Breakups. Divorce. Talk about a tectonic shift.

It took me 1600 days of moving on to get back to who I was before the relationship.

Imagine you have a partner whom you love very much. Imagine that you have been living together for 6 years, and have been married for three. You both love art, music, and writing, have all the same hobbies, and enjoy traveling and going on adventures with each other.

Now, imagine that one night, when you are both lying in bed, you get into a heated argument, and he suddenly says he wants a divorce. How would you feel in that moment? How about a day later, when you are evaluating your responses? How about a week later, when you are packing up your clothes, knickknacks, and fine china, to take with you back to your parents’ house? How about a month later, when you miss him and have difficulty falling asleep alone on a king bed?

My separation from my ex-husband completely shook my world. First, I thought he would come in a few days to pick me up from my parent’s house. After all, every time he went on a vacation to see his parents without me, he would miss me and call me after a few days. But when he didn’t. I tried to keep busy with new faces, new bodies to hold, to avoid loneliness. But it was inevitable. On one of those late nights when the quiet was deafening, I finally caved in and started writing down what was on my mind and in my heart. My words bled on the pages, and with every drop, I felt more empty inside. With every teardrop, it felt as if the sacred monuments I had built in our temple in my heart, one by one, crumbled down. I cried for days on end, sometimes wondering if our seven years together were all a dream, or if I was losing my mind thinking that it was real. Or that it was imaginary. I couldn’t tell anymore what was real and what was not.

Every few days I would bottle things up, and then later my feelings would burst on the pages of my notebook. I would open the box of everything I had from him, and remember all the memories… from the dried-up cherry blossom flowers he gave me on our second date, to the notebook I wrote our memories in, to the finger puppet he gave me in the first 2 weeks of meeting, to the white rose he stole for me from the Casa Loma garden a year before.

And I wrote down my feelings, denials, and the endless sadness that engulfed me for many months. As meeting new people became exhausting and annoying, my solace became my pen.

Through this act of journaling and self-reflection, I learned to embrace my aloneness.

When you decide to buy only one, 

and not two of the dainty coffee cups

or the foldable lawn chair;

When you quit sleeping on

the left side of the king bed

and reclaim the entire land

and set your foundation

right in the middle, 

that’s when you learn

you have welcomed 

the bittersweet embrace

of your perpetual aloneness.

And through many many poems (about 160 in fact), reading psychology articles, seeing a therapist, and talking to close friends and family, I became free of that codependency. Over time, my feelings towards all the items I held as mementos of him changed; I watched them all lose meaning, one by one.

Keeping a positive outlook on life, despite numerous health challenges, learning to love myself again, despite feeling unlovable, and surrounding myself with inspirational people, allowed me to recalibrate my compass, and find my way back to my old self. To the goals and dreams I had for myself. I found the drive to work on my emotional health and physical well-being and invest my time in myself to gain the skills that paved the path to my dreams. I learned to enjoy my aloneness. As poet David Whyte puts it, aloneness is not loneliness, but rather a permeability that allows us to reimagine ourselves (Consolations, p.2). As such, writing poetry became the companion to my aloneness. Every poem became a step towards acceptance and healing.

I have documented my journey of growth in my new book “1600 Days of Moving on: Explorations of Love, Grief and Acceptance”. You can view a free sample on Amazon here.

If you’re going through a breakup or divorce, I want you to know, that you can only go up from here. I want you to buy a notebook, write your feelings down, and review the pages periodically. I want you to buy yourself roses and sunflowers, and listen for birdsong in the wind, for as unbelievable as it may seem, the dawn is near.