The catharsis of lost love
When people lose love, they wonder if they would ever get to enjoy the vibrancy of life they have become accustomed to. Everything starts at catharsis.
When you lose love, something happens in your brain as soon as you acknowledge that this love is lost. Let’s call it temporary cognitive dissonance. That thing where you try to convince yourself that this love you lost wasn't that important, even when you are visibly breaking from the loss. You are an uncoordinated mess; your insides feel hollow, and you are crying your eyes out twice a week. You even periodically get angry that you almost fall ill. You don’t even know how to ask for the help you need.
Sometimes, it’s more sinister, especially if you are a thinking person. You deconstruct. You try to convince yourself that the relationship was meaningless; a whole episode of nothingness. But if it was really that meaningless, it’s not supposed to be breaking you apart this badly like a cracked lip on a harmattan morning. You are not known for making huge investments in irrelevant things. But you gave this the all you could muster.
So you try again for an explanation, a piece of evidence that you might be right. You highlight all the negative parts of the love you have lost. Even if it was once a blissful experience with an amazing person, you want evidence that says they were not that amazing. That you lived a farce, an extraction from reality that has now expired. So, you demand, sometimes violently of yourself, that normal life programming should resume. You crack yourself open, more than the lost love ever could.
Say you want to introduce some delusion; you want some semblance of love. You go to the person and demand “to be just friends” or use another person as a rebound. You get the momentary high, with another swerving of pain. Eventually, you are exhausted from denying, appropriating and refusing to face your own pain. That’s when the real journey starts.
One day, by some miraculous intervention, you see the shattered pieces of your heart, with all the nerve endings hanging outside; what’s next? In the throes of pain, you wonder how long healing will take or what it will look like. It’s not uncommon to use search queries like “How long does it take to heal from a heartbreak?” with the common assumption that such information will help you cope. You’re in between a rock and a hard place.
Underneath all that effort to eliminate the part of you that’s hurting, there are more pertinent questions. You are not an octopus. Will I ever be the same person again? Will this new hardness be a permanent part of me? When this injury eventually heals, will the scar tissue prevent anything else from growing there? Maybe then, in the watershed moment that happens in the quiet of the night, adequately flavoured by the chirps of crickets, you finally admit not just your pain but the fear of uncertainty that heartbreak brings.
Love offers a desirable softness because thinking and treating someone tenderly changes your self-perception. When you carry someone else delicately, you are forced to treat yourself with intention and care. It conveys a softness in you that you never really considered. After all is said and done, you want that softness to be there still, even if it makes you cringe. Because what kind of human being are you if you are incapable of cringy things? Caring deeply is cringe for most people. It’s when it becomes evident, in retrospect, how love gives life to an already exceptional painting. It provides a much-needed vibrancy and resplendence previously unimagined.
After heartbreak, it feels like a part of you has gone with the wind, the tender part that you saw flourish in the presence of this other person. So you wonder if you will ever be capable of such tenderness and colour, especially when it wasn’t a part of your life before, hard guy republic. While this softness exists in memory, where the knowledge of the capacity has been established, it is difficult to access. Because quite unfortunately, you can’t fully enjoy yourself alone. A part of you needs to be unwrapped by someone else.
The healing road is arduous and starts with the confrontation of two realisations. One is that you are not the same person—that you've been permanently altered by love. The other is that the personhood that existed before love has been buried, and the graveyard is inaccessible. So, like moulting, a new personhood has to be born.
The canvas on which a new personhood has to be created is where the real healing occurs. This canvas is not blank, but the painting has to be done over a now faint image of a previous self. The period spent in wonder has created an excellent whitewash over the painting. Tilted to an angle, however, you can still glimpse what used to be there. As you gradually lose yourself in the new painting, playing with colours and faint imagination of the final part, the pain, doubt and question start to ebb away as the sand on the seashore dips into the water.
A new personhood is created as colours, shapes and contour lines become complexly interwoven on this canvas. While this new painting is excellent, even breathtaking, an expectation builds for an added layer of vibrancy — one which only love can give. When the expectation crystallises into a tangible desire for love, many moons after the previous heartbreak, one can now breathe easy.
With the last dredges of pain pulled up, a fertile ground above the scar tissue is formed. In the fertile ground is hope, desire and the renewed ability to give and receive love again, one that was thought impossible in the not-too-distant past. Only then do you feel ready.
You deserve love, may you find it in its most vibrant form.
If you’ve healed from a heartbreak, what’s the thing that surprised you the most?
My Friend Innocent Okochikwu has a beautiful piece on how to heal from a heartbreak.
This is beautiful. I always recommend being truthful to oneself after a heartbreak though. If it was a great love, don't lie to yourself that it wasn't. I know it's the person's way of coping, but it's better to confront the truth about it without pretending it never happened.
What surprised me after healing from a heartbreak? My ability to move on and forget. During healing, I usually get angry and frustrated wondering when I'll be done with the tears, and once healing comes, it's like I was never heartbroken. I find it interesting.