The worst part of being an adult

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Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. Cheryl Strayed

Do you know the worst part about being an adult? Having to pretend you’re fine when you’re totally not fine. Having to show up and smile, carry on with the everyday normalcies of life when inside you’re suffering is just plain cruel. “No, I don’t want cracked pepper on my salad? Can you tell I’m heartbroken? Leave me alone!”

I don’t think there’s anyone on earth who can’t relate to this – and I mean the quiet misery, not the pushy waitstaff. What is life if not a series of sorrows (and triumphs), and how do we endure them?

There’s a place inside all of us where our deepest hopes and fears dwell.

It takes a lot of trust to reveal this part of you to a partner, shining warm sunlight on a piece of you kept in the dark. Here in a space of true exposure is where deep and profound love begins. But when the person who promised to share your life with tells you he doesn’t love you anymore, it should kill you instantly, a mortal betrayal. But instead, we’re left wounded, with a cracked-open heart, empty and exposed, a forced vulnerability.

How do we even begin to recover from something like that? How do you heal a broken heart?

heartbreak

In the beginning, you might feel like a shattered shell of a person; a ghost resigned to walk among the living. You go through the movements of life without purpose. One foot in front of the other, you’ll get there, wherever “there” is. And honestly, why is heartbreak so damn exhausting? I’ve never napped more!

But time carries on, and I suppose you begin to heal; the pain isn’t there all the time, sometimes you forget. Sometimes you even laugh! But then you remember again, and it’s awful. Waking up to the stark reality of your situation is the worst. I thought I was not too fond of mornings before, but now I truly despise them.

Rambling with no idea what my point is might be my forte. No idea where I’m going with this; I suppose that I’m trying so hard not to fall into despair. But I’m tired. I’m tired of hurting. I’m tired of grief. I’m tired of living out of a bag. I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of saying, “yeah, I’m fine.” I’m tired of COVID and anti-vaxxers and not being able to sleep and Christmas decorations and why the last $3 avocado I bought seemed perfect on the outside but was rotten on the inside. Everything is, I don’t know, exhausting.

Every season of mehs and yawns will end, but it doesn’t make me feel any better to write that. Trying to sit with the pain and feel the emotions of a personal tragedy is hard. But sit with it I will because I’m determined that, if anything, I will come out of this a better person. I must.

I’m sharing my own current raw and fractured heart on here not for any sympathy or compassion (please don’t), but because I want you guys, all of you, to know you’re not alone, in both heartbreak (which we are all called to endure at some point and in some way in our lives) and also in having to hold yourself together when you really don’t want to. Instagram is a goddamn theater – let’s not pretend or perform.

Heartbreak is horrible. Life doesn’t go always go to plan. And being an adult sucks sometimes.

By the way, I’m fucking single.

Who else is currently enduring heartbreak? Please don’t let it just be me.

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