Breakups are the worst
July 26, 2024
Part 1: This week
Breakups are the worst.
This week when I couldn’t sleep, I was feeling all the typical feelings of a breakup: grief, anger, sadness.
For context, we only dated for 4 months. So no need to worry.
In addition to all those typical breakup feelings, I felt scared.
It was like once the relationship was gone, the whole world felt like too much again.
Reality felt repulsive. Like all the trust (not just in the relationship but everywhere) was gone.
Part 2: A particularly bad breakup
When I was in college, I developed a pretty bad sleeping problem. It began with an awful stint of not sleeping during my sophomore year of finals.
I had always thought that the lack of sleep was caused by the stress of finals.
But I had an epiphany while I was up and sad this week where I realized that probably the most important factor in my not sleeping was the breakup I was going through at the time.
It was my first queer breakup. It was completely miserable.
Even though it needed to end, when it finally did, it felt like the world was ending.
The best lesson that breakups have taught me is that breakups are actually the end of the world. There’s no getting around that fact.
Part 3: The end of the world
Last week, when I was awake at night, it was all to easy to slip into the huge fear of being in this world right now.
The end of the world was not only within me, it was all around me. Maybe you’ve felt like this recently.
There is nothing like the end of the world that we are witness to right now.
It is the end of the world in Palestine. For every child, for every person who is living within the imminence of death, the trauma upon trauma upon trauma.
For the lost souls who deserved to live and breath and laugh and fight.
Seeing pictures and hearing words. It is endlessly sickening.
To know that this is not new, it is an escalation.
Recently, even moments of hope feel like a short delay on the end of the world. Fear feels correct.
Part 4: How I make sense of it all
Amongst the confusion, something that helps me figure out my place in all this remembering that all of us humans are on an equal playing field in understanding the un-understandable.
Basically: there is no expert in God.
The gurus, the masters, the rabbis, they are all just humans and thus novices like the rest of us.
In a way, this is worrisome. We want someone on this earth to explain heaven to us, to explain hell. To make it all make sense.
But in another way this level playing field means that we are each standing at the doorway to a spiritual realm. Shuffling around to find the key.
To be clear, this doesn't mean we can make sense of grief or genocide or violence or loss. As far as I can tell, there is no one that can do that. There is nothing that makes the end of the world okay.
But wherever we want to source wisdom, we can and should.
For example, a breakup can be a spiritual portal.
Part 5: Healing
The second best lesson that breakups have taught me is that somehow, shockingly, the world starts again.
You have to be sad for a long time first. And you have to ask for a lot of help. And you might not sleep well.
But eventually, a new world starts again.
The most revolutionary thing that could happen. A world ending and then coming back to life.
But it is truly the way of the natural world. It is the only way. Death and rebirth. Winter leads to spring.
Part 6: Hodayah
I think that what we’re doing here has something to do with breakups. Knowing that sometimes the world ends and then it comes back to life.
Death and rebirth. The wisdom that comes from living through all scales of this process. Some which are especially tragic and some which are brutal. Brutal and despicable.
I believe that healing is a spiritual process.
Something that defies our understanding.
It is something so contradictory that only God can understand how it can happen.
It is simply our job to trust, beyond every logical reflex, that it will happen.
And in our belief, work toward it.
