him, he broke it, and he left. As absent as his name has been from the manual thus far, your ex has been absent from your side.
The purpose of this section is to have you consider, with honesty and openness, the role your ex is going to hold in your life as you make your way back to yourself. Ultimately, that will be your decision to make, reader, as we’ll remind you: Each broken heart is unique, as is the story that shattered it.
In the world, you will encounter two kinds of humans: People Who Leave, and People Who Stay. Here’s an idea of what you might feel and/or notice when encountering each:
People Who Leave
People Who Stay
Erm, that was a lot, wasn’t it? No, it’s fine to cry. This is a difficult chapter to make meaning of.
As you might guess, it is decidedly difficult to know what kind of person you’re loving in the middle of loving them. Love, as you know, orients the Heart to look for the good, to search for the hope, to keep paving forward.
You were not foolish, but brave, to love. We thought it was important that you knew that. At least this time, you were one of the People Who Stay.
Yes, you’ve also been one of the People Who Leave. Not this time, but yes.
No, that’s all right. Take some time. It’s important that you know the two types of people, that you understand the definitions. You’re diving into the tricky stuff now, the pulling out of the old stitches. Take a breath, spread your limbs.
We’ll be here when you’re ready.
