I t was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I can be a little dramatic sometimes. But honestly? Not about this. I have never known agony like it. An older pain, the kind caused by far more shocking blows dealt to me in the past, seemed to lie dormant in my bones until the anguish of heartbreak reanimated it.
I felt all of it β the old pain and the new β erupt at once. My body was burnt up by it. In part, the devastation was caused by the rupture catching me unaware, like a natural disaster no one sees coming. It had been my private little earthquake, and it razed me to the ground. Many of us have experienced this kind of breakup. The kind that nothing prepares you for. The kind that leaves you existentially unstable.
The kind where the only reasonable response to the first note of an Adele song on BBC Radio 2 is to wrench the car radio out by brute force and toss it out of the window.
Am I dying? G rowing up with dysphoria about my body and an inquisitive mind had stunted my emotional growth in early adulthood. It created a dissonance whereby I often felt I understood things long before I experienced them. I regularly mistook intellectual understanding for true knowledge of my emotions, so the full experience of shattering heartbreak was shocking.
The smashing of my delusion β my previous belief that I understood what loss felt like β was brutal and shameful. I had just entered my 30s and was only now experiencing the devastation of a teenager, sobbing in her room because her world is ending. So embarrassing. My ex-boyfriend, B, and I had not expected to fall in love in the first place.
