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

• Their presence, initially, has all the warmth of the sun, but their absence becomes increasingly dark and difficult, leaving you in waiting for their return.
• For them, you will hustle, and they may praise your effort, igniting you and beckoning you to hustle further. The hustling will not cease.
• Early on, they will be impressed by your brighter characteristics, but, with time, they will find your flaws, and they will convince you that to hold you is heavy.
• Their arms will reach for you when you are useful, when they are unable to stand on their own, but you will find they do not reach for you when they are feeling victorious.
• They will resist letting you see their broken pieces, snapping at you once you’ve noticed them, and they will not know what to do with yours.
• You will study them closely, learning the language through which they speak and hear love, and you will learn to pull their smile into being. In return, they will never learn to decipher yours, to understand what it means when you tell stories, or when you explore sadness, or when your hands are reaching quietly for theirs.
• At the ends of your visits together, their eyes will fixate on the clock, and they will not reach for you to stay, but instead urge you to go.
• They will leave. When they do, maybe they’ll give you words, that you ‘deserve more,’ but they’ll ring empty, because they’re not meaningful, because they’re the words of someone who’s leaving. Or maybe they’ll leave with a whimper. Or maybe they’ll leave in silence.
• The moment they leave, their eyes will fixate on what’s next, on new beginnings, on finding something to distract them from the very real wounds they’ve just left on another human being.

People Who Stay

• It may be that you haven’t noticed them, that their constancy caused you to forget them in favor of the ones for whom you’d been hustling. But they’ve been there, you’ll realize, through all of it, the storms and the stars and the quiet mornings and busy days and long nights.
• Rather than beckoning you always to hustle, they will summon you to be still, to be proud, to recognize what you have done, and to rest in the beauty of your own being, as you are now, without modification or influence.
• They will find inspiration in your brightest characteristics, will point you to them when you’re not feeling steady on your feet, and they’ll remember them when you’re not at your best.
• They will see your flaws, will be honest with you when you’re not owning them, but they will teach you to hold them, to repurpose them, will convince you that the cracks in your being are no excuse to feel broken.
• They’ll study you, learning the language through which you speak and hear love, and they’ll say words / do things that make you feel seen, that make you feel like they’ve got a direct line to your heart, and they’ll use this to make you feel tall, brave, and loved.
• With them, you do not have to perform, to put on the act of perfection, but instead you can relax.
• Their hands will reach for you in times of victory, in times of failure, in times of boredom, summer, winter, fall, and spring.
• They will not seek to change you, but will change you in doing so, by teaching you to exist, as you, with courage, honesty, and sincerity.
• They will not leave, not if they can help it, even if that means reaching over miles of geography or mountains of emotional turmoil or the deafening distance between life and death. They will always show up, show up, show up. You will never look within yourself and not find them there.

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.

One side effect of coming in possession of a broken heart, in most all cases, is a bit of a blow to the ego. In your case, you devoted months of your life to turning your love into actions, a language he would understand, and he responded by letting you go. It would be unusual, we have found, if you didn’t wrestle with a little bit of self-doubt.

In any case, it’s been some time since you ventured out into the world of dating. More than likely, you won’t be certain you’re ready in the first place, which will make you unsure of what you want, and you’ll be annoyed at your friends’ eagerness to see you ‘getting back out there!’

One Friday, however, once work has subsided and you return from a run, you will look at your spot on the couch, the blanket still curled from your last rendezvous, and you will turn instead to your closet. You will pull on a crisp white button-up, beckoning your friends to join you for a night out, and you will set out to find a little bit of confidence.

On that particular occasion, we’re happy to tell you, you will make eye contact with an extremely attractive stranger, and he will smile at you. For the remainder of the night, you will practice making intentional, prolonged eye contact, and you will find yourself blushing as he glances downward and smiles. At the end of the night, when he hugs his friends goodbye and makes a beeline to you on the dance floor, you will have an out-of-body experience. And, after he pulls you into a kiss lasting the span of two songs, you will re-enter your body, glad you ventured out.

And you will tell him ‘good night,’ surprising him and yourself, because it will turn out that you aren’t ready. You’re simply figuring out how to stand again, how to make use of these wobbly legs.

There will be similar forays into the world of dating, each of them seemingly ill-fated in retrospect, but their purpose will not be to find you onto the next great love, but to direct you back to yourself. You are learning, reader, to stand and breathe and rest in your being. These are vital lessons in healing, and they are essential skills to discover anew.

You will entertain a 72-hour first date, and you will realize about 6 hours in that you are in over your head. You will develop and nurture a crush on someone whom you will not be able to pursue. You will have a number of coffee dates, each of which will find you shaking your head as you drive home, wondering why on earth you ever left in the first place. These will bring you laughter, of course, and more than few feelings of foolishness, but they will also give your legs some much-needed practice: You are learning to stand, to walk, to run. Please allow your legs to be wobbly.

 

An important side-note, during this time: Please make note of the friends walking beside you, ready to catch you if you stumble, and rejoicing when you find your footing on new terrain. These are your people who stay (more later), and they deserve some of the love you haven’t been certain how to repurpose.

Well, hello there. No need for apology, by the way. We knew it would take you some time to get to this section of the manual. You have a tendency to read closely at the beginnings of things, then to lift off, as though you’ve got a good grip on where things were headed. Very ‘I’ll take it from here!’ of you.

Oh, no need to huff. We don’t mean to make light of what’s going on with you. It’s just that we knew we’d find ourselves here, or –– more accurately ­­ –– that you’d find yourself here. What you’ve just experienced, reader, and the reason you’re staring these words in the face, is what we’d like to term ‘the miraculous better.’

After the initial shock of a broken heart wears off, you may note, and the stubborn-ass steps become a bit less heavy, it is common for the possessor of a broken heart to break into a sprint. ‘I’m ready to date,’ they might tell themselves, venturing into the online dating world with a fetching new profile picture, or ‘that’s quite enough wallowing.’ The phase that follows, marked by a kind of euphoric joy, is the miraculous better.

You had time to sit with your pain, reader, and you made meaning. You sorted through it, pulled it apart until you comprehended its edges, and you reassembled it into meaning. You found the lesson, as it were, amidst the parable. Using your words, you felt your feelings unfurl. And so, like a mud-caked child rinsed by an ocean wave, you felt cleansed. ‘Why continue to dwell?’ you asked yourself, and so you embarked.

And now you’re back. As it turns out, there is a marked difference between feeling ready and being ready.

You have learned, much to your chagrin, that you can’t really control the tempo of a healing process. There’s no number of ‘hell-yeah-I’m-fine’ playlists, you have discovered, that will erase the tear you feel within whenever you remember his laugh. You’re wounded, flightless, and you’re going to have to move through all chapters of this journey.

Resist feeling foolish. This is a time, if you haven’t gathered already, to be gracious to yourself. The road to healing will be lined with missteps, and this isn’t really a time to berate yourself for that. (There are very few, if any, times to berate yourself, by the way. This warrants mentioning, though it is a much larger lesson requiring a manual of its own.)

So, if you will, work to unravel. Work to stop bunching in the bundles and pretending you’re weaving yourself together. Take the time to love each stitch, each suture, and run your fingers over the beauty of these new scars. You will not learn to love again, we suppose, until you’re certain you are worth loving, too.

Another thing: You can, and will, turn these scars into stars. Trust us. Or, maybe better: Trust yourself.

Words are, for many, a means of injecting meaning into the world. They are a tool of human connection, of building understanding and empathy. Properly utilized, a person can use words as a tool for constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing the surrounding world. You are, as it turns out, one such person.

Whenever you fall in love, words swell from a spring deep within you, passionate and limitless, and you embark to build a world –– unique to you and your lover –– so beautiful that neither of you will ever want to leave it.

But we are here because you are holding a broken heart, because love has failed, and that world around you has crumbled. Throughout these times, you will find that words can bring you peace. Picking up a pen, making meaning from the mess, will empower you to suture the wounds within. Long after, you will search and find that they have dissolved, leaving behind stronger tissue.

You will, for example, endeavor one day to write him a letter. You’ll sit there for a moment, iced coffee bleeding water onto the tabletop, and stare at the empty document, and then you’ll begin: You’ll tell him where you are, why you’re writing, how you’re feeling, and the magic will overtake you.

Four pages later, eyes flooded with tears and heart thundering within you, you’ll finish, having written something honest and heartbreaking. You’ll send it to him, not certain you need, or even want, a response. Because you wrote it, you put all this pain into words, for you.

It is incumbent upon us, however, to let you know you will find that words have limitations. Try as you may, you will not be able to infuse beauty into every break in the road. Put simply, your grief can’t always be repurposed.

Remember the night he left? The way you lingered on the phone, fumbled for words, did your best to say something meaningful? The moment you realized you should hang up, if you don’t recall, is the moment you realized words weren’t tying any of you back together.

He will not respond to your letter. The disappointment you will find, the way it blends with the strength you’ve found in your own limbs, cannot be mistaken for beautiful.

The path to normalcy, you will find, will be marked by very few unblemished successes.

Limited though they may be to repair the broken world around you, you will employ words in every direction. Though words cannot transform your grief into joy, they will resonate with the grieving. When you write your pain into existence, when you unfurl it and let it writhe, raw and honest, you will discover you are not alone.

As we’ve stated, words are a tool of human connection. When we are hurting, holding our broken hearts in our hands and working our way forward, we rarely seek to believe our hearts have never been broken; we simply want to know that we are not alone.

So it is that, whether you intended it or not, a by-product of your pain will be reminding the grieving that they do not ache by themselves. There are many of us out here, sitting beneath the moon and waiting out the night.

It is highly probable that, by this time, you have discovered that possession of a broken heart has a unique impact on your way of life: All aspects of living have become conscious choices.

Consider your meals; have you ever given this much thought to eating? This applies, of course, to elements beyond the dinner table: waking up each day, choosing an outfit, showing up at work, laughing at your co-workers’ jokes. At the present time, these are all likely concerted efforts on your part.

In the earliest days of possessing a broken heart, your way forward is through a series of conscious decisions, which we like to term stubborn-ass steps. During this phase, the days seem a bit longer, as do the weeks and months, but rest assured: You can and will tread through this terrain.

When you learned to run, you learned to understand it as an exercise of discipline, of drowning out the voice telling you to slow to a walk. When the urge to stop reached you before the finish line, you found the combination of taking a deep breath and counting one hundred strides to be enough to get you through. As it turns out, guiding a broken heart through the obstacles isn’t that different.

When, for example, you hear a song that pulls your mind to a memory of the two of you dancing together, wild and free, you will do well to take a deep breath, feel yourself exhale, and let the song play through.

When you come upon a calendar date you once earmarked as significant, you will benefit from building plans outside of the walls of your apartment. Some dates, especially in the first lap around the sun, simply requiring a committed breathing through.

You get the picture.

The steps you take to normalcy will make themselves apparent to you. Calling yourself ‘single’ on your social media. Referring to your relationship in the past tense. Collecting his things, already taken down and stored away, and letting them go. Putting your pain into words, sharing them, healing. Deciding on the role he gets to hold in your life; letting him know where to reside in the meantime.

You won’t do these all at once, and that’s good, because it’s not advisable. The key to successfully harnessing the broken heart is allowing time the space to do its work. Like water, it erodes slowly the uneven edges, moving rhythmically as it washes, purifies, carries away what you can no longer hold.

A broken heart has a tendency to cause the mind to shift into overdrive. One afternoon, perhaps over coffee, you may begin to wonder what he’s doing and how he’s feeling. How’s it possible that he hasn’t called, you might ask, that he doesn’t care. It’s unfair that he’s not hurting too, and he’s probably found something better, or someone better, and they’re building new memories and he’s using your old jokes, and you just want him to care, and you shouldn’t, but you do, not enough to love you forever but enough to make you believe he ever loved you at all, and he doesn’t, and he didn’t, and he won’t, and you know it, and ––

A deep inhale and exhale, and taking a minute to notice the way your fingertips fit perfectly over your kneecaps, will help carry the noise away. These days are for stitching yourself up and getting to safety, not untangling the sutures from your skin.

Stubborn-ass steps, you will find, will mark many of the days ahead. The decision to laugh, to make new memories, to embrace the sun as you’re running and to whisk your hands over grass blades afterwards. They occur when you encounter new kinds of pain, inner wounds you didn’t know you’d been hiding from, when you allow yourself to feel it and then decide to move through.

Recovering from a fall, carrying a broken heart, is one of the only times that everything takes so much try. Deciding to try, again and again, is stubbornness in practice.

the year of the beginning again, of how many times can somebody shed his skin before finding himself free of scars, of showing up with shaking hands, of repurposing the love flowing out of cracks in my sternum, of working to rip the stitches loose. the year of the purposing, of running before i’m ready, maybe, of the hard-won wisdom that feeling ready is a poor measure of being ready, of refusing to pay mind to a ticking clock working to pick seconds from our pockets. the year of unlearning to second-guess my softness, why was it so easy to do the opposite, of sharing the art of making tapestries from our frayed and hanging threads. the year of the here, now, on the eve of everything, of erring on the side of love, on the side of courage, of leaving no ‘i love you’ left unspoken. the year of making a mark by preparing the hands that will remain, of taking jewels mined from my deepest cuts and letting them loose with reckless goodwill.

All right, this takes a little bit of explaining: Within you are two entities, your Heart and your Mind, that work together to move you through the process of life.

Your Heart (which is particularly dominant in its governance of you, by the way) prefers to make decisions based on feelings and abstract notions such as compassion and the transformative power of love and the greater good of humanity. Your Heart concerns itself with the well being of others, especially those you love.

Your Mind (which is often quite tired of taking orders from the Heart) prefers to make decisions based on what it’s observed before and what it sees as the logical end result of behavior. The Mind is also particularly insistent upon scraping past memories and showing your Heart where it missed specific inconsistencies and signals, which your Heart does not appreciate. The Mind is focused on your preservation through strategy.

As you might guess, being dominated by the Heart can present occasional problems during a healing process. Healing is, by nature of its purpose, a selfish process. It will require you to take up space, say ‘no’ when your instinct to please others arises, and generally do whatever it is that the Mind has found to be nurturing to your greatest welfare.

While it’s not terribly pleasant, we are pleased to say that the pain your Heart is experiencing does enable your Mind to take charge a bit more than usual. And, given the rarity with which the Mind gets the driver’s seat, it is a minor understatement to say that the Mind ‘makes itself at home.’ You will be rational, calculated, and direct about what it is that you need to heal, and your Heart will often be relieved at the results.

The Mind without the Heart, however, can be a bit ruthless in these times. Scouring memories of the past for the aforementioned inconsistencies and signals, it can become forgetful of the Heart’s commitment to empathy. The Mind will want to ask questions, demand answers, and express its anger.

Because you are ruled by the Heart, you will not be able to allow the Mind to reign without belaboring your Heart further with remorse. As such, you will need to remind your Mind to proceed with kindness. At times, your Heart may overdo it, but your Mind will begrudgingly accept this is as a lesser risk to your well being than cruelty.

As time moves on, and as you approach the finish line of ‘normalcy,’ you will find the Heart gradually gaining strength. The Mind, having surveyed you for any cracks or vulnerabilities, will then sigh, satisfied with itself, and give over the wheel. Your Heart will return to its station, able once more to feel and give love openly.

It is in this state that you will feel most strong, most certain, and – as you might imagine – most yourself.

Listen, and listen well: The end goal, the finish line to this process, is for you to feel ‘normal’ again. The challenge –– think of it, if you will, as a series of hurdles –– is that life with him has become your normal. You will need to take steps to establish new routines, new supports, new things to look ahead to.

We know –– seems pretty far off. But we wanted to start you off with an idea of where we are headed. No, there’s not a way to rush through the process. No, we can’t speed the time. Yes, sir, we know that you’re usually the one coaching others through this, and ––

Sir. If you’d just listen, that’s ––

Sir. Please take a seat. Yes, it’s okay if you cry. No, don’t look in the mirror while you’re doing it. It is a universally strange experience to see one’s puffy, crying face. As I was saying, you brought us to an important point: The people you love are going to rescue you. Yes, that means you’ll have to be sad with them. Yes, they want to. No, they don’t think it’s a burden. Yes, really.

Recently, you came in possession of a broken heart. We know this is no call for congratulations, and we know you’re tired of hearing people say they’re sorry. So allow us to state the facts: The heart you possess is broken. You summoned your courage, held it out, and the one you gave it to left. Now it’s broken, it’s crying out, and –– well –– it’s yours.

The purpose of this manual, as you might imagine, is to help you find your way back. Though the walk ahead has many names, and these journeys are a bit nuanced, we have done our best to prepare to assist you in your walk.

Now, as far as establishing a new normal, let’s use some things you already know from past difficulties: First, running helps you process the pain. Yes, you can listen to the Last Five Years soundtrack. You will cry sometimes, as you run, but that makes it hard to breathe, so you will inevitably learn to breathe through the pain instead. This is therapeutic, and you will need to find time to do so.

The people who love you will reach out in the ways they know best. Many will tell you really wonderful things about yourself, and you are likely to argue with them inside your head. Try to resist this. Accept all the love you are given, and do your best to go along with the ones who are working to get you out of wallowing.

Sleep will take a while to resume. Night is when you are most prone to make sense of your day, and even the brightest of days gives way to the contemplative shadows of night. Stay on friends’ couches as long as you like, provided they are willing. You do your best sleeping surrounded by people who believe in you, and that is necessary during this time.

Every broken heart is different, despite what the clichés of contemporary music would have you believe. The path to the end goal – a reminder, this a sense of normalcy – is different for everyone.

Your friends will see through your bravado when the pangs of heartbreak break the surface. Your eyes will go to a different place during a group conversation, or they will catch you taking a long pause and surveying the world. You can choose whether or not to explain to them that what you’re doing is watching the world move forward, or – more abstractly – watching time beckon you onward.

And here’s where you’re going to struggle, if what we’ve seen so far is any indication: You’ve got to take time. You are going to have to feel it, all of it. You will need to feel the embarrassment of giving over so much love only to find you aren’t loved. You will need to feel the sadness of remembering him. You will need to feel the anger, the apathy, the jealousy, the false hope for what was. It is important to remember the falseness of the hope, we’ll warn you. Convincing though it may be, it is statistically not a positive indicator.

One clerical note, and we know this doesn’t speak all that much to you, but Alison from liability says we have to cover it: Alcohol may seem like a shortcut through, but it generally becomes a stumbling block. You are likely to see this in the first night you feel bold enough to ‘go out’ again, but it’s just going to drop you right into the worst of it. It is okay, we should mention, to be messy once in a while.

But don’t forget the writing. Words are the tools with which you restore your world. Find your pain, write it into meaning, and set it free. Share it with others and allow them to affirm for you that, as it turns out, you’re experiencing something deeply human. Pain is a wellspring of honest writing, and honesty will pave your path.

And the crying. Well, that’s part of it, we’re afraid. No, you’re not going to be able to predict it. We know you prefer some control or forewarning, but roll with it. Lie back, when you feel it, and let the heartbreak ripple through you. You may feel like you’re going to break, but – when it subsides – you’ll sit up stronger.

The purpose of this manual, reader, is to help you find your way back to yourself.

This past summer, I took a trip to New York with one of my best friends. It was his first time in the city, and we, a pair of writers who happen to direct residence halls, were searching for meaning in every direction. This translated, of course, to spending a graciously brief amount of time in our AirBnB and scouring the city for bookstores, coffee shops, and rocks on which to read.

In Brooklyn, on Fulton Street, there’s a bookstore called the Greenlight Bookstore. Unlike The Strand, the Greenlight is approachably small, with texts adorning tables and shelves as though curated by the tastes of the employees. There, I stumbled upon a book with an interesting cover and title: ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Continue reading “book club: ‘your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever?’” →