How Can We Experience A Breakthrough From A Break-Up?

Terence C.
3 min readJun 30, 2019

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As a sentimentalist and a romantic, I believe there is a silver lining in romantic rejection. When we go through a breakup, be it an imminent or imaginary one, we feel that we’re negated of our entire character. The foundation and structure of who we are is called into question. Our house of cards collapses. No matter the circumstances, it is a difficult pill to swallow. But perhaps, there is some beauty to be taken from being told “No, I don’t want to be with you (anymore).” We become familiar with the whole paradoxical idea of experiencing an exclusive, exquisite and excruciating pain of someone who goes home alone. We see things a little clearer, that agony and ecstasy are sometimes two sides of the same coin.

How can something that aches be so beautiful?

Regardless of which incidental soul it happens to attach to, a heartbreak feels far too eviscerating. It is really an abreaction. It is an reenactment of much earlier losses. It is the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. It is cumulative of all of our past lost loves. We never really got over them. They’re distant, no doubt. But they’re ever present. Similar to how it seems almost impossible to writhe out from under the crushing weight of cultural consensus, propaganda and deafening chatter of other people’s opinion, the experiences of our love engulf us with no reservation.

The world’s most insidious power is that which infiltrates not only our brain, but our heart.

On most nights, we wonder what the hell ever happened to the old Us. We enjoy fewer things, and enjoy them less than we used to. Maybe we can get what we thought we wanted only so many times before it loses its allure. We endure our own lessening and dissolution for that wistful longing of what might have been, what could have been and what should have been. For a moment, we channel our younger self; still alive in there somewhere. There were a lot of touches, both physical and emotional, and the pervasive feeling is one of warmth. We didn’t just change on the outside. Love reinvented what is inside too.

Maybe we can find it a bracing consolation to admit that there are quite a lot of people out there we could fall in love with, if we let ourselves to.

I’m sold on the idea that romantic love is an identity affirming mechanism. We become what we behold. We can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight. We can’t be constricting and deforming the virtue of love. We can’t be in the constant of wrecking our life and making pathetic clowns of ourselves. It is mostly not the reality, but the tantalizing possibility of being a loser, not to be confused with feeling like a loser, reinforced through many loops of self-talk that makes it addictive. It is easier to say that we’re failures than to admit we’ve yet to succeed. But we should be wary of how forever is the ideal that makes us feel like we’re chronic failures. Love is not simply about being bonded in a deeper, more enduring relationship and spending the next 20 years changing diapers, watching Frozen a million times and shepherding kids to basketball practice. Love is more than that. Sometimes love is coming to terms that a break-up is inevitably heartbreaking that you will break away from society for what seems like forever, and it eventually becomes your breakthrough.

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Terence C.
Terence C.

Written by Terence C.

There is a fine line between fishing and doing nothing. We would like to think that we’re fishing, but the truth is we don’t have the line.

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