The Heartbreak Club
By Z Zoccolante
Congratulations. You belong. You are no longer on the outside looking in. You’ve had your heart smashed as though you’ve swallowed a champagne glass and had it smashed in your esophagus, leaving shards of paper thin glass to wander through your body, floating in your bloodstream in crystal thorns.
Congratulations. You loved someone. You cared about someone enough to let them in. You trusted someone so that their betrayal left wounds, left a racing mind, thoughts that spin like a tilt a whirl.
Congratulations. You have a choice. You have a world full of possibility. In the beginning of heartbreak, when you feel like a walking zombie, when it hurts to be alive, there are still choices. There are many possibilities.
You hear of people whose love has turned to hate, who have become fixated on the hurt and how they can’t have what their heart longs for. You hear of how they turn this space into anger because anger has more power than the empty shell of being gutted with sorrow. Sorrow can feel as though we have no control. Anger seems to have more power. People choose to fill themselves with it because blind rage tells us that we want other to hurt so they will know our pain so that we can be justified.
But an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. And aren’t we all at fault sometimes. Don’t we all have our part in everything we’ve created in this life. Even in my life’s greatest betrayal, after sitting in the pain, I was able to see my part in the past. Not in the events that burned everything to the ground, but in ways that I didn’t show up, didn’t do the work on myself. And so I changed from there moving forward, because when choice is taken away from us, when events happen outside our will or control . . . we still control us. We still have choice around our part, our behavior, thoughts, actions.
We always have choice, even if the choice feels small. We can make the small choice.
Our power lies in our ability to choose. Our power lies in our ability to take honest responsibility for our part in our own lives, relationships, connections. Our power lies in our ability to feel the deep gutting shards of glass AND move forward.
The more you practice letting go, the quicker it becomes – like muscle memory.
My friend describes it like letting go of a pen. You drop it. You realize you’re in anger, or replaying sorrow, and you acknowledge it and drop it like you would drop an item from your hand. And you pick up something else A new thought or a new activity. If the same pen finds its way into your hands repeat the process until it becomes a skill, until you can cry about it for a minute and then everything clears and you’re completely fine again. It just needed to be processed out of your body. You just needed to drop the pen.
We all have situations where we feel as though our choice has been taken away. Sometimes, in reality, our external choice has been taken away. We are not in control of any part of a situation. But we are in control of us and the person we want to be.
We can let our hearts become bitter and shadowed, or we can find that the solution to a broken heart is to love more, to be so full of love that it fills every space between, till we love ourselves so much and are so kind to ourselves that we are someone we love to be with. We become someone whose hearts are full.
Maybe not every moment of every day, because we all have our things to process, but for the most part we will grow into people that we love. And as I once wrote in my latest book, we can’t do anything from this point on without self-love.
Feel your feelings
Vent them safely
Pray
Take responsibility for your part and for you
Let it go and replace it with something new
Be kind to yourself
It’s a process
It sucks but it does get better
You are the only thing that you control. But that is your power.
As one of my massage teachers once said, “If you have a choice, do the good thing.”
Allow heartbreak to make your heart softer, more pliable, and bursting with love. Why not? Let the heartbreak club heal you.
With Love,
Z :)
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