Time heals most wounds.

About a year and a half ago, my heart was shattered into a million little pieces. The pain of heartbreak feels physical. Your chest feels heavy, you can’t sleep, and at times you don’t even want to move. You feel weighed down; everything reminds you of them — the list goes on. When you decide to sit in this pain, you decide to unlock every deep-seated reason you feel this way. During my heartbreak, I discovered that I was healing from wounds deeper than the ones caused by my breakup. I was — and still am — healing from years of abandonment, trauma, housing insecurity, and a lack of self-love.

I want to share my story in hope that it will guide anyone who may feel hopeless in their healing journey.

My ex and I had tried everything we could to make our relationship work. After being together for about eight months, we took a leap of faith and moved in together. This is when we started realizing how incompatible we were. At this point, our relationship had endured long distance and a few break ups, but I still believed that he was the love of my life… that he was the one. I’ve always had an extremely fantastical and dreamy idea of love. I was and always will be a hopeless romantic. I believed that you fought for the love you wanted. I wasn’t going to give up.

We tried everything in the playbook to make it work. We tried reading relationship books, taking trips together to connect, and we even started seeing a couple’s therapist. However, our problems were too deep and beyond the point of being repaired. After a gut-wrenching fight on New Year’s Eve, and lots of arguments in between, we decided that we could no longer put ourselves through the pain of trying to make this work. This was our third and final break up.

I knew this time would be different from our previous break-ups. I couldn’t bear the pain of watching him pack his things and leave the apartment — and me — empty so I stayed with a friend while he packed. When he was all done it was time for me to go back “home”. Since I was in a place in my life where I was building a foundation for myself, I decided it would be best for me to stay in the apartment. This place is a hidden gem in a city where it’s almost impossible to find reasonable rent. The drive back home was terrifying. Thankfully, I had a lot of wonderful friends accompanying me and literally holding me up when I couldn’t handle the heaviness. When I opened the door, the place was empty. He was kind enough to leave me an air mattress to sleep in and some other furniture I requested, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was a big fuck you in that moment.

I don’t think I’ve ever cried as much as I did those next few months. Every night the apartment felt cold and empty. I longed for him. I missed him. I fell asleep crying. I woke up crying. The pain I felt was very similar to what it feels like when someone actually dies. I know it sounds dramatic, but I really didn’t see the day that I would start to feel normal again. Fortunately, I had blocked him on all platforms because I knew that speaking to him would not be helpful. This relationship was over, and I had to accept it. Secretly, I wanted him to heal. I wanted him to “do the work” as they say and realize that we could make this work. But those were just my wounds speaking. It was over.

I immediately started my healing journey. I took a very intentional stance on how I would go about my healing. I didn’t want to just jump into another relationship, although I could have. I didn’t want to ignore my feelings and start something new with someone while still having someone else so engrained, so alive in my heart. I continued seeing my therapist. I started working out and creating healthy eating habits. I didn’t see it then, but this was the beginning of a brand new life for me in a brand new city.

My ex decided to take a different route. Not too long after we broke up, he was already seeing someone new. Although this felt like a deeper cut into what was already an open wound, I wasn’t surprised. That was his cadence. Fast forward a few more months down the year, I was hit with even more gut-wrenching news. His new girlfriend was expecting. This all happened within 6 months of our breakup.

When I found out, I felt numb. It took me a few hours to really let it sink and figure out how I felt. My ego said “This was the man I loved! This was the man that not too long ago was telling me that he wanted my children. How the fuck could he be having a child with someone else?!” Eventually, my emotions settled down and this is where the magic happened. It’s as if this news was the news I needed to cut the cord. Any hope, any feelings, any love I still had for him were completely gone. Now I was just left with me, myself, and my healing.

I moved from Queens, New York to Southern California on my own in 2012. I moved back home to Queens in 2018 and decided to move back to California towards the tail end of 2020. Living far away from family isn’t for the faint. Thankfully, I have created a strong support system of friends who are like family to me. They were my rock during that time.

My last communication with him was earlier this year when we had to separate some financial accounts we had together. This truly felt like a damn divorce! I wanted it to be over. I wanted to be over it already.

It goes without saying that healing from heart break is a journey. One that we can’t put a time limit on. I constantly compared myself to other people, wondering how they were able to move on quicker than me. I did the things I thought would help me. I did the things that “looked right” and “felt good”. My therapist helped me realize that I was healing from things greater than just my breakup. For the first time in my life, I was given the opportunity to heal from a place of stability. I had secure housing, a stable income, and safe space to simply… exhale.

After living in thirty-three years of chaos, I didn’t know how to exhale. I had to learn to feel safe in my body, how to feel safe living on my own and navigating life on my own, and how to keep myself from falling back into the pattern I knew best — chaos. I promised myself to do everything in my power to heal the wounds that put me in this position in the first place. I didn’t — and don’t — want to repeat the pattern of getting into a relationship from a wounded place.

Although painful, that breakup was the best thing that could have happened to me. It forced me to look inward. It forced me to confront my demons, my wounds… my brokenness. I have worked through so many of my deepest childhood wounds. I’ve fixed the most broken of relationships. I’ve stood up on my own two feet. I can afford my own apartment and provide for my own needs. I am reparenting myself, holding little Natasha tight and close to my chest. I reassure her that I will keep her safe and promise her that no one else will hurt her anymore. It taught me that no one else could do this for me. A relationship was not going to magically fix my own problems.

I’ve learned to view love differently. Shit… I really thought I knew what love was when I was with him. But now I see that love can’t be forced, and it certainly isn’t enough to make a relationship work. If you are not good with yourself, you can’t be good for someone else. I’m learning to love myself in a whole different way and approaching dating in a different light.

I’m excited to see what God has in store for me. I’m excited to continue learning about myself and how I navigate the world. There’s still a small part of me that holds on to some of the fears my breakup unlocked. But there is a new, shiny, and healthy side of me that is more secure in setting boundaries, that is addressing her trauma, and knows what she wants.

Never in a million years would I have thought I would be sitting here writing something like this from a place of healing and gratitude. As the saying goes, time heals all wounds. Well, most of them, at least ;)