It’s Just a Breakup
Learning to stop arguing with myself about my own damn experience!
It’s just a breakup!
Friendships and relationships end, that’s life.
People come and go in your life.
It’s a breakup, and now you just need to get through the grieving process.
I swear I heard so many variations of this that I believed it all. Of course, all my friends are right, this is just normal grieving, and I know all about the 5 steps of grieving, so let’s get on with this thing so I can put it behind me.
Denial: Oh, I know all about this one. Still waiting for my best friend to show up and say “ha! I punk’d you! Got you good!!”
Anger: I am not comfortable with anger, but I felt it here. It wasn’t pretty. Shocked my poor puppy!
Bargaining: I mean duh…If I just did this one thing differently and changed this one behavior of mine, all would have been fine.
Depression: Constant. My bedroom and bed have gotten to know me well. I think they are getting tired of me actually.
Acceptance: Ummm…hello? Acceptance? Where are you? I’m waiting!!
Oh wait a minute, I forgot, healing isn’t linear. Ok, let’s start from the top boys and do this again!
Weeks passed.
Then months.
And still, nothing.
I don’t understand why I can’t move on! Because after all…
It’s just a breakup!
Over time, nothing seemed to be changing. My friends became exasperated that I wasn’t getting over it, that I was repeating the same stories, same arguments, same memories, and the constant lingering depression.
My inner critic, Billy the Bully begins to chime in on my “failure” by saying:
Oh my God you loser, what is wrong with you? Multiple times a day, every day, people break up! Look at you. Still stuck. Still frozen.
She moved on quite easily. You want to know why she moved on? Because she got away from you! Lucky her!! Can you imagine if you could get away from you??? But you can’t, can you? Everywhere you go, there you are. What a loser. What a piece of fucking shit!!
Billy’s words kept echoing in my head: “Can you imagine if you could get away from you???”
My mind started to shift from “It’s just a breakup” to “What is wrong with me?”
The feeling of failing, defeat, and ultimately the shame that I can’t move on. And I’m losing more friends because no one wants to be around me anymore. My world is shrinking on me. The loneliness and isolation are starting to sink in.
Not only did my best friend “get away from me,” but most of my friends are also “getting away from me.”
Again, Billy the Bully’s words keep echoing in my head:
Can you imagine if you could get away from you??? But you can’t can you? Everywhere you go, there you are!
This is probably the lowest I felt in my life.
Dammit!! What the hell is wrong with me!!!
It’s just a fucking breakup!
At one point, something shifted in me again. I can’t pinpoint the moment, or if I was triggered by something I read, but something within me asked:
“What if this isn’t just a breakup?”
What if my original premise was wrong?
My mind found a little movement in a positive direction. And sometimes, just a little momentum is all that is needed to get going again.
I first focused on the actual breakup itself. I had my best friend of 7 years tell me on one day that we will always be friends and I’m part of the family, giving so much safety and comfort. And then the very next day, I am ghosted and never hear from her again.
For me, this wasn’t friends drifting apart or even having a big fight. It was an abrupt, unexpected, and confusing rupture within me.
Get Liamb Boyd’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Ok, so maybe this is more than a breakup for me.
I next looked at the actual friendship. We became codependent on each other. We became enmeshed with our lives. We became comfortable and complacent. I wanted safety and I didn’t know where to find it except in that friendship. And then all of a sudden, that safety was gone.
Ok, so maybe this is more than a breakup for me.
Finally, I looked at myself. My history, my traits, my shadows. I had a friend who kept telling me “I don’t know why you don’t get mad, say ‘fuck you’ to them, and move on! She ghosted you Liam!! Get mad!”
But that’s not me. The person telling me this may get mad due to how they were raised, their experiences, their history, their triggers…plus, it is easier to give “advice” when you are not in the deep end.
But I have my own experiences, history, triggers. Some things I learned about myself:
I have an anxious attachment style
I have abandonment issues
I have low self-worth
I have no home within myself
I don’t say the above as Billy the Bully would say them. I say them as something I have learned to recognize and accept that these traits are a part of me right now. A lot of my healing involves looking at these aspects and working on them. But I can’t deny they are there.
Ok, so maybe this is more than a breakup for me.
Those three aspects combined:
The way the friendship ended
The way our friendship became enmeshed
The internal issues within myself
These three points all created a perfect storm within me, and they all collided at once.
I didn’t stand a chance.
As meteorologist Todd Gross said in The Perfect Storm:
“It would be a disaster of epic proportions. It would be…the PERFECT STORM.”
Cue the big thunderous music here! Come on, I had to use a Perfect Storm quote! When was the last time you heard a Perfect Storm quote??
Finally, I realized that for me:
This was more than just a breakup.
I kept denying my experience. Whether it was my friends in my ear, society and how we treat people when they are going through the end of relationships, or Billy the Bully getting on me…but I kept denying what I was experiencing.
Then I gave myself permission to accept what was really happening to me. I gave myself permission to accept that for me this was more than just a breakup. I stopped arguing with myself and I just accepted that one thing.
Wait…did I just say: “I accepted?”
Well fuck me. There it is after all.
Acceptance.
Not acceptance that I am over it and all is good
Not acceptance that my life is “back on track”
Not acceptance that the end of my friendship means nothing to me
But acceptance that my experience is my experience, and I don’t need to be ashamed of that, fight that, defend it to others, or apologize for it.
Acceptance to me is that in this moment, with all three storms hitting at once…I can quote Mark Wahlberg’s line from the end of the movie The Perfect Storm:
Well fuck me!
Ok, before anyone comments on this, I know that is not what he says at the end of the movie. In fact, if I recall correctly, he gave some cheesy line at the end that was laughable. So, I’m rewriting the end of the movie to what I really think he would have said: “Well fuck me!”
That acceptance allowed me to move forward. Not because I was suddenly healed. Not because I was over it. But because I had finally stopped arguing with myself about what happened.
In a prior article, I wrote about needing to listen to my body in order to move forward. I also needed to stop arguing with myself and minimizing or dismissing what I’m actually experiencing in order to move forward.
I don’t know what the next step is.
But I’m ok with that because what is important is that there is finally a “next step.”
Time to get curious about what’s next.
