I'm So Heartbroken, But Hopeful
A woman is a thing of many contradictions.
I’m back in therapy (thank goodness). I’ve always loved the gift of having a thought partner in dissecting my reflections, ideas, and neuroses. She points me toward roadblocks, those opportunities of insight I’d missed in the emotional immediacy of my experience.
Have you considered this?
Try thinking of it this way…
Perhaps we can approach it from this angle.
A breakup is a perfect moment for this sort of objective analysis. Our session began, and the conversation ping-ponged between us until I unexpectedly blurted out, “It feels like I don’t get to be heartbroken. Because I initiated it, because I asked for it, I don’t deserve to get hurt.”
Isn’t it interesting how we’re never allowed to be both, not even in the intimacy of our hearts? I can’t be heartbroken and hopeful, relieved and regretful, grieving and grateful all at once. My therapist nodded, as if she had seen this before—this self-imposed binary, this refusal to grant myself the complexity I so easily extend to others. “What if,” she offered gently, “you let yourself hold both truths? That you made the right decision and that it still hurts?”
Isn’t it interesting how we’re never allowed to be both, not even in the intimacy of our hearts?
I sat with that. How often do we silence our own pain simply because we believe we shouldn’t feel it? Because it isn’t convenient, because it doesn’t fit the story we’ve told ourselves? But the heart is rarely linear. It loops and doubles back, carrying all its contradictions at once. And maybe healing isn’t about choosing one truth over the other but about letting them sit beside each other, unchallenged.
So I’m practicing. When the ache rises, I don’t bat it away with logic or guilt. When relief follows, I don’t question whether I deserve it. Instead, I let them both exist, side by side. And I remind myself: this, too, is what it means to move forward.
And isn’t that what reinvention really is? Not discarding the past, not insisting on a clean break, but learning to carry it all—the love and the loss, the certainty and the doubt. We don’t begin again by becoming someone new. We begin again by integrating everything we’ve been. Heartbreak is its own kind of becoming. A forced reckoning, yes, but also an invitation: Who am I now? What do I want next?
We don’t begin again by becoming someone new. We begin again by integrating everything we’ve been.
When I turned 30 a month ago, rather than lamenting the very real truth that I was about to start over, I reframed: I have the opportunity to start over. I exist on no one’s timeline but my own. And even then, who’s to say my path should be linear? Maybe life isn’t a ladder but a series of loops, of gentle returns. Maybe starting over isn’t about erasing what came before but carrying it with me—proof that I’ve lived, that I’ve risked, that I’ve been brave enough to begin again.
Maybe life isn’t a ladder but a series of loops, of gentle returns.
People have always told me that my choices don’t make much sense. That from the outside, I seem to step away from things just when they’re at their best. And maybe there’s truth to that. Maybe I do have a quiet fear of getting too comfortable—that’s for me to unpack. But I’ve never been interested in a life that simply makes sense to others. I want a life that surprises me, that challenges me, that pushes me into the corners of myself I wouldn’t otherwise explore.
I recently came across the words: You are not here to be understood but rather you are here to understand yourself. It stopped me in my tracks. How often do we move through life trying to be legible to others, to be easy to explain? How often do we seek validation in the form of approval, rather than the deeper certainty of knowing ourselves? But what if the goal isn’t clarity—at least not for anyone else? What if the real work, the real joy, is in continuing to meet ourselves in every iteration, every reinvention?
I love learning from a little instability, growing from a little challenge. I don’t need my life to be a neat, predictable arc. I want the kind of richness that comes from change, from stepping into the unknown before I feel fully ready. Because what do we have if not the opportunity to keep becoming? To step forward, not with certainty, but with curiosity—knowing that even if no one else understands, I do. Or at the very least, I’m trying. And that’s enough.