There’s a version of me that existed before the heartbreak, a girl who thought love was something that stayed if you held it gently enough. That girl talked in soft metaphors and felt everything like it was a prophecy. She loved in full color. She kissed slowly, laughed too loud, and believed connection meant safety.
I miss her sometimes.
But I’m starting to understand why she had to die.
Heartbreak didn’t hit me all at once; it hollowed me out in small, precise ways. I didn’t even notice I was disappearing until I caught myself in the mirror one day, smiling with my mouth but not with my eyes, and realized I’d been living like a ghost. Laughing at work, existing around people, holding conversations that felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. Like everyone else was speaking a language I wasn’t fluent in anymore.
I hated that emptiness.
I hated how familiar it felt.
Because that’s the thing about loving deeply when it leaves, it doesn’t exit clean. It digs its hands into you, takes pieces you didn’t know were removable, and walks out without looking back. And then you’re stuck with the echo. The aftertaste. The silence that shows up in the places their voice used to fill.
I kept thinking something was wrong with me.
Why can’t I connect with anybody?
Why does talking feel wrong?
Why do I feel so alone even when I’m surrounded?
People say heartbreak makes you stronger, but mine made me observant. I started realising how much energy I spent trying to keep myself together so no one could tell I was falling apart. I’d wake up determined “today I’ll be good, today I’ll be present, today I’ll be alive” and somehow end the night feeling like I was still standing outside my own body.
I was living like someone destined to survive, not someone allowed to live.
And yet, even in the heaviness, there were moments of clarity. Weird, sharp little flashes where I remembered who I used to be: the girl who traced pictures on fogged-up windows, who believed every moment could be meaningful, who wanted to love and be loved without feeling like it was too much to ask.
She’s still in me.
Just quieter.
Just learning to return.
Heartbreak didn’t destroy me — it revealed me. It showed me every place I abandon myself, every fear I try to outrun, every wound I decorate with metaphors because the truth feels too sharp without softness around it.
It made me honest.
About how lonely I’ve felt.
About how badly I want connection.
About how much I deserve it, even when I can’t feel that truth in my bones.
Maybe that’s what this season of my life is about: un-ghosting myself. Choosing to live instead of letting the ache narrate my entire story. Letting my heart hurt without letting it harden.
I’m not the same girl I was in June or July. She wrote to herself like she wanted the universe to save her. I write now like I’m learning how to save myself.
And honestly?
There’s something sacred about that.
