Heartbreak is an innate aspect of teenage life. And yet, it doesn’t feel any less devastating when it happens.

When you trust someone – wholly put your faith and belief into them, let yourself be vulnerable, reveal the deepest parts of you – you are baring yourself, peeling off armor piece by piece. And when that person breaks the most fragile part of you, the one you handed to them tenderly in the hopes that they would shelter it, it hurts like anything.

From the perspective of an adult, it’s one of the essential parts of the “teen experience”. But as an adolescent who is actively going through the event, it feels like the end of the world as you know it.

Today was not my first experience with teenage heartbreak, and likely not the last.

When something goes wrong, it doesn’t stay neatly contained and labelled in the “relationship” category. It bleeds over into:

• am I lovable?
• am I good enough?
• did I imagine everything?
• why do I keep remembering the good moments after the bad ones?

There’s also the loss of innocence. It’s the first time I’ve genuinely realised that someone can love you and still hurt you, or say sweet things and still resent you.

I realised far too late that any relationship that drains you, makes you feel like you’re walking on eggshells, or exhausts your energy… is too painful to be sustainable.

The hardest thing to process is that the people who hurt you aren’t monsters. Their actions are just a culmination of poor communication, acting selfishly, avoiding honesty, or treating you in ways that diminish you. It would almost be easier if they were simply cruel all the time. It would also certainly be easier if you were perfect and acted like a saint all the time.

It is difficult, however, to explain the humiliation of being loved publicly and resented privately.

(My major lesson from this was that one should never doubt Mom-Instincts^TM)

Yours truly,
Divi