I had my heart-broken earlier this year, and since then I had been finding it difficult to write. The truth is, I couldn’t trust myself to write anything because I did not know how it would come out and I was finding it hard generally to keep my language PG 16.
I have never been in love nor was I in a relationship so when I got hurt I was completely blindsided. As that Nigerian athlete said “I never experred it”. The thing is, I would be fine for a while and then something would happen and I would just relapse. No one really knew I was hurt, and whilst I saw writing as my therapy, I was unable to do it.
After week one of feeling like… well feeling like my heart had been ripped out, I was determined to learn something from this experience, to turn this hurt into something productive. The first idea I had, whilst in tears in bed surrounded by rolls of tissue paper was to write a book, because all I could think was “I could write a book of how you’ve hurt me”, and somehow my brain thought “Excellent Idea”. The first few chapters were filled with bitter rants and numerous How could you have’s? Needless to say, after a few chapters I could see this becoming more unhealthy than helpful.
After thinking of a lot of similar ideas I realized I was taking the wrong approach. I was like an injured athlete trying to be back on the field the day after sustaining an injury. It was like I was trying to run right after breaking my knee, and after a lot of highs, followed by sudden lows, I was exhausted and decided that the idea of walking so soon after a broken knee was enough. I had given myself to someone and instead of focusing on how to get that self back, I was trying to expunge myself.
This friend I had known for about 3 years had, putting it plain, taken more than I had to give. I felt broken and empty, and still feeling hurt at the same time. And even though he was a total douche, I learnt that I cannot feel disappointed or hurt by someone else without judging them first for their actions. And this all comes from an expectation that I deserved better than that, that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. So I started to feel like I had a right to feel the way that I did because I felt you owed me more than I received.
One day after listening to countless podcasts and my mind had run out of swear words it dawned on me that what I think someone owes to me is in correlation to what I have borrowed to them. Sometimes we fail to see how we have also participated in this hurt. I had borrowed from him a certain sense of myself or placed in him a sense of security, strength and wellbeing. So I had held him up to a standard that I created before even getting to know him and if he could rise to it. Make sense?
I started to realize that this had nothing to do with what he had done, but that I had lost the sense of myself that I had put in him. It is not that I did not know this boy. I had known him for 2 years and had properly spoken to him everyday during that period. It is just that the attachment was not from the person but the sense of self that I put in him, which isn’t even the actual him because I expected him to act in a certain way, without waiting to see how he would actually act so I had placed my judgement and expectations on him and instead of accepting that he did not act the way I think a person in that situation should act, I took it that he had come up short in my eyes.
And sometimes our sense of self can come from something like a good hair day,and this comes from the sense of self that we imagine others want us to be. And we judge ourselves from what we imagine we should be not from what God wants us to be…
It’s right to want to be right or a loving person or a strong person or even to be loved, where it becomes wrong is when we imagine who that person is. As soon as a sense of self is invested in that image we run forever in debt to that, because life will keep showing you that you are not that image that you have created or a perfect relationship is not what you imagine. And this really is God showing us a limit to our imagination, because our hope is to be in things not seen.
We try to keep the image of ourselves alive and that image isn’t even an accurate representation, because we have an image of what a perfect wife or husband would be, but we forget that our mind works in experiences and memories and that’s why we find ourselves feeling the same emotions over and over again and that is why your boyfriend would upset you and you start to feel those feelings that your ex made you feel. Then we wonder why we cannot forgive ourselves or others, when we’ve made ourselves God in our own eyes, thinking we can pay for the debt that we have created in our imagination.
And I learnt to let go and stop creating people and situations in my imagination and just get to know them, and actually experience without prejudging and expecting something to turn out the way my mind has told me it should turn out.
And even though I did not write my bestseller on “How You’ve Hurt Me“, I don’t hurt anymore and that’s enough for now