Right now my world is a shambles. It sucks. I hate it. I hate everyone in this world.
I’m going through a breakup.
The worst part of going through a breakup isn’t that your heart is shattered in a million pieces. It isn’t that you feel like you can’t breathe. It isn’t that you just lost something you think you can never replace.
The hardest part of a breakup is sucking out the poison.
Breakups are like getting bit by a poisonous snake. Sure the bite hurts. You become so wounded and the poison sets in and makes you forget about everything else in life. You don’t care about your house, your dishes, your job, that you haven’t showered in 4 days, that you aren’t wearing real clothes except by Wal-Mart standards… The wound cuts you so deep regardless of how long you two were together. The wound hurts because you left yourself open and you got bit… again. It spreads and burns like fire in your veins.
For most of you this isn’t your first bite. You’ve been bitten before, but the last one didn’t feel as bad as this one is, or as deep as this one feels. The last bite was tiny and this one has punctured your soul, but as I said, it isn’t the bite that’s the hardest part, it’s sucking out the poison.
The first thing you need to do after a breakup is remove him or her from your life. You suck out the poison. This means you stop spending time with him or her. You don’t call. You don’t text. You don’t Snap Chat. You take down all the pictures of the two of you in the house. You delete the photos on Facebook and Instagram and every other social media site that you now use in this modern age. Worst of all, you unfriend and block him or her (and everyone who connects you two) on social media. You donate the clothes he or she left at your house or give them back. You throw out the toothbrush that he or she left at your place.
This is quite possibly the most emotional and hurtful thing you have ever done to yourself, but also the most essential. The more times you do it, the harder it gets. You cry. You sob. You look at yourself in the mirror while crying (we all do it sometimes). You use more tissues than a teenage boy who just discovered porn. You can’t eat (or you eat all the time). You can’t sleep. All your brain wants to do is fight this change, be together again, make it like it was before and it will stop at NOTHING to convince you that this is possible regardless of how you broke up or why.
Your friends all tell you how you’ll love again, but you don’t want to love anyone ever again. They try to reassure you that you’ll survive this bite. (They are trying to be good friends here, so try not to bite their heads off.) But inside you feel this hole starting to build, the hole where the fangs got you. And you feel it spread deeper and deeper until you’re more hole than person.
You suck out all the poison until the open wound that bite is now clean and you can really assess the damage. You suck out the poison until your whole soul is exposed and clean and you’re the most vulnerable you’ve been in the longest time.
But that’s not all there is to recovering from a breakup. There’s a whole list of other steps you have to complete before you’re done. And it can be overwhelming. It can feel like nothing will ever be the same, but I promise that once you suck out the poison, the wound begins to heal. It will be the most horrible thing you ever do, but hang in there. Soon the wound will get smaller. You’ll consider scratching it and letting a little bit of your ex’s poison in via Facebook message, or text or tweet, but don’t do it. You need to stay far away from the poison so you can heal.
The most important part of sucking out the poison is to do it for yourself. Don’t try to heal for anyone else but you. Give yourself time. Let yourself be vulnerable and weak. Show your emotions. Cry and sob and let that mascara run without caring. You need it.
But most of all love yourself and know that it takes two people to make a relationship work. Forgive yourself for any mistakes you’ve made. Mistakes are a part of being human. Know that you will eventually heal in time, but in the meantime, don’t let anyone else bite you.
Pretty soon you’ll be playing with snakes again…
thelifeofjodi 