Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

It feels like the worst act of betrayal in the world, to have the one who’s meant to help get rid of my pain be the one making it.

This book spoke to me from the start. You realise just how normal these feelings are and maybe there’s something in that, an acceptance. Also the feelings of who you are supposed to be and how you are supposed to behave after the trauma of a shitty break up, trying all the while to still see the value in yourself. It’s been a while for me and I read it having taken the hard road back to me. Loved this book 📖

If I had takotsubo cardiomyopathy – a name, a fancy scientific name, to legitimise this feeling – would I feel better?

I realise all you need for happiness is yourself; no one else needs to help you achieve anything, to help you feel it. The obviousness hits me like a revelation. Aloneness still feels so distant, but then he’s saying, ‘I should probably get on with my day,’ and he’s getting dressed, tapping his pockets asking, ‘Have I left anything?’ And then he’s walking out of the door.

The day stretches out in front of me, inviting and warm, like something I can take by both hands and rub my face into.

On the way home I sit with my face against the cold glass of the bus window feeling slightly deflated because even though I wore the green dress nothing was any different to any other night. I worked to mould myself into another shape and I thought everything would change, but nothing did. I was the exact same funny but not hilarious, good-looking but not beautiful, clever but not intelligent person I always was.

Why is so much of love built out of pretending not to love at all?

The writer Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, ‘If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’

I gave him my arms and my legs and he ran away with them and I don’t know how to get them back.

Women are never just women, they’re the men they prop up and save.

I’m so annoyed that I let that ukulele-loving prick talk his way into making me like him.

What if I wasn’t so forward, maybe he would have felt like he needed to work for me more? What if I hadn’t said that weird insensitive thing about paracetamol? What if he didn’t like the way my kisses left lip gloss all over him? I thought he would get rid of my what ifs but he just brought me more of them.

Women aren’t good at taking criticism. Perhaps because we’re not allowed to be anything but perfect in order to be valued. Men can be all types of wrong and still be wanted. You see them in films blowing up buildings and punching people in the face, but we’re still cheering them on. Women say I’m sick of doing all the housework and they’re a bitch. They sleep with too many men and in the next scene they’re left dangling from a rope. It had to be his problem because we know what it meant if it was mine.

I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life. And in the towel now, with coldness starting to prick up all the hairs on my arms, and the sheets dark with damp, I experience another ‘over’, and this time it’s a promise, to keep on being nice to her. To order expensive takeaways, and go on walks, and watch films that are difficult to understand, because this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

But more than curating my own space, I want to be free to be messy in it too. To see myself as so important that the place I live comes second to it. What books will I write at that desk? What men will be in that bed? So that the room is serving me rather than me serving it. Rather than unpacking like I would normally, I do what he would have done. I lie on the bed and think, That can happen tomorrow, or the next day, and I don’t go to the shop to buy milk. Sometimes self-care is not caring at all.