1,000 days post-breakup

The awful beauty in saying goodbye, 'Sticky' by Drake, and standing naked in the light.

My first relationship lasted two years. We started dating right after high school graduation, went off to the same college, and broke up the summer before our junior year. We spent the formative years of 18, 19, and 20 in close, kind proximity.

There was no bad blood in the breakup, and I am being honest when I say it was mutual. It was as gentle as we could figure out how to make it, and it also left me in a type of pain I had never experienced before.

Naturally, people asked what the reason was. I often wonder if they had expected me to disclose some cheating saga, produce text thread screenshots or digital receipts of some kind. Maybe they expected me to share something that would shake their perspectives of me or this person, or even our mutual friend group at large. In some ways, I couldn’t blame them. Saying “we just weren’t 18 anymore” seemed satisfactory enough, but I quickly realized I didn’t have an easily packaged story to share in passing at the bar, catching up with a friend, or even to my parents.

I knew enough to know this: we seemed to have ideas of how a relationship would go, feelings and needs as 20 year olds we couldn’t always identify, let alone articulate. We were growing into two separate people beginning to want what felt like separate things. While we couldn’t necessarily verbalize some of the tensions we were beginning to feel, we knew we didn’t want to hurt the other person. We cared for one another deeply, told each other we each deserved something happier, said we’d be friends. To quote the incredible Matt Maltese’s song “Less and Less,” it seemed that we were “making choices with our innocence.”

It was horrible and right and awful and the best decision for the time. It is one of the few feelings that has ever rendered me speechless in the moment and many moments after. I just knew what I felt, and this essay is about my journey in learning to actually and honestly sit in that.

Of course — and I will only provide this disclaimer once — there was far more to it than that. There always is. The only “simple-feeling” thing about our breakup, from my standpoint, was the love. Three years later, and I’d still like to say that’s true.

The relationship really was wonderful, and I learned so much from it. For two first-timers, I think we did a pretty good job. I owe many of these reflections to this person and the time we shared, and feel able to reflect so fondly and openly because of my own light and capabilities, yes, but also because of how this person loved and supported me — even at the end.

But this piece, however, is not about him or our relationship. This piece is about the awful beauty of a breakup. What it feels like to stand naked in the light — no matter what led to you getting there.

The relationship was about us. The breakup has been about me.

At this point, the details and lessons of my past relationship are fairly irrelevant to everyone except myself and the person I dated. However, what I have learned about a breakup could be of some use to anyone familiar with this tough, gross, dull pit-in-stomach spot.

1,000 days is a long time. In these days, I finished out the second half of college (which, by the way, felt like six years, as I am of the belief that one college year = three regular ones), lived with some of my best friends in a huge green house, traveled abroad, moved back home, started a job I never thought I would, listened to a lot of music, cried and laughed and sang and danced. In these days, I grew out my hair and watched my dog get old. I spent time with my brothers. I got medicated. I started doing things like pilates and cycling classes. I posted videos of myself reading poetry online. I read poetry in real life on stage. I logged many miles in my Subaru. I had three birthdays.

1,000 days is endless. To take you through each one would be novels of a woman coming into a vulnerable and important part of herself. I am standing naked in the light with this, everyone. This breakup made me feel like the kind of person who feels more able to do that.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. Ask me on 1,001 and it might be all different again.

No one is god, not even you.

I am not going to tell you that I “get it” because I am not a liar. I do not “get” your experience because I am not you. However, I am also not going to say that I “don’t understand,” because I do understand that you feel like there are things no one understands about your experience. You are correct.

Welcome to a tricky part of this process: multiple things can be true at once.

You are the only person who can have the feelings you’re having, no matter how universally we describe them in music or movies or other pained art. That’s what makes people keep thinking there’s a way to describe this particular grief. And there is. As long as individual people keep falling in and out of love, there always will be.

Do not let anyone or anything take this feeling from you. You are an ocean, waves big and small. Get yourself around good people who will ride the waves, who don’t diminish or compulsively reduce their size, who just are there with you.

Limit your consumption of outside ideas and opinions and noise, at least for a while. I’m even talking about stuff like this — about me, an internet stranger, running the risk of accidentally telling you what to feel.

Let me be clear, I am not suggesting you isolate. Had it not been for my friends and the love around me at all times, this reflection (and my life) would look undeniably different. In fact, the role my loved ones knowingly and unknowingly played in this journey transcends words and all the gratitude I could give.

I also want to credit the art and media I did consume that helped me feel less alone during this time. I am only advising you consume everything, always, with caution and to not let it drown out your own thoughts, too. You are still in charge of the emotional work of thinking for yourself during this colossal upset, with whatever energy you have left.

In my experience, the thinking proved to be the longest-lasting, most stubborn challenge, as it was mostly entirely self-inflicted. I was immediately, as one can imagine, extremely uncomfortable in the wake of my breakup. I tried to rationalize everything I could, to make friends with the discomfort by “understanding it.” I was convinced I was putting in the work because I was moving in thought: journaling, talking it out, thinking and thinking and thinking. And while that all certainly has its place in the process, it is not the process.

If it was a matter of intelligence, you could have the breakup blues beat in days: read all the self help books (and Substack posts), watch the movies, listen to the podcasts while you work out and pledge yourself to new and laborious personal routines. But it is not a matter of intelligence. Your heart is not your brain.

Personally, I found myself trying to make decisions for the both of us, trying to control a narrative about our breakup. I wanted everyone to be comfortable — him, me, anyone I was sharing uncomfortable news with. It took me a while to realize I wanted those around me to think my decisions were intelligent. That even in this emotional gray, I could still make the “right” decision. (But “right” for who?)

The truth is that I was making choices based on what I thought I “should” do, things I had learned from other relationships and friends and the internet and hypothetical ideas. I also was caught up believing anyone else in my life was thinking about this even a quarter as much as I was. I would, of course, recommend listening to those that have your best interest at heart. I would also encourage you to pull up a seat at the table. Your opinions must be there, too.

Somewhere in this process, I heard that everything you learn or hear about is ‘knowledge,’ and only when you do it in your own life does it become ‘wisdom.’ I thought maybe I could avoid certain parts of heartbreak because I knew what had been a “bad idea” for my friends in their own processes. I thought I could use the life lessons of loved ones, movie characters, or self-help writers in place of actually doing it myself. Yes, advice from others is good. Yes, it’s good to observe and learn from mistakes or inspiring moments of those around us.

But you have to live through it.

There are things you know, and things you know. You know them in your body, through the process of enduring it yourself. This is a corny little rhyming phrase, but I would be remiss not to include it on the chance it could help a fellow overthinker. “You gotta feel it to heal it!” And I guess I knew that, but I didn’t know it until I did.

I now recognize most of the mental movement I was doing was in circles, with the subconscious goal of avoiding the center. I recognize that breakups are deeply complex because relationships are deeply complex. There is far too much to “figure out” even on your best day, let alone two weeks out of an intensely emotional experience. The good news is that there’s no timeline. The bad news is that there’s no timeline.

There is no way around this feeling. It’s too big. It’s blocking the road. You have to sit in traffic. You have to wait it out. You have to use whatever metaphor makes you feel best to understand that the only way through is through. The time will pass anyway. Just be there.

You are going to question things about yourself you thought you were done asking about. You’re not going to care about what you look or feel like for a while. You’re going to have to force yourself to do things you actually love. This experience will give you empathy in ways you haven’t known, and one of those ways is the consideration of mental health in the context of a breakup. You will think over and over again, “what would I have done without my friends, family, home life, this bed, etc.” You will fight hard to look like you have it all together, don’t bother. You will feel so embarrassed that you care so much, that you just aren’t “figuring it out,” that you have the same thought twice, and you will want to hide so much of that. You will have a good day and feel guilty. You will have a bad day and feel just fine about it. You will think you have it all buttoned up, and your housemates will hear you cry in the shower. Stop running from the leakage. Stop pretending this is a math equation because you think it makes you feel better. Make weird art. Be a freak about this. Let yourself think crazy things without the disclaimer that you’re “not usually like this.” Of course you’re not usually like this.

You will break open a hundred times and have light exit and enter you in a hundred ways. It will be extremely painful and disorienting. But when your eyes adjust, it, like most things in the light, will be beautiful.

It’s not embarrassing to care. The love is yours to keep.

In these past three years, I have become entirely different and absolutely rooted down in who I have always been.

I care about my ex. With the nature of our breakup, what I was told in confidence about his life, how I have long viewed him and the role he’s played in mine, the fact that I still see him every few months around the mutual friends we love and cherish — I still care for him. And I am lucky to do that.

Of course I had on rose-colored glasses for a while, such is life, but in this process I decided that caring is not an insane act. It is not synonymous for letting someone take advantage of your kindness. I am a firm believer that it might leave you feeling hurt or embarrassed, but you will never really regret the act of caring.

The feeling your loved ones and internet strangers are trying to warn you of is someone abusing your boundaries, the ways you give the benefit of the doubt, the ways your heart remains open for this person. While this unfortunately could happen, I believe the actual care and capacity to express it is nothing to regret.

On my deathbed, I choose to believe I will ultimately be glad I made a tipsy, chatty fool of myself the first few times I went out after breaking up. I will be glad I wrote a lengthy and impassioned breakup letter. I will be thankful I posted poetry on the internet despite the awkwardness. I will be thankful that I asked how he was doing, that I mentioned the good parts wherever I could, that I defended the idea that we should both feel comfortable in the months and years following the split. I will not care about the times I felt like people didn’t really understand, or the times I misjudged a situation and got my feelings hurt. I’ll be thankful I felt.

In this process — the feelings I was left with in the heartbreak and the constant ‘will people agree with this decision?’ spirals — I learned that the answer is not shutting off the care, but to manage how it happens. To send some of my care from behind a closed door, to do it while protecting myself, but not bullying myself for the feeling. It’s a hard balance to strike, but humans are complicated and love makes us stronger, makes us harder in our ways. And I will not regret feeling the love, not once. I refuse that.

The world is cruel enough. I will save my anger for situations that earn it. Despite how frustrated he and I made each other at times, despite the hurt I felt in the end, it is nowhere near a level of continual hatred and anger. Far more love, far more love, far more love.

I will say that while you are figuring out how to keep potentially caring for this person while also being fresh in the breakup, I do recommend taking time apart. This is obviously, historically, classically an awful part of the breakup process: not being able to talk to the one other person going through this same thing, not being able to share and collectively wallow in the grief of the relationship you thought you’d always have.

I would encourage you to think, as isolating as it might feel at first, that you and your ex are actually not going through the same thing. Like I said, the breakup becomes about you independently and the other person independently. Same specific breakup between two specific people, yes, but different reactions. Different reflections, different things to work through. Personally, it has been healing to realize this and also actually acknowledge this with my ex in some of the conversations we’ve had in the years since breaking up. For a while, I was running from the fact that I was going through this internally within the walls of myself.

With that said, I do think sometimes “no contact” isn’t always the best solution for everyone. It just isn’t feasible in some cases. While I agree that some fashion of no contact is required to process and progress, breaking up and never seeing that person again is really weird — especially if it was a loving mutual thing. There’s a narrative all over social media that you should completely detach from someone you’ve dated. And I trust and believe this opinion exists for good, true reasons. But do not forget your experience is subjective. Your life and love are yours.

Practical advice. What actually happens.

There’s a chance that you, kind reader, are currently in a place of grief or heartbreak or whatever it may be and, though it’s been some time and I no longer feel like the woman who was doing these things, it feels wrong not to include what I did in my freshest days .. and what have become habits.

We’ve finally reached the part of this essay where I share what I wish had been included in all the poetic, perspective-driven pieces I read through blurred tears 1,000 days ago. I wanted someone to tell me it sucked and it was okay to sob in my room, and I wanted someone to tell me what they actually did in their real, day-to-day life while the feeling passed through over and over again. Here’s a small but impactful log.

There will be many moments during which your life in society will compete for attention with you being a human. You will, unfortunately, have to simply find ways to make this work despite the lack of energy and anguish you feel. But there are ways to wipe your eyes and manage to go grocery shopping. There are ways to be a part of the turning world. Sunglasses for the bright light, if you will. When you feel done crying in your bedroom and need to do something practical like go to the store or walk to your on-campus job, put on headphones and play a dumb song really loud. Pick a song that is not your favorite, not your least, not one that reminds you of your ex in any capacity. Weird beat, silly lyrics, a childhood classic. Tears in your eyes, get up and move your body to the whole thing. The entire song.

I have some recommendations below, but pick whatever feels right and good for you. You can feel free to picture me, tears in my eyes in my college bedroom, forcing a pathetic dance to “Sticky” by Drake. I would, in a sad and not at all cohesive way, move my limbs around the room for all four minutes and three seconds. By the end of the daily cries (which, trust, eventually won’t be daily) I had pavlov-dogged myself into wiping my tears upon hearing the opening beats.

This feels small and odd, but I trust it’s psychologically practical in some respect. It at least got my body a little further from breakdown mode, even if I cried for three of the four minutes. I was up, I was committing to changing route for as long as I could. I was “dancing” to “Sticky” every single day.

On the topic of music, you will eventually have to take a break from the gut-wrenchers — the Gracie Abrams, the Lizzy McAlpine, the Phoebe Bridgers, etc. You’ll know when. You’ll reach for that one playlist (the one you curated full of songs you wish you had written that somehow perfectly describe your experience) and sigh. Take a break. R&B is a great temporary substitute for my fellow sad-music enjoyers. Sometimes you have to pull yourself from the mud. Changing your music is a pretty achievable (and healthy) thing to do. I recommend Alabama Shakes, Olivia Dean, Sir Woman, Djo, Smino, and Dijon. Still some emotional and reflective music, just something a little different than tear-jerkers on an acoustic.

And on the topic of media consumption in general, sometimes wallowing in the sad movies or songs is not wallowing — it’s a form of catharsis. Art helps us unlock avenues to feel. However, it is vital you take a break from breakup content and analysis and everything begging for space in your mind, especially while it’s dealing with the bright light.

Besides, it’s also nice to find and spend time with something that has absolutely nothing to do with your life or current situation. Something you can immerse yourself in because it asks for no taxing personal connection. Something, for example, like the show Jane the Virgin (about a virgin who is accidentally artificially inseminated and has an insane roller-coaster of a life), or maybe Ozark (about a family of in-over-their-heads money launderers working for the Mexican drug cartel).

And, if feasible and accessible to you, I would look into therapy. Among other things, there is value in sharing your perspective to someone (a professional someone) who does not know anything but that; does not know your friends, your ex, your family, anyone else.

I heard this saying that “nothing works until something does.” So try everything. If you fall down a rabbit hole of comedy clips on YouTube, that’s fine. If you can’t stop making this one particular comfort food, keep eating. If you need sleep, grab the pillow. If going for long walks brings comfort, lace your shoes. If you end up taking my pavlov dog music suggestion, keep your headphones charged. As long as you are not hurting yourself or someone else, do what works. Try everything until something sticks. Eventually, relief will come.

Other helpful pieces of media!

Binchtopia is my favorite podcast of all time. A few years ago, the ladies recorded this episode “The Weight Of It All,” which touched me deeply. One of the hosts (Julia) is fresh out of a relationship and reflecting vulnerably. Then, a year later, they filmed “The Second Arrow,” reflecting on the reflecting. These women are incredible for many reasons.

Songs for the immediate post-cry:

• “Sticky” by Drake

• “Gloom” by Djo

• “Dirty Town” by Mother Mother

• “Hot Wings” from the Rio soundtrack

Shows I like in general (and think would be a good distraction from most people’s daily lives, ranging in drama and plot severity):

• Jane The Virgin

• Ozark

• Suits

• Stranger Things

• The Office

• New Girl

• Abbott Elementary

Other small things I found myself doing that helped … just in case they help anyone else:

• A lot of really long showers

• Talking to myself in my car

• Going to the movies

• Working shifts at a restaurant in my hometown

• I posted my poem ‘girl dinner’ about two months after the breakup. Now I post poems on TikTok all the time.

• Eating pasta

• I became really into drinking tea? I had never really liked tea before.

• Walking

• Going to workout classes so someone else could tell me how to move and what to do and so I couldn’t think about anything else for 45 ish minutes because I was overstimulated (positive).

• Sleeping. A lot.

I am grateful for days at all.

I have distinct memories of feeling like this will never pass. To your potential surprise, I am not here to tell you “it will pass” because I know that you, kind reader, might be approaching this essay in the headspace of the opposite. Those words mean nothing right now. What I hope reaches you instead is this: there is one day at a time. Your job is to have your feet there the whole day.

Time does heal, but I will offer you the reminder that healing is a painful process. Think of physical therapy, think of relapse, think of the long journey that is healing the body and brain. Imagine your heart and brain have shattered bones. Imagine the cast, the pain of removal, the nerves about using the arm again. Sometimes healing does not feel good. In fact, it might not even feel “better.”

This breakup taught me how to simply wait something out. The result of that waiting and staying true to myself has helped me realize that right now I am in a place of needing to be with myself without simultaneously figuring out/analyzing who is watching and from what angle. I spent a long time paying really close, often misguided, emotionally exhausting attention to what version of myself I needed to be around certain groups of people (and not even because anyone asked me to). This breakup, after I ran around in circles trying to “solve” the whole thing and write an essay like this one week out, forced me to face the music of myself. I think it’s valuable to question whether or not you like your tune.

I feel it’s worth mentioning I am aware that I do not have the scope this essay might be attempting to reflect. I am 23 years old. One long-term relationship. One breakup. That’s not to say these reflections aren’t valid, that I can’t try to organize some takeaways — but it is to acknowledge there is so much more coming, and so much I still don’t know.

You can learn from something for a long time, long after the first part of it is over. It’s not that it’s been 1,000 days (though it’s a satisfying number), it’s that there have been any days at all. That time has come around again and again despite, despite, despite.

Stay strong, big heart! The love you had and have is yours to keep. You are not alone in this experience, though you are having a unique version of it because you are the only you who has done it this way, walking through something you cannot yet see the other side of. I only encourage you keep your eyes as open as you can.

The light is coming in. The light is coming in!