Yes, that’s normal, or, at least, not abnormal, and I’ve been there, more than once. The first time, in 2003, a boy broke my heart and I couldn’t eat, or think really, or do anything besides play computer games, do drugs, run, go to work, drink, and fight with him. I started eating only junk food because it was all I could get excited to eat. It was the summer of quesadilas & frosties & pizza. When I felt okay for even a second I took that second to eat.
Around that time, when I was in the dark pit of it, my best friend Krista wrote me this email that I still keep around because she was right and it was good.
This is part of it:
“Even though sometimes the world seems about six sizes too small for our pain
the amazing shit is that no matter how deep purple the bruise is
no matter how dark and overwhelming and miserable and worthless it all seems
the world will get a fraction of an inch bigger every day.
Really, every fucking day.
And you won’t notice it for a long time until suddenly, one day, it’s only five times too small for your pain and then four and then the world will just keep getting larger and larger in comparison to your shattered heart and eventually it will be able to hold it and then it will outgrow it.
And your pain will be just a speck in your world.
It is supposed to feel like the end of the world right now. That, my beautiful dearest Ris, is how you know that it was worth it. That is why it was one of the relationships that shook your core and after which you will never be the same. That is how you know that you are growing up and are experiencing shit rather than living safely in risk-free choices….
The world is supposed to feel as though it is ending and you are supposed to know only in the most dormant recesses of the backmost corner of your soul that it will not be like this forever.
You are supposed to feel acutely and lucidly that everything is over that your purpose for life is worthless and that not even cheesy pasta and molly ringwald movies are going to make you smile, and you are supposed to know opaquely and elusively and abstractly that everything is not over and that your purpose in life is so much huger than you can ever imagine and is still saturated with value and that you will eat pesto and read Stephen Dunn and live in Manhattan and have stacks of waffles at corner diners with girlfriends and spend inordinate amounts of money on bath products and sunbathe on the roof reading trashy novels and you will will will will will will will love again.
I did not think that I was going to be able to ever breathe without shaking again after J broke up with me, let alone successfully love and fuck again.
That is what you are supposed to think.
I cried hysterically for months.
I wept so much that I had stewardesses on planes ask me if I needed oxygen, I had waitresses refuse to serve me, I had strangers approach me with offers of help.
Then I stopped.
Then I started again and stopped again and started again and then stopped for good…
… I promise you will survive, and with more grace than you can now imagine and that you will have more grit and vision because of it.
Moral: Sometimes someone can crack open something that feels very safe and make you unreasonably vulnerable: you will live to tell the story of this shock.”
That was in July 2003. She got married last year and she and her husband are incredibly happy. I’ve had three relationships since the Summer of my Discontent. When I started dating my first girlfriend in 2007, the boy who broke my heart wrote me and asked me who are you now, who is this person i see on the internet, what happened to you, you’ve changed so much, i miss your face and how we were, and I thought, you know what, you’re right. I have changed. I’m not the girl with the half-broken heart anymore. I’m really just not that girl anymore.
You will live to tell the story of this shock.
She will live to tell her story of regret.
You never know what the future holds.
