You Keep Breaking Your Own Heart. And You Know It.

Nathalie Qassir

18 hours ago

4 min read

Ever wonder why it’s so hard to let someone go? No matter how hard you try, they’re just there. In your head, in your dreams, in your chest. Ever consider the possibility that maybe a part of you doesn’t WANT to let them go? Regardless of the type of love or loss.

I’m no relationship expert, but I think we’ve gotten so bad at processing things that letting go can feel like a complete system shutdown. Or maybe it’s just me and a couple of others (who I hope find this article).

Grief, breakups, endings… they suck. They can send you into a complete breakdown; for those of you who catch it before it eats you, please let us know how you do it. I think there’s a reason some of us choose not to catch it, though.

To heal a wound is to stop touching it. But how do you stop touching it when you’re still trying to understand what caused it? You keep going back, convinced you missed something. Some explanation, some moment that will suddenly make everything make sense. You replay it, revisit it, reopen it, and then wonder why it still hurts.

So at a certain point, we need to stop and ask ourselves: how much of our misery is our own making? If we’re being realistic, being consumed by sadness is easy. I think in all of us there lives a slight masochism that we enjoy. Getting better requires you to stop participating in your own heartbreak. Pain makes it so blurry for us to see: holding on to heartache is a choice disguised as permission for them to stay close.

Understanding what broke you matters. Was it the person, the relationship, or how they treated you? Because those are three different things to grieve. You can miss the person and still know the relationship was wrong for you. You can mourn the relationship without wanting the person back. And sometimes, what broke your heart wasn’t losing either of them. It was accepting what someone you loved was capable of doing to you.

If you’re empathic, or just stupidly in love, you probably became very good at explaining things away. Your memory becomes so inventive when your beliefs are challenged, especially when accepting the truth forces you to act against what you still feel. Maybe they didn’t mean it. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe the good parts say more about them than the bad parts. Anything to make it make sense.

Sometimes the person you keep wishing would come back and fix this is the person you needed protection from. Missing them does not make that any less true. Waiting for someone to finally see where they went wrong, thinking that if you explain it differently, hurt loudly enough, or somehow make them feel the weight of what they did, they’ll finally understand. They might not.

And no, that doesn’t make them the villain. I don’t need to rewrite every beautiful moment into something ugly just so I can leave it behind. Opposing things can be true at once. There’s beauty in life’s contradictions.

You can spend forever waiting for validation from the exact person who hurt you; that is yet another way of keeping them close. You’re still expecting something from them. Eventually, you have to stop screaming underwater for someone who isn’t coming down there to hear you. They could only love you as much as they love themselves.

If you want to get over heartbreak, you need to be very honest with yourself; have that ego-shattering, mind-blowing disbelief of a confession to yourself. Yes, I fell in love with your potential. Yes, maybe I knew better and stayed anyway. Yes, I did not love myself enough to walk away. Part of getting through it is falling in love with yourself. Then giving yourself somewhere else to go.

When we were younger, life moved whether you participated or not; there was always a “next.” As an adult, you have to create the next thing yourself. It’s easier to move on when you have something to move to. You have to create a life that makes you want to feel alive again.

It’s called heartbreak because it feels like your most vital organ is being shattered with no way back to its origin, and that’s the point. Sometimes we do not change until everything we know about our current state ceases to exist. How terrifying.

How privileged. To lose the life you knew and be handed the chance to create another one!

And if you know this is bad for you and that’s why you’re pursuing it, welcome to the club. If you’re smart enough to self-sabotage, you’re smart enough to get out of it. At some point, you have to stop dwelling in your own heartbreak.

This is where letting go gets really scary; they really do become a part of the past. What if one day their name doesn’t do anything to you? What if a song comes on and you don’t have to skip it? What if you can’t remember exactly what their voice sounds like?

When you have no claim on them anymore. No right to know where they are, how their day went, what they’re thinking about at 2 a.m., whether they still order the same thing, whether something happened that made them think of you.

Healing is so terrifying because it feels like losing them one last time. So you hold on, to the heartbreak, the anger, even the hatred. You find yourself mentally hoarding… hoarding memories, conversations, versions of them, versions of yourself. Maybe even the pain itself. Because what happens when it stops hurting? What do you have left of them then?

The heartbreak still belongs to both of you. It came from something you shared. It has their fingerprints all over it. When everything else is gone, the pain becomes proof that there was once something there.

And suddenly it makes sense why you keep touching the wound. Not necessarily because you want to suffer, because every time it hurts, for one tiny second, they’re close again. But healing doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Letting the pain leave doesn’t take the love, the relationship, the lesson, or that version of you with it.

Maybe you don’t have to keep the heartbreak to keep what happened. Heartbreak can become something you carry rather than somewhere you keep ending up. You do not have to keep hurting just to prove that you once loved someone.