I knew this would be hard, but not like this. I feel like a zombie. Some days I find myself driving around… no where to go, but not wanting to go home to an empty house. My stomach feels empty, but I have no appetite to eat. Everyone tells me to keep myself busy, exercise, be around people, but how can I?  It’s hard to put one foot in front of the other, let alone have the energy to go to the gym or carry on a conversation.

Breakups take a toll on a person, but at the same time, it can be a beautiful thing. It can be wild, violent awakening of a person’s soul; that little push to begin a person’s growth, to get them up off their feet. For me, it’s a time for rebirth. It’s hard. It’s painful. I don’t understand or even know how to explain quite how I feel, just this emptiness in my heart of where someone used to be. It’s the feeling of being stuck, of not being able to go back, but not sure how to go forward. It’s there when I’m alone, it’s there when I carry on a conversation… it’s always there, in the back of my mind, reminding me of what no longer is. Not wanting to be alone, not wanting to sit in the silence that is now the everyday norm.

Regardless of how I feel, I am doing just that: letting myself feel. Letting it all out, practicing patience on my hurting heart, crying at any and all times of the day… just observing the emotions, and letting them be. This is a time to focus on myself, look inward, let go of attachments and begin cracking open my heart. There is a lot of hurt I have carried my entire life, and it is time to let it all go. I let my ego, my fear, my anger, my judgement, my lack of love for myself – all get in the way of practicing love towards others. It is time to focus on self-love, and let the healing begin.

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

–Alice Walker