The Truth About Heartbreak

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Paid testimonials, results may vary. Hey everyone, it's Matthew Hussey. Something a little different today on the podcast. I wanted to read you an essay I wrote on the subject of heartbreak, uh, in literally the last 10 days. I hope you enjoy it. This isn't appearing on YouTube or anywhere else. I wanted this to be a listening experience. So, I hope this episode helps. I hope it resonates with many people out there who are heartbroken right now. And if you are in heartbreak right now, I want to invite you to join us for a 5-day experience called 5 Days to Mend, beginning on July 20th, where I'm going to be with you live every single day, helping you through your heartbreak. Uh, there's going to be a free community for this. I'm making Matthew AI available 5 days during this process so that anyone who wants to speak with my digital mind outside of the times we're live together can do that. And it's just designed to be an intensely healing week for anyone going through a hard time right now. Please join us July 20th for 5 Days to Mend. You can register at mendweek.com. Heartbreak. What other feeling in the world is quite like heartbreak? It is a crushing pain that makes us feel like our insides are collapsing in on themselves under the weight of news we cannot bear. It can be an out-of-body experience as we hear the words nothing could have prepared us to hear, and at the same time, an intense feeling of being trapped inside our body once the pain really sets in, knowing we have nowhere to go to escape. Sometimes the news that threatens to destroy us, that this person doesn't want to be with us anymore, is just too much to handle. Sometimes, for some of us, we dare not allow ourselves to feel a heartbreak when it happens, because if we did, we fear the dam of tears will break and the waters will engulf us and we will drown. I remember being told by someone in the middle of an argument that they needed to go for a walk to get some space. An immediate and instinctive survival mechanism kicked in the moment they left the house that made me get out of my pajamas and put my outdoor clothes on. Something about this person needing to go for a walk was so out of character, so jarring, so not their usual pattern, that my body sensed imminent danger. I felt like Clive Owen in the movie Closer when he senses Julia Roberts' character Anna is about to break up with him, so he changes because he doesn't want the embarrassment of being broken up with in his dressing gown. I waited an eternity for her to return. And when she did, she told me she wasn't sure about us anymore. There it was. The words entered my body like poison, slowing everything down, like lead had entered my bloodstream and was coalescing into a bowling ball-sized weight in my chest, crushing me from the inside, and at the same time rising up into my head, clouding everything, making me dizzy.

Nauseous.

I knew it was over. She just didn't know how to say it, so I did. You're breaking up with me. She didn't say anything. There it was again, the confirmation. When she left that day, I felt sick. I didn't know what to do. You know that feeling you get when something happens to you and you instantly know that the pain you're going to experience as a result of this moment has barely even begun, and the thought of how long this is gonna last is utterly daunting. Like you can't even begin to face the journey that's ahead. That was me. I will never forget the moment I turned to a friend with tears in my eyes and said, "I just feel like I'm not enough." I'll never forget the ways I tortured myself over all the things I should have done differently in the relationship. The things I should never have said. How I should have shown up with a different level of confidence, how if I'd been more attractive, more sexy, more impressive, more secure, less flawed, it wouldn't have ended. Whether someone ends things with us after 3 decades, 3 years, 3 months, or 3 dates, if we've let our guard down and dared to develop feelings, we are in the firing line. When someone breaks our heart, The world around us doesn't just stop. In fact, aside from a couple of friends who understand how broken we really are, and therefore show up for us, it can feel like the world doesn't truly even acknowledge our pain as a serious thing. We're expected to just carry on. "It's only heartbreak, you'll get over it." Meanwhile, in our head, it's like that old song by Skeeter Davis, I wake up in the morning and I wonder why everything's the same as it was. I can't understand, no, I can't understand how life goes on the way it does. Even with well-meaning friends, there's a point at which we feel less and less entitled to share how we feel, having already told the story one too many times. Eventually, we resort to fracturing ourselves just to try to exist as a person in the world. Split in two, there's the you that sits on a Zoom call at work, the one who attends your sibling's get-together or a restaurant with friends, the you that walks into a café and forces a smile with the barista who's nice to you. But only you know the extent to which you're not really there. The real you, the broken you, sits deeply recessed behind the facade that forces a smile to the world while your stomach churns and the lump in your throat is always sitting just beneath the surface. And no part of you knows how to get back to joy, to wholeness, to yourself. In case you were wondering, there's nothing wrong with you. The rest of the world may carry on, but for you, a world has ended. And while society may tell us it's just heartbreak, we know that this is one of the most painful things we have ever been through. On the scale of cataclysmic emotional events in our lives, true heartbreak ranks near the top. It is as though a bomb has gone off in our heart. The initial shockwave brought us to our knees. But the aftershock that comes in waves can be just as intense and unrelenting. Our life is divided into the before and after of losing this person, and the after feels like a sickness that is all-consuming. We find ourselves simply trying to hold on, every ounce of energy being spent just trying to hold it together. We look for relief in 5-minute chunks where we get to feel normal, Not even good, just normal. Normal for a few merciful moments before we see something that reminds us of them all over again, and the dark, heavy sickness of heartbreak oozes through our bodies all over again. We find ourselves trapped in a prison of memories and associations. Sometimes that prison is our home, sometimes an entire city. But no matter how far we venture beyond our house or city walls, we find ourselves continuously trapped in the prison of our mind. These days, we're also almost never beyond the reach of social media, where misguided attempts to stay connected to the person who broke our heart are akin to putting our hand in a flame and hoping for warmth. What we see instead are the hallmarks of them moving on, and it burns us. A picture of them on Instagram looking good, and it kills you that they look nice and that they're not yours anymore. A story of them having a good time with their friends that wounds us because they don't appear to be suffering in the way that we are. Everything, everything is a threat. The new job they get which places them in a building, a network, a career path that we have no reference points for. Pictures from a trip that they took to a place you have never been together. An outfit you don't recognise. Every picture, every story adds a memory that doesn't include us, placing us further from the home of memories we cling to with them, a place that exists only in the domain of our newfound enemy: our imagination. We may hear something of them having started dating again, and it makes us want to vomit. But even if we don't, our imagination takes us there regardless, tugging on our sleeve and asking the question, 'What do you think they're doing right now?' The answer ignites every territorial instinct in our body. They are supposed to be my person. Why is anyone else near my person? Forget them moving on to something serious. You can't even bear what comes first. The idea that someone else will enjoy a date with them. The idea that they'll be sexual with someone else makes you sick. That they will get close to someone, laugh with them, lock fingers, share what was sacred between the two of you. It's why going no contact feels so deathly scary. No contact can feel like a total loss of control while we sit at home fearing that any minute now they could be with someone else. We finally reach a point where we want nothing more than for this pain to be over. For us to be over them. To have moved on from this person once and for all. For us not to care anymore. And the thought that you can't stomach repeats on you daily, "What if it takes me years to get over them? I can't feel like this for years." In the depths of my heartbreak, I remember a well-meaning family member saying to me, 'You just have to be prepared for the fact that although this may take a long while, you will slowly feel better. But you may still think about them even a few years from now at times, and that's okay.' He meant well when he said this, but it was literally the last thing I wanted to hear. I wanted nothing more than to never think about this person again. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I wanted to erase them from my memory, and here I was being told that even in a distant future I would would still be visited intermittently by this ache. It made me feel like it was a life sentence, my never-ending punishment for deciding to fall for this person. Our heartbreak is compounded by the thought that we now have to go back out there and look for this all over again, which in itself is horrifying when it's something we hadn't felt in so long before this person came along. We can even feel this when the person we're losing isn't someone we had even reached the point of a relationship with. Maybe we weren't in a serious stage with them, and it still really hurts us. Heartbreak can hurt in different ways at different times in our lives. The first time we ever experience pure, unfiltered heartbreak, our entire being seems to cry, "What the utter fuck is this feeling? What is this? What do you mean I can't have this person? What do you mean it's over?" 'None of this makes sense. The world doesn't make sense.' Other heartbreak can feel like a deeper, more existential pain. The total disappointment of having lost someone who brought our hopes back to life and reignited our spirit, our sense of romance, our imagination about the future. Our heartbreak becomes an immediate kind of dejected apathy of not wanting to have to to go out there and look for that all over again. The fear of never finding it again. Our early heartbreaks are infused with a world-ending tone. "This person was my life, and now my life is gone." But then there's the heartbreak that we feel after one too many disappointments, which can feel more like a deep pain at the idea that life never seems to truly begin. This is the pain of feeling our resilience has faded and we cannot take one more false promise of happiness. Whatever the nature of your particular heartbreak right now, which only you truly know, I want you to know I have seen my own version of that place you're in, and so have many thousands of people with whom I have sat during some of the darkest times of their lives. I see you. You are not alone. And I am so deeply sorry that you are going through this. But sometimes in our lives, when everything seems so dark that no light could possibly find its way to us, there are hands that reach for us through that darkness with a timing that both saves us and restores our faith in the beauty of life. I would like to offer you my hand right now for something I am doing on the week of July 20th. It is something I have never done before, but it is something I feel compelled to do right now, which is to be there with you during this time in your life. This is a time when I know a lot of people are going to be talking about summer and, you know, creating a summer of love and making the summer exciting and all of this stuff. And this is a time when what you need more than anything is a summer of healing. Look, I have made plenty of YouTube videos about heartbreak in the past, but there is something transcendent about coming together as one in a live way during the worst times of our life. The human element of joining together in real time and communing in our pain lifts us up in a way nothing else can. So starting Monday, July 20th, I am going to be holding a 5-day process called 5 Days to Mend, where for 5 consecutive days I am going to be sitting with anyone in my community and any friends and family you would like to invite along who is going through heartbreak. Every day for an hour, maybe more on some days, we'll see, I am going to go live to share the things that I have discovered in 19 years of coaching that are the most helpful things you can hear and do to heal in these moments of our lives. I'm going to be answering questions. I'm going to be working through it alongside you. There's going to be no fee to attend this event. This entire 5-day experience will be entirely free. And this is a very rare event because I have had to plan for months to take an entire week out of everything else in my life to be with everyone in this way. But I know it's going to be worth it. Sometimes life brings exactly the thing we need at exactly the moment we needed it the most. If you know that 5 Days to Mend represents that for you, please join us. You can sign up in seconds at mendweek.com, and I will see you for day 1 on July 20th. Until then, stay strong, take care of yourself, and I will be with you. See you soon.

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