While before I’d never understood the concepts of feeling broken, or damaged, I couldn’t understand any of it because I’d never been through it. I’d seen films cope with more heartbreaks than I’d physically witnessed, I remember the scene in Friends with Benefits when Justin Timberlakes’ character tells Mila Kunis’ that Magnum PI couldn’t even deal with her shit she was that damaged.  An interesting notion, I used to think how is it possible to feel so broken from a break up. The answer is easy. Trust. Broken trust, leads to a broken heart and mind. It’s easy to stand back and say there are plenty of fish in the sea, but for a time you felt that that person was your fish. Funnily enough, my ex tagged me in that exact meme of the frog holding onto the fish saying when there’s plenty of fish in the sea but she’s your fish. And I believed it. So when that ends, when you have to comprehend the fact that what that person said wasn’t meant to last forever and you have to give up on the promises, the feelings and the love, it leaves you feeling broken. Your brain and heart has to compute what happened, almost like rewiring your whole belief system, you question everything, whether it was all a lie, whether it was all in your head. Leading you to believe will you ever trust what someone else says ever again. Will you ever be able to give yourself fully again to be able to be in love again or will you hold back, in fear of getting hurt again.

After my break-up I spoke to my sister a lot, and this one time I was saying how we’ve dealt with a lot of stuff in our family, we’ve dealt with the loss of many loved ones and yet we came out of it because we had each other. In some ways, its easier to deal with the loss of someone, because they never chose to leave you, they didn’t want to leave you either. With a break-up, my sister had an interesting point from a friend and that was that its like a bereavement going through a break-up, yet its even worse because you have to deal with the fact they don’t want you anymore. In a way, you wish they had died so you didn’t have to cope with the fact they wanted to leave you. All of this was true, I felt all those things.

Being broken you feel weak, but its normal, you feel let down by one of the only people you felt wouldn’t let you down. It doesn’t make you a weak person, you loved, you lost and now you need to heal. I know I’ll never forget my first love, it was a special all consuming love, one that I compromised a lot in, I gave everything, something maybe I’ll open up about in a future blog, but for now the focus shall remain on being broken.

The thing about being broken, a break can nearly always be fixed, maybe not completely, but if you let it, it will heal. That has to be the aim, to heal. I’m hoping my healing will come when I go home for Christmas, when I am with familiarity. I’m better than I was, I know I’m not completely broken, my trust is broken and for now I can see in my future I’ll struggle to trust someone as much as I did. I struggled with trust even before all this, I struggled opening up, being honest, for fear of leaving myself vulnerable and in some ways I hate the fact I left myself vulnerable. Unfortunately in love, you have to show vulnerability. That vulnerability allows to love, to be in love, to feel loved and its an amazing feeling. One that I don’t regret having felt, I don’t wish it hadn’t happen because I had an amazing year, I fell in love and I wouldn’t change it for the world. What I wish i could change, was how it ended. I was ripped away from the man I thought I knew, as dramatic as that sounds, that’s how it felt.

What you don’t know, and what makes my “story” even more depressing, the day after we broke up was meant to be the day he came to Cyprus for 9 days. He had it booked for a month, I had been excited for a month for him coming because of how much I missed him. But within that month was when things turned sour, skype had become a chore and my ex had started putting more effort into everything else in his life and I felt it. Call it womans intuition but the moment my ex mentioned a girl he worked with to me I felt protective, I felt jealous, something I’m not used to. Suddenly, things we had done, Nandos, shopping, Macdonalds drivethru, things I considered date days, he’d started to do with her. Now, I’m different to most girls, I don’t boil over things, if i feel something I’ll mention it and I’ve always been a firm believer in open communication. So I spoke to him, I mentioned it made me feel jealous because I wanted to do those things with him. I never said to stop, I didn’t even ask him to stop seeing her, because it wasn’t fair to me to stop a friendship just because she was a girl. When I had friendships with guys too, that would have been hypocritical, but for weeks he assured me nothing was wrong. The sad part is, amongst all of that I’d said I loved him enough to let him go if he had stopped loving me, but he kept reassuring me. In the end, I should have trusted my gutt, because our last skype left him telling me that he had developed feelings for her. He lied to me for weeks, that was one of the worst parts and apparently the reason he had developed feelings was my fault.

Manipulation is not something I am good with and I was not going to let a man, no strike that, now boy, manipulate me into thinking it was my fault. I wasn’t going to let him curb his guilt and blame me. So I ended it, I said we’re done. And I’m glad I did, if I had tried like he wanted after telling me that, then I would have been more broken than what I am now. I would have risked my own self-respect and I would have felt like a mug to my friends and family. I had the strength to end it, even if it wasn’t what I wanted, I had to for myself.

I don’t need to analyse the above for you to see how I was broken, I felt cheated and I didn’t know how someone could go from saying I’m their world and that they loved me to acting and feeling this way in such a short amount of time. My story is messed up, I laugh saying I could write a book, how it could turn into a film, everything and this isn’t even the half of it. But the fact of the matter is, it’s okay to feel broken, and while I may be broken for now, I know that I have strength. Strength that let me free, let me take control of the situation. I have to hold onto that strength and that will heal me and I have to know that I won’t feel broken forever. I’m a fighter, I’d never give up because anything worth having is worth fighting for, it’s not meant to be easy and anything worth having isn’t easy. When things got hard, when he missed me, he tried to push me away to try and cope with it and that’s not what love is, you can’t push people away. In the end I wasn’t in front of him anymore and in the end he tried to replace me, he said me leaving was the hardest thing and he had never wanted me to go, he wanted someone by his side, but that’s not love. I was always going to be there, I was always going to come back and he gave up on that.

That’s how I know I won’t be broken forever, because that strength is something he never had and may never have.

xoxo

Kathryn