truths about post-breakup life

A letter about the brutal sadness that waves over you, day after day after day, after a break-up.

I’ve written a few letters that focused on the optimistic, profound process of transformation. This letter is not that. This is about the brutal sadness that waves over you, day after day after day, after a break-up. Or at least, this is my experience.

Trying to detach from someone you’ve spent fifteen years of your life with, looks a bit like this:

• I’m so sad but somehow can’t possibly cry, so I’m in the shower making mewling sounds to get the crying going, and the face is there, the face distorts and wants to, but the crying never fully arrives

• When I get up I’m so tired I want to go back to bed and sleep for a year until it’s the summer of 2026 and maybe the ache has left my body

• I’m tired of speaking to my parents about really mundane things, what I’m going to do that day, what they are going to do that day, and at the same time I’m so glad they’re there to bring up the really mundane things

• I think I could be silent for a month and just sit with myself and my sadness and feel it throbbing through my chest and not need anything else

• It’s 36 degrees and I go for a morning swim in a t-shirt like a ginger child because I’ve sunburnt the top half of my body, and the water is so delicious, swimming feels so divine, I feel momentarily blissful. My mother says: ‘the colour of this feeling is gold'. When I close my eyes in the water I see the gold

• Some days I get an energy rush and I think of so many ideas I have for future stories, creative projects I could do, companies I could start, and I start writing all the ideas down, and after an hour I get so overwhelmed by the force of it, the details I still have to figure out, that I have to do everything MYSELF, I have to take a nap

• I went to see an apartment I can live in for four months while someone is traveling, and it’s quite big, there’s a little garden, it’s in a cute part of town. But it’s not my town yet, and I will be living there by myself in autumn when the days get darker, and I feel a fear creeping up, but it could also be excitement, because this is what I wanted. I wanted to be by myself. The realisation hits in many ways

• We were promised a storm and I race the hills in my red summer dress that I have to hold at the split because otherwise everyone on the road sees my underwear, but does it even matter? Can they just see my underwear and be fine? I’m all sweat and wanting the sky to break, but it doesn’t, not really, we get ten minutes of loud rain and no thunder

• When you’re trying to detach your brain thinks you’re addicted to cocaine and does everything in its power to make you feel like you HAVE to go back to that person. I have to remind myself daily I made this choice for a reason, although I no longer know what that reason is. Reason is out of the door, on holidays, out of office.

• I still use the word ‘we’ to describe my life

• I miss my friends’ birthdays, their entire pregnancy, social and cultural events I would normally go to, because I can’t fathom the idea of getting on a train towards regular, big city life in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. I need the security blanket that is small town life surrounded by trees and leaves

• Sometimes when I’m on a little evening walk I think, woah, when I’ve survived this period in my life, I think I can really get through anything (we’ll see)

• I’ve lost a bit of my sweet body because I haven’t felt like eating much, so I obediently eat what I can, and I miss the joy I used to feel when it comes to food and cooking

• Listening to new music and watching new tv series or films is too much story to comprehend and process. Books do give me comfort.

• It’s been 2.5 months and sometimes I feel like I’m not ‘progressing’ quick enough, but what is that?? People who ask me whether I’m already feeling better irk me. This time is needed to learn to take my time. If processing this takes three years I’m willing to adapt to that schedule.

• This list is important research data for my future self

• I no longer feel like it’s impossible to get through a day, but sometimes pms tries to pull me into that cave again

• I think about the colours I might paint the walls of my future apartment and how that apartment will probably be small and expensive and old, and I won’t have that many close friends in town yet, and I will have to drag up an entire life structure again, but I will do it, and it will be mine

Lots of love x