Challenging Comfort

How to Get Over Your First Heartbreak

We all have one in our lifetime. Unless you’re a unicorn or won the lottery of relationships, reading the words, “your first heart break” a name and a face probably popped into your mind. Heartbreak is the part that comes after your “person” who was once by your side, for what probably seemed like was going to be forever, is no longer there. The time when you begin the tumble down one of the hardest falls of your life. The time where that person is no longer physically there, but mentally they are engrained and weaved into most of your thoughts....one of the cruel truths of loss.

Your first love is unlike any other. There are no rules, no restrictions, and most importantly...no protectors of your heart. Every emotion is heightened and fresh and being experienced for the first time. You love like there is no tomorrow and you probably sacrifice parts of yourself like you had never done before. We are all familiar with the ideas that “love hurts” and “love is hard” but we remove ideas like these from our brain because in the moment, the love we share with someone else is infinite.

For myself, my first love consisted of a lot of lying to myself. A lot of shaving down of my own puzzle pieces to fit his because that was love right? It was taking parts away from myself so I could be the person he “needed” me to be. It was the process of completely losing myself to one day find myself again. After my first heart break I was completely lost and broken. I would look around at people and wonder how they got past this terrible time in their lives. They had to have had a heart break in their lifetime too right? But I couldn’t see myself getting past this point in my life. I couldn’t imagine a time that I would be okay, or I would “get over this eventually” like everyone kept telling me, because “time heals all.”

Unfortunately, there is not a one size fits all process of healing. Which makes sense, because we are all different and every love and relationship is different. There is not one relationship in the whole world that is identical to another. Each and every experience is unique. So, what worked for me? Leaning on myself and choosing to love myself first instead. Sounds simple, right? Maybe even a little cliché too? But it’s so DAMN true. The reason my first heart break was so relentless was because I was giving too much of myself to someone else when I did not know how to love myself properly first. I thought a relationship was about finding someone who completes you. Finding someone who holds you up. And sure, maybe they might “hold you up” at times, but a relationship in my mind now, is two people in separate cars heading in the same direction. One does not rely on the other to get there, because a relationship is not about completing one another, but instead each person acting as a compliment to one another.

I was not a whole person before. I was lost and I based far too much of my own happiness on someone else. I had to find myself again, and this time, find my whole self. My whole confident self, that can lean on others when I want, but also, always have the ability to lean on myself too. Because, a certain person may not be your always and forever, but you will always be your always and forever. Be confident in the love you have for yourself, because we accept the love we think we deserve. So you better start believing, you expect nothing less than an exceptional life and an exceptional love.