Anonymous

If you’re reading this, I hope you give yourself grace.

I’ve always been both anxious and outgoing. Even at a young age, I found myself wondering whether I would ever find someone who didn’t think I was “too much.” So naturally, when I met someone as an impressionable college freshman who liked me as I was, I became attached quickly. In my mind, this had to be my person. He brought me flowers, comforted me, and made me feel safe. He was kind, and I know I gave that same care back to him.

It was going well until it wasn’t. We ended things when it got too hard, and that was that. We dated for over a year, which feels like a lifetime in college.

Although the relationship and the breakup itself was relatively healthy, the breakup still absolutely destroyed me. It’s been months, and I still get emotional thinking about it; not about the relationship itself, but about how I felt during the beginning of the breakup.

I wish I could go back and hug that version of myself, even though I know it wouldn’t have changed much. I felt like I was going crazy. I constantly replayed everything in my head: what I did wrong, what I could have done more or less of, why he didn’t work harder to save the relationship and how rejected I felt by someone I loved. What hurt almost as much was realizing how much of my self-worth had become tied to someone else choosing me. I didn’t realize how much power I had given him until he was gone.

On top of that, I was a full-time student doing research part-time, making it really hard to focus and I was not centering relationships in my life. I did things I normally wouldn’t do just to cope.

I don’t think mental health during a breakup is talked about enough. It’s this overwhelming wave of sadness. It’s also the kind of pain that makes you check your phone for a notification you know is not there, constantly write a different perspective about it in your Notes app, or wake up and just start crying. Sometimes, it can make life feel unbearably heavy. And because heartbreak is invisible, people may expect you to be “over it by now,” or you may feel guilty for bringing it up to friends and family again. But it is okay to talk about it. The people who care about you will not mind hearing about it one more time. It took me a lot of time to realize that I wasn’t crazy for struggling.

In that period when everything feels so heavy, hold onto the fact that you are going to become a better, stronger version of yourself on the other side of it. Get excited to meet that person! Think about all the hobbies you wanted to try but never got the chance to: paint, move your body, explore your interests, and do what makes you happy. When you find joy from within yourself instead of another person, you’re in a much healthier place.

I’ve realized that since I was young and already worrying about being “too much”, I was also learning to look for someone else to define my worth. I wish more young women, like myself, spent more time romanticizing their own life instead of romanticizing a future partner. There is so much life to live in becoming yourself first.

If you are reading this, I hope you give yourself grace. You are not defined by who chooses you, but by who you become when you choose yourself.

Anonymous, Washington University in St. Louis