In the past two years of this pandemic (wow, it’s been two years) there’s been so much losing not just of lives but losing of ourselves in moments and in relationships. Our hearts keep breaking, our spirits keep getting crushed, just as we think we are about to hit the other side, something changes and we find ourselves back in that dark place. Wishing for better days, less pain, less breaking, more healing.
The pandemic has forced us to confront ourselves, who we are to each other, how we show up and the things that we found for some we couldn’t confront ourselves. We didn’t want to face who we were in relationships and who we were in friendships. So we broke, yet again and as sad as it may be to lose a piece of one’s heart to have it crushed into a billion pieces, trying to figure out how to piece it together. There’s something quite beautiful in the losing and the breaking – there is the finding. What we find can be so much more filling for who we get to become, how we get to see ourselves, how we get to value ourselves, how we get to love ourselves, how we get to love others and how we get to grow. These things are so much more important than the things we lose in the breaking.
I have been thinking about this a lot and what it means to find things in the breaking and there are certain things I have learnt in the past two years.
Better understanding – understanding it meant looking at one’s own actions from a place of clarity. Understanding why those actions happened. What led to them and the moments that could have changed them on why they didn’t change. Having an understanding helps you become better for what comes next.
Releasing – we often find that we gain more when we release our pain. Being able to release that pain allows you to gain freedom to be whoever you want to be, freedom to learn from past mistakes without blame or anger.
Learning how to love yourself and eventually others – when you begin to find yourself and the things that mean everything to you. It becomes clear that you haven’t lost at all. You start to articulate clear boundaries on how you need to be loved, how you need to be respected. Knowing this will help you love others better, understand their boundaries as well.
Building boundaries – In the breaking we find that we should never have been in that situation in the first place. We find that we gave too much space and allowed too many excuses. We allowed our identities to shift and bend, and mould into what seemed like the right thing, but it never was. I love the song Giants by Dermont Kennedy, he asks, “we used to be giants, when did we stop?” We stop our biggness for others too often to fit their egos.
Redefining happiness – In this time of finding, we also get to learn about what happiness actually looks like. There is happiness and there are delusions of happiness. In the breaking we truly get to confront what our happiness actually looks and often you find it much better than what we thought.
A work in progress – If you cannot be a safe space for the people you love, then you need to figure out what is broken within you. You must learn how to heal and understand the multifaceted nature of healing. Healing begins very small and it ends very small. So how do you begin to heal in a time of crushing? The truth is there’s no better time because there’s no way else to go but up when you are down.
A cup of tea can mend a broken heart – there is so much comfort in a cup of tea drunk in silence when the whole world is in chaos. It is the truest form of peace.
In the finding, you get to be whoever you want to be and you get to see all the ones who have been there with you the whole time. Those who have loved scars, who looked in the mirror in the clear light of day loved the work in progress they saw. Those believed in building together, rather than breaking apart, those whose foundation with you was always stronger than the hurt and anger.
The hardest part of the finding is the rebuilding of trust. It is a journey that you all walk every single day until you already not just trust others but to trust yourself. We keep thinking about things we lose in a breakup. We never think about the things we find and how in our brokenness we actually find our true and whole self.