Find this essay and more in Someone Said This?! Vol. 1 No. 1: If My Wishes Came True
On the other side of this heartbreak, if you’re lucky, will be a particular kind of sadness. It will be lighter than the unbearable weight of each piece of the broken heart you’re carrying now. It won’t feel impossible to carry anymore, but it will make your shoulders burn. You’ll probably find mysterious bruises all over your body, where the corners of the sadness bumped into you as you tried to navigate a new world. But, on days when you’re in familiar spaces, you’ll hardly notice the pain.
Every place you go after the heartbreak will feel brand new.
I don’t mean to make it sound hopeless. This sadness is beautiful. And not just in the way that anything can be beautiful after the darkness required to reassemble a heart. It’s beautiful just because it is.
So beautiful, in fact, it’s in all the best parts of some of the best love songs.
Dolly Parton promised it in “I Will Always Love You.”
Ronnie Milsap declared it in “I Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World.”
Taylor Swift confessed it in “I Almost Do.”
And, of course, Garth Brooks moved all of us with it in “The Dance.”
The ugly truth is no one can teach you how to get through your first big heartbreak. Each of us feels it at some point, and still, it evades explanation or instruction. The best any of us can do is bear witness for each other. Acknowledge that the pain is real, even if there’s nowhere to dress the wound.
But I can make one promise. If you do it right, you can be one of the ones who transforms the pain into The Beautiful Sadness.
One important step is to try not replace the pieces they broke. You have to leave the cracks in your heart wide open. You can’t fill them in with glass or gold, not even lace. The sore parts have to stay exposed, as an acknowledgement that you desperately wanted life to go a different way. And even if life didn’t listen, and even though that might be for the best, you can’t deny that the current life you’re living isn’t always what you wanted. There’s another life where things worked out differently, and you’re happy there too.
But don’t get stuck in the yearning. You can’t reach the lucky side of heartbreak without fully accepting your loss. The Beautiful Sadness is a celebration of what else could have been.
At some point, the central villain in your current heartbreak will b e reimagined as a side character. One who simply matter more in a different storyline than they matter here. But they will never not matter. Any story about you could never be told honestly without the best parts they helped create.
The last step is to find a way to bring them with you into the new chapters of your life. Sit them in the corners of all the spaces you enter. Keep them close enough that someone could ask about the backstory if they happened to notice life’s details.
But give yourself the freedom to move around, to feel the lightness once in a while. And soon, you’ll start to feel excitement for the new endings for both of you, independently.
Because even though they are the person who ripped the future from you, they also made you believe it was possible for the first time. And their influences paint every good day you’ll have from now on.
You’ll know you’ve made it when you find yourself stealing glances at the corners where you left them. Sending silent messages into the past. Or maybe it’s the present. Maybe it’s the future that never could have been.
Wherever it goes, the message is the same.
I’m glad I didn’t know, the way it all would end, the way it all would go.
Our lives are better left to chance.\
I could have missed the pain, but I’d’ve had to miss the dance.