Does Your Heart Break While You're Breaking Someone Else's?
On emotional triggers, unspoken conversations, and learning to comfort the younger version of yourself.
Stranger, do we know each other?
Or perhaps we carry a shared pain that no one else understands.
We hide behind excuses, jokes, a little dark humor, and then keep moving forward.
Until the next trigger.
Until the next toxic pattern we think we’ll overcome.
Until the next therapy session that leaves us mentally drained.
And yet, we keep playing hide-and-seek with the obvious, doing everything we can to avoid it. We live in a reality that’s heading toward a collision simply because the traffic light stopped working a long time ago.
Now let me ask you something:
Does your heart break while you’re breaking someone else’s?
Does the pain tear you apart? Do you bleed on the inside while hiding everything behind a grimace?
Do you think about your own feelings while stealing someone else’s?
These were the thoughts running through my mind last night after I saw a stupid photo. A story posted on Instagram by a stranger.
Correction - I once knew him with my soul, though sadly, that was never enough. I knew him through eyes that looked at the world with the innocence of a child. I knew him through feelings compatible with a donor heart.
And yet now, he’s just a stranger with a stupid photo.
A stupid sweater with the words:
“I love breaking hearts.”
I probably shouldn’t be sharing these struggles of mine, but damn it - let’s normalize sharing stories like this.
Let’s normalize being affected by our exes.
Let’s normalize talking about the little triggers that make us want to crawl out of our own skin.
Let’s normalize the idea that stories are meant to be told, not buried in silence.
Once upon a time, I stayed silent for far too long.
I was capable of doing everything except having the one conversation I desperately needed. I was capable of spending months crossing the same traffic light, hoping for a random encounter, but not of speaking.
I thought it was easier that way.
Correction - I wasn’t brave enough to hear what was coming.
I wasn’t brave enough to tell my heart:
“Hold on. We’ll get through this. It won’t kill you.”
Instead, my heart suffered because of my own weakness.
Because of my own confusion. Because no one can get tangled in a web of hypotheses quite the way we do ourselves.
That’s how I dragged my mind into an abyss with no way out.
Correction - there was a way out.
I just had thousands of excuses.
“The right person, the wrong time.”
“If it’s meant to be, it will be.”
“Maybe not now, but someday, in the future, if he finds the courage, we’ll talk.”
And here I am, four years later.
My heart stitched back together. The conversation never happened. And the excuses? Somewhere out there, sunk beneath the sea.
The only anchor I ever had was myself.
No one else.
No confusion weighs heavier than the kind we create for ourselves. That’s exactly why I’m sharing this little story in trailer form today.
Because in reality, it created the woman who eventually found the courage to write publicly about her feelings.
I want to normalize the fact that we all carry stories that shape us.
I want to normalize the fact that somewhere out there, someone else needs your story too. Because they’re going through something similar.
The characters may be different, but your script might turn out to be the perfect example.
Don’t keep your stories hidden away in a closet.
Share them. Hang that old laundry out to dry and show the world that even the most absurd stories carry meaning. Because your experience may be someone else’s medicine without you ever realizing it.
That’s why today I’m allowing myself to admit that something as small and “stupid” as that Instagram story affected me.
It didn’t hurt.
But it disappointed me. Simply because I know how much lived inside the little girl I was four years ago.
The same girl who lived for the truth. The same girl who got lost in someone’s beautiful words because she believed that love was supposed to hurt.
And here she is today: more at peace, yet still carrying her triggers. Because that’s how trauma works.
Not because of old feelings. Not because of romanticizing the past.
But because it’s perfectly natural to grieve an older version of yourself.
Today, I’ll hand myself the tissue no one ever handed me. And I’ll applaud myself for having the courage to share this trigger.
As for the bigger story: one day, you’ll read it in my book.
And maybe then we’ll finally find an answer to the big question:
Does your heart break while you’re breaking someone else’s?
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I understand what you're saying and have been on my own journey reclaiming myself through breathwork and somatic practices. One of these days I'll share them too.
"it's perfectly natural to grieve an older version of yourself."
that's the sentence that reframes the whole piece. not grieving him — grieving her. the girl who believed love was supposed to hurt. that's a very specific and very real kind of loss.
the correction structure throughout — the way you keep gently revising your own language mid-thought — that's doing something formally interesting. it reads like someone learning to tell the truth in real time.
thank you for hanging the laundry out.