What Do You Do With a Broken Heart?

In the process of dealing with a break-up or flat-out rejection, you go through just about every state of mind you can possibly imagine. There’s the phase of pure anger, where you shatter your wine glass on the ground in pure rage. There’s the phase of denial, where you try and justify every word that has been said and every tiny action that can be analyzed. And of course, there’s that pure, simple and lingering phase of sadness of which I need not describe.

And perhaps what’s most unfortunate about it all, is this process never really comes to a halt, no matter how many times you experience it, or how logical you try to be. Your sensibilities don’t work in a love-struck world where, by its own nature, there is no such thing as “rational.”

What does it mean, then, that even with all of this “experience” we have, we still can’t learn to just move on?

It’s easy to tell yourself to “get back on the horse and try again,” and to move onward from all that is doom and gloom, but doing so is often a completely different story. Humankind prides itself on dwelling. “What don’t we dwell on?” is undeniably a much better question than the reverse.

What I’ve come to realize, however, is that rather than sinking in these feelings and letting them consume you (and boy do they consume), it eases the pain in the long run to tackle these feelings head on and – if at all possible – bypass them altogether.

You have the friends who will advise you to do this or that in the post-break-up process, and many of us do so accordingly. We “wait it out,” thinking that we’re being the bigger person by avoiding confrontation and talking out feelings. But when it comes down to it, these games of emotional politics do more harm than they do good. We need only look at the example of Washington for further proof of the damage political thinking can deal.

I don’t have the clear-cut answer to heartbreak; if I did I’d certainly have a much more solid business model than running a column on Blogger. But the advice I can give that will save pain in the long-term, is to stop running.

Stop running from those feelings that you don’t want to feel anymore. Stop running from the anger and the frustration that you feel for the person who broke your heart. Stop running from the bright light coming toward you, because doing that is the only thing holding you back from moving forward.

Love and heartbreak are not “black and white” subjects, and they surely are not emotions that any doctor or scientist can ever give you a solid solution to. No one can write you a prescription for a broken heart. In that very way, it just might be the worst disease to ever plague humanity. It’s everywhere, and it’s unavoidable.

But like The Black Death, you’ve got to warn the others and stay on-guard during the entire duration of the outbreak. But always keep in mind that living in fear of being struck by it is a worse poison than the harsh realities of love could ever be.