Did You Know: Your Broken Heart is Your Biggest Gift?

Your heart-breaking can be your making.

One thing I hate about love is that it can be broken.

It can fracture, shatter, scar. It is the gravitational force of our own hearts, possibly the most powerful energy in the universe, and by far the most fragile. We, as humans, are not equipped to handle love at its maximum potential, we’re too clumsy, too frantic, too unsure. This is why we so often injure it, instead. And ourselves in the process.

Another thing I hate about love is that most of us have felt it — being torn away.

Heartbreak is a human experience. It sucks, and it hurts, and in hindsight, it’s a blessing in disguise. Granted, the disguise is a gorgeous person wielding a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire — but really, that can be a good thing. A broken heart can be a gift.

Eggs Must Break Before Cakes Can Bake

Nobody has ever asked for a divorce for Christmas. Nobody has begged Santa for a breakup. Nobody has scribbled out a letter and asked their little sister to post it to the North Pole, desperately requesting a beaten and bruised heart.

But it doesn’t make it any less of a present. Sure, it won’t feel like it at first. Or during. Or even immediately afterward. It’s only upon reflection that you’ll see what you’ve been given:

A chance to build a better heart.

Every heartbreak you experience — whether romantic or familial or platonic — is like a beta test. Your heart is in Phase 1, a Prototype Pump™, testing its abilities, determining its demographic, learning about how it reacts out in the wild. And when the relationship ends, the heart shuts down and is pulled from circulation. The feedback is gathered and the amendments are made.

But not to your heart. Your heart isn’t scrapped. It isn’t thrown away. It isn’t a failure. Because it’s not your heart being tested here, it’s your audience. It’s simply a trial run, putting the feelers out (literally. Wink wink nudge nudge) until it has located exactly where it belongs. And I can promise you now — it will be well received when that time comes. Because it has its target market, it is weatherproof and water-resistant (no tears, except when your partner watches an episode of Community without you) and timelessly durable. It’ll find its person. You will find your home.

Your broken heart is simply a measure of quality control. Which exists to ensure that you find what you truly deserve.

How to Repackage Your Proto-Pump

The best thing about a broken heart is that you get to stick it back together in the very way that you desire. With glitter glue and silk ribbons and a pack of gems you bought from Etsy, you get to put these pieces in places that maybe they weren’t before. You get to stick them in a new pattern. Add more to them, throw bits away, repaint and rebuild and re-purpose.

Your heart is a muscle, remember? And like any muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

But you cannot let this injury stop you from exercising it. You will need time to heal, sure, but healing and hiding away are not the same thing. You need to stretch it out; you need to tend to it; you need to take it to the park for some fresh air. Don’t sweep up those heart fragments and bin them. Scoop them delicately into your palm, lay them along with your dining table between your strawberry milkshake and bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, and admire them for a moment. See how those pieces glitter beneath the candlelight? Gorgeous. Then grab your glue gun, stick on a Take That album, and get to work. Put yourself together again.

It sounds hard — and at first; it is — but then it gets exponentially easier. All you need is that very first piece.

• Take a hand mirror, sit beside a window and talk to yourself in it. Remind yourself how bloody beautiful you are (and you are. Yeah, even then).
• Ask your best friend to write a fake dating profile for you. See how much you are loved through their eyes.
• Message an ex (a precarious activity that must be carried out under sober supervision). Sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s not if you’re simply messaging them to say thank you for being a significant chapter in your life. Closure is a cough-syrup.
• Google celebrities you fancy. Then close your eyes and imagine yourself beside them — doing stuff.
• Tweet a selfie in your favourite outfit. Then delete Twitter entirely.
• Watch three horror movies in a row on your own and realise that you’re doing just fine. You got this. Maybe order a burrito.

There are so many tiny ways that you can piece your heart back together. You just have to trial and error and see what sticks, see what fits best where, see what settles in stronger, tougher, and better. Because heartbreak is an experiment, an exercise bike, an unexpected gift. It happens for a reason. It leads you to where you need to go.

Eventually, you’ll find it. I promise you. You’ll stumble upon a love so conclusive, so indestructible, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

And this is where you will fall — headfirst, heels flailing towards the moon. Yet no matter how hard you do, your heart will never break again.

Oh hey, whilst you’re here: why not put the “em” into your “emails” and lob your name onto my mailing list for weekly em-bellishments on my rose-tinted, crumb-coated lens of life. It’s the equivalent of the reduced section in the supermarket (low value Weird Crap™ that you didn’t know you needed).