one month later: picking up the pieces

It has now been exactly a month since my breakup. It feels fitting for an update.

Breakups are relatively new to me, being that they were my first love, so I am not quite sure what I am supposed to feel. My own emotions and feelings have always been something I’ve struggled to grasp so I do some interesting things (methods that seem unusual to me but perhaps more people do this) to try and evaluate how I am feeling.

now vs. then

The easiest method for me to evaluate my feelings is to compare them, specifically over time. While I can have a difficult time determining how I feel, I can typically see how it compares to other times I have also been confused with my feelings. Detecting this change or difference in emotion can provide a useful starting point to see how I am doing.

I remember how it felt when they told me they wanted to breakup, I remember how it felt leading up to our final days–and minutes–together, I remember how my “newfound freedom” initially felt, and I know how I feel now. All of those feelings were certainly different. I felt hurt, then sad, then scared, and now calm(er). While those words on their own are vague and broad, they are the closest language I can come up with at the moment to describe my feelings. There have also been ways my feelings towards them seem to have changed (I use “seemed” because I am often not sure of my true feelings. Perhaps I am rationalizing instead of being rational).

If you asked me a month ago if I thought I could ever love or want anyone else, I would have been offended you asked. Now I know I would understand the question and I wouldn’t get defensive. I know the answer, it’s clearly yes, I will love again and I will want other people, even if at times it feels like a betrayal (not necessarily towards them but more towards the lies I told them of never wanting anyone else). If you had asked me if I’m okay with them moving on (or even just touching someone else), I would have told you I felt sick. Now I am confident I can live with them loving someone else. I can live with them touching someone else or kissing someone other than me.

So now we have established that I feel different emotions in these moments surrounding my relationship with them, but this doesn’t answer the question of how I feel about them now. Surely at a certain point I’ll know if I’m over them, right?

Well, I’m not sure. We went no contact immediately after breaking up. After around a week and a half, they removed me from following their instagram and unfollowed me. There has been the occasional upset over not seeing them but for the most part just understanding and love for them, not any longing for them.

i miss my friend

If there was a spectrum of missing them that ranged from missing my lover to missing my friend, I think I would be much closer on the missing my friend side. While the no contact has been fairly effective to help move on in my life without them, I do especially miss certain aspects of my relationship with them. They were my best friend and possibly my closest friend. I often felt like they were my only friend or at least only friend I could go to about most things. When life got hard or lonely, or when I was just bored or had good news, they would be the first person to mind and my go to. And now I don’t have that.

Maybe most people, and those stupid cheesy online articles (“10 ways to know you are NOT over your ex”), count missing them as a friend as still not over but I don’t know if I would. I feel even though I do miss my friend, there is a sort of understanding about where they stand in my life–in my past–and I am okay with that.

an understanding

I know this is for the best, both the breakup and no contact, and that does actually make this at least a little easier. We had reached the end of the line for our relationship and luckily one of us had the guts to say something before it imploded. Sometimes things do not go how you always want them to and that is okay.

At the time of the breakup, it felt like a pause or a sort of break. Like soon we would find each other again. That is what we said to each other, and at least what I said to myself, at the time. While we both new realistically that it was a far fetched idea, it made us feel safer in the moment. I don’t tell myself that lie any more. I know things are over now. I’m okay with that. I don’t need our lives to intertwine again and I am okay with things never going back to how they once were. I know I can live with them in my past forever. It’s a terrifying thought at times, losing my lover and dear friend forever, but sometimes it feels completely okay.

current standings

While my mental well-being is questionable at best, mainly due to procrastinating the important things in life, I am holding up from my breakup remarkably well. Much better than I could have ever imagined. I am quite happy with how I’ve dealt with this so far and know I can continue to improve on myself.

In my first post I outlined a couple steps I felt were good first ones.

1. Remove primary reminders of them (pictures, letters, and such)
2. Make another list of daily tasks to complete (get out of bed, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to class, do homework, etc.)
3. Create a playlist of songs that are not directly tied to them
4. Process my thoughts and emotions (nightly journal and now this!)

I have been successful, more or less, in all of those. All very blatant reminders (pictures and letters) are tucked away, my whiteboard contains a list of things I need to do every day (following it is a different challenge), I have several new playlists that hold music that I feel is mine (some have songs that I associate with them or learned of from them but I feel as though they are mine enough to still belong), and I have been journaling from time to time (not frequent enough but a good start). I have also been trying to be social and amiable, sometimes to success sometimes not as much. I’ve read a couple of books in the meantime and spent a little to much time following the news.

Some future steps to focus on though:

1. Thrust myself in academics more than I am (we’re aiming for that 4.0 this semester)
2. Read Read Read (gonna get those 15 books by end of May)
3. Maybe learn to code (since they’re taking away all the trucking jobs, may as well learn a skill that’s actually useful)
4. Keeping writing on here (we’re going viral baby!)

Perhaps a future post is needed for my goals but in the meantime this vague list will make do.

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I read an interesting quote a while back that I can’t seem to find attribution for or the original quote so I am bound to butcher this but it went a little like this

You don’t have to look forward to tomorrow, but at the very least you should be curious about what the future holds.

I am certainly curious about what the future holds.