Thoughts on heartbreak

It was an afternoon in early June. I had spent 7 hours crying, starting with the moment when I woke up at 6am and remembered it was all real. 7 hours later, there I was back in my bed; but this time I wasn’t crying quietly to avoid waking up my roommate. This time it was a breathless, anguished cry as I brought my knees to my chest and laid there in actual, physical pain. 

I called my dad again for the second or third time that day. A couple hours earlier my parents had comforted me on FaceTime, repeating over and over again how sorry they were, reassuring me that everything would be okay. But a couple hours passed and my roommate left the apartment temporarily and suddenly I was alone. And I was not okay.

I think my dad could hear the desperation in my sobs on the other line. “Dad, it’s so painful... It’s just so, so painful... *long pause to calm down enough to get out the words* I don’t think I can go on. I wish I could go back and reverse everything. I wish I had never met him. It is not worth this pain.”

I don’t agree with that statement now, but in the moment the grief was so shocking and the pain was so deep that there was just no way in my mind that 6 months or any number of happy months in a relationship would be worth that kind of pain. 

The rest of that week is just fog in my memory. Food had absolutely no appeal. I almost failed a final. My eyes were permanently swollen and my hands shook from the anxiety. My friends, my brother, married friends and their spouses all took turns coming over as I re-told the story over and over again and broke down with each re-telling.

Grief.

My dad told me that every day would get better. I clung to that promise because I knew I could not go on if this pain didn’t go away. But a month later in July I wrote in my journal that it felt worse. It actually felt worse. (Don’t worry dad, you were right in the long, long run)

When summer came to a close, people would ask me how my internship in Oregon went and I wanted to tell them the truth: hell. pure, grieving hell. Going to work every day felt like a monumental task. I was present physically but never emotionally. When I couldn’t focus I would get out the yellow notepad in my desk drawer and write out what I would say to him and how much I missed him. Then I’d hesitantly tear the yellow pages into tiny pieces and throw them away, trying to let it all go. It was hell. 

The triggers would happen all the time. Driving in my car. Hiking a trail. A song. A scene in a movie. My younger siblings asking me if we’d get back together, not knowing how painful that question was to my fragile heart.

But the trigger that was most painful and probably most frequent was seeing families. A husband with his arm around his wife on the pew at church. A baby swaddled on his mom’s chest on a walk. A friend’s engagement on social media. Every time, it was like the pain was as fresh as that afternoon in June. And it wasn’t getting better.

It took a few months but I finally came to the pivotal realization that losing that boy was not just losing him. I had associated that relationship so closely with where it was headed—marriage and a family—that when it all fell apart, my future crumbled along with it (or so it felt like). The grief I felt actually had little to do with him—because I knew it had been the right decision to break up—and everything to do with my future and mourning the loss of the family that suddenly wasn’t going to happen for me.

I was stuck. When I thought back to the happy moments of our relationship, I felt sick to my stomach. When I thought about the present and how unlike myself and depressed I was, I wondered if things would ever get better. And when I thought about my now uncertain future, it was just too much to bear. I was quite literally trapped in my mind. There was nowhere to go. I was just stuck.

Maybe you relate to this on an intimate level, almost like my pain is yours. Maybe you have never experienced heartbreak or never will. Maybe it wasn’t heartbreak but you’ve grieved in other ways about other things. It’s okay either way. This is just a raw, personal example of a reality I had zero concept of before experiencing it myself. But now that this experience is mine (and now that I've had a year to come up with the words), these are my thoughts on heartbreak.

Let me fast forward from June Christine to December Christine. I was driving back from the movie theater with a dear friend, one of the strongest people I know, who had recently lost her dad. Our experiences were so different yet I felt my heart expand with this empathy I didn’t know existed. I felt bonded to her as I understood just a portion of her grief. In that moment, after months of the most reeling, uncomfortable, and what seemed like *unfair* rollercoaster of my life, I just felt this overwhelming gratitude. So overwhelming, in fact, (and at the risk of sounding irrational or insensitive) that I remember telling her:

I would ten out of ten recommend heartbreak to anyone and everyone. 

What a turn of events ladies and gentleman, let me tell you.

In June of last year I would’ve given anything to reverse that entire relationship and spare myself the heartbreak completely. But there I was in December resolutely recommending the whole experience to all mankind and *knocking on wood*... even willing to do it over again.

I can’t explain how those breathless, anguished cries of June turned into silent tears of gratitude in December. There is no logical explanation for it. But what I can explain, because I’ve seen it and felt it firsthand, is this:

“Surely he has borne [my] grief and carried [my] sorrow”

I want to share what it was like to watch the Savior bear my grief and carry my sorrow during one of the hardest experiences of my life.

It looked like angel roommates sitting with me and crying with me. It looked like an inspired priesthood blessing from a bishop who didn’t even know me. It looked like timely hymn lyrics and moments of respite and peace in nature. It looked like the constant support of my family. And perhaps what buoyed me up most were the gentle messages of encouragement and comfort that would come to my mind randomly, words that were most definitely not my own:

“You are loved”

“I will consecrate your steps”

“Move forward”

“You are growing”

“Pray for him”

“He’s hurting too”

“Trust in me”

I held on to those words so, so tightly.

I won’t pretend that I felt peace and comfort at every moment because I didn’t. There was a lot of emptiness, a lot of doubting God’s plan, a lot of pleading with him for any trace of hope that I would still have a family one day, and a lot of frustration at how painfully long it was taking to be okay. But those gentle whisperings carried me through.

When no one else knew what it was like, the One who was “sent to heal the brokenhearted”, did.

Surely, if he has borne every grief and carried every sorrow, then he could bear my grief and carry my sorrow.

And He did.