Breaking up

I always come back to this space to process and mark the downfalls of life. The last six months have seen continuous knock back after knock back. Not even really just ‘knock backs’, but entire walls of everything I’d built crumbling down, with one bad piece of news after another being delivered relentlessly to me.

As a whole, I can appreciate the majority of 2020 hasn’t exactly been peachy for anyone. I wish I could take solace in the fact the entire globe is living the same reality of this pandemic. In my immediate circles, though, I seem to have taken the brunt of the bad luck.

I lost my job and subsequently moved out of my flat in London. I lost the life I’d built myself having finally achieved it only a year prior. In more recent times, my two year relationship ended. The worst part – though sometimes it feels like a glimmer of good (it changes every day) – is that that love was not entirely lost. To me, that seems like a great shame, to throw something away when we still had love for each other. To not consider where we might be if the pandemic hadn’t happened, that this is all just circumstantial and not a reason to throw so much time away.

To top it all off, my mental health was already pretty shaky before lockdown happened, the subsequent job loss and the rest. It’s only got worse and I feel incredibly lost for the first time in my life. I suppose you could say I felt lost when I graduated from uni, but that limbo was always sort of expected; a sense of directionless that was commonplace and anticipated in the lead up to deadlines and cap throwing. This loss, though, feels like a genuine stripping of my entire identity.

My depression ebbs and flows. Sometimes I feel incredibly sad, sometimes simply this floating, numb thing. When anxiety nibbles away at me, I feel completely out of control, like my rational thought cannot keep up with the catastrophising. And when you’re thrown completely off balance, you hold onto anything remotely solid that little bit tighter.

I held onto the future I’d imagined with my best friend, my partner. We have struggled a lot throughout our relationship, with culture differences and family, with communication and finding the balance. But we’d weathered it all and we’d weathered the first 14 weeks of lockdown before we could finally see each other again. I felt in my heart, till the very last moment, that we would always come through the other side together. I was determined in my love and my fight that we could make it.

And now it’s gone and so has my fight. So have the plans we built to finally be together in the same city again, the plans we’d formulated to build us both back up and put me on my next path.

Going through the motions of a break up, I can’t even decipher one emotion to the next. Sadness and yearning and mourning for all that we had and all that we’ve lost. Just wanting to curl up in the warm words of my best friend, missing the morning and goodnight texts, the sharing of insignificant occurrences in the day. Knowing that he was the person that knew every side of me, every secret, every thought and feeling I’d ever had. Being around young children and coming to realise just how ready I was for those big, adult milestones. Marriage and babies. I know I’m still young, I know that I have time. But I wanted that now. I was ready for it. With him.

I’ve started to experience anger, too, not for the break-up itself but for how things have been handled in the aftermath. The confusing mixed messages and complete disregard for my feelings, my struggles. I guess I can never know quite what’s going on, but it feels almost like, for him, we never happened. That those two years are easy to brush off and forget. That I was always the problem. Not good enough and, in the same breath, too much. Not worth the time it would take to give answers to.

Anger quickly turns back to sadness, though. Sadness and fear that I don’t know when we might speak again, if ever. Fear, too, that this might be the surest connection I’ll ever make with someone. He was always my most certain thing and now nothing that comes next is certain at all.

Really, I just miss him.

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