You have got you nails done for the new year.
It wasn’t in the spirit of “new year, new me”. Far from it.
It was a product of sheer curiosity. Your best friend gets the most amazing nail designs and after a long drought of intense longing, you took the plunge and decided to get those nails done for the first time.
Did you feel any different? You did. It made your fingers feel longer and sexier and the edgy green was a sublime message that said, “I look calm, but I will mop the floor with you if you mess with me”.
The nail technician didn’t know this, but you were suffering from a heartbreak, the kind that comes with having unfulfilled longings and desires. You were treating yourself to something different and it worked in making you feel different. It was quite refreshing to learn that he also was suffering from heartache. (Salon gist is on another level!)
He had been served breakfast with a side of juice. The woman he had dated for a year and was hoping to get married to had been cheating on him for a while and he found out in the most dramatic way. He was quite adamant about not giving her a chance if she asked for it and guarding his heart in the future.
You could relate to people who swear all kinds of things when they get their hearts broken. It’s not a great place to be. It looks like hours of walking through a deep dark tunnel with no end in sight and the war is the fiercest in your mind.
Coming from a very recent past of being served a heavy breakfast meal myself, and being in a space where I can look back and see that I am no longer bitter about what happened, here are a few tips on how you can get over being broken-hearted.
Don’t medicate the pain: we live in a world where we are not allowed the space and time to process and express our emotions. It’s a place where people simply expect you to move on and be done with the bad things that happened. Do you know that it’s medically proven that unprocessed pain shows up in your body? From headaches to dizziness to fatigue, several scientific studies prove that your mental and emotional state can affect your body. Experiencing a heartbreak is like getting shot and stuffing your wound with cotton wool, then going about your normal business and hoping that you will not bleed out. You will bleed out, guaranteed. Acknowledge that you have been wounded, then seek help. For me, getting therapy and getting closer to God helped to ease the pain over the years.
Develop capacities: one of the biggest capacities one had to develop post-heartbreak was forgiveness. Coming to understand that it was the healthiest that could be done even though it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Heartbreaks can present excellent opportunities to sit down and reflect on the things that you could have done better and your contribution if any, to the issue. So, if in those moments of self-reflection, you find out that you are lacking in some areas, be honest enough to admit that and start the work of building capacity in those areas.
Don’t make oaths: “I will never”, “it will not happen”, “I will make sure” …pain can make you say and do the craziest things. It can be extremely hard right now to envision a future where you open yourself up to the possibilities of love again, but you can shut down those possibilities with promises that you make from places of pain. While these kinds of promises protect you in the short run, in the long run, they cause you to build walls around spaces of your heart that even you might eventually find hard to scale over. Don’t make promises from a place of pain, ever.
Being a better person after being served breakfast can be hard but not impossible, as long as you are intentional, honest and vulnerable.
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