Getting Over a Break Up

The end. The journey is over! You feel rejected! Hopeless! You don’t want to get back in the jungle again. You may even have that dreaded feeling of failure.

Suddenly, all the love songs on the radio seemed to have been written for you. You want to stay in bed all day. Shut all the doors and the windows. Send your parents and everyone around you away. You don’t feel like talking to anybody now. You swear to yourself that you will never get involved with someone again, half believing it.

But life is much more exciting than that. Besides, you are not the first and only person experiencing a broken heart or going through a break up. It might not even be your last break up either. With proper mental tools, break ups can be less painful. I prefer to call break ups opportunities to change your habits. It’s like having an addiction and you need to cut yourself from it. It’s painful, but necessary!

Another day is over and you’re still troubled by a relationship that ended few weeks ago. The whole thing is dragging on too long – why can’t you just get over it? But every time you think about it or bump into your ex, you feel ruined again.

Perhaps something remains unsaid for you, even now. Perhaps that’s why your feelings remain so strong even after months have passed. Perhaps parts of you hold out, hoping you could get back together again. Perhaps you need to admit that and let go of it. Or maybe you fear that you won’t meet anyone else like your ex. You won’t, but you will meet someone – they’ll just be different.

When you see your ex happy, half of you wants to cry, half of you would do anything to get rid of those feelings even just for a day. People may tell you it’s time you got over the relationship. Like with bereavement, you don’t ever have to “get over” it, but you may need to more forcibly move yourself on.

Hurtful experiences, ones that are emotional and logistically reset our lives, leave us with two choices: open up more or close down. The braver choice, the one that will allow new things to enter your life, is to open up.

It’s time to accept the pain, look past it and move on. If you’re having a hard time letting go, realise that if they wanted to stay, they’d still be there. It might not be tonight, it might not tomorrow morning or the next day…but everything will soon be okay.

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