Quotes, Books and Overall Advice for Heartbreak

I recently got my heartbroken by someone I recently had to let go off. There were just too much going on in my life at the time to really realize that the relationship was over, until it was completely over. You know, the kind you hold on to until there is not other way to go on about it but let it go? That’s what I recently had to go through. Or to be honest, the kind of thing I’m going through. It’s like a deep void inside myself that doesn’t seem to relent; it only seems to get deeper and stronger with time. But as the person who broke my heart said to me: the only thing that will heal a broken heart is time. With time you will see that your pain isn’t all encompassing but just a mere glimpse of your life. And that’s the part that most of us have a hard time getting to. The glimpse of life. The part where your pain isn’t taking all your being, but it’s just a mere page in the book of your life. Sadly, getting to that point, especially when the heart ache and break is so recent seems like forever. Like it will never stop. Like there’s nothing else to do but cry your eyes out and fill the void with food, with sex, with alcohol, and just watch as the sugar, the high, and the hormones make you feel slightly better, but only until the pain comes back and reminds you that can ignore it, but only for so long. So what do to with your pain? Well, since none of the options above do anything good for your overall health, I thought it would make a lists of quotes and books I’ve been leaning into to both lean into this pain and lean away from it; because dealing with pain isn’t easy, and sometime you just need the right kind of distractions to forget, even if it’s for a moment. 

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose, sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but let go.” – Cheryl Strayed 

This quote from her famous book Wild in which she decides after her divorce that she would hike the Pacific Crest Trail in order to move to another town and deal with the broken feelings of divorce. If you’re in the mood to read about how someone who’s never done more than walking as a form of exercise decide to venture herself into the second hardest trail in the country in order to avoid the feelings of void and depression of divorce this is the book for you. She goes into detail about her marriage, her life as an aspiring writer, and the lesson of both hiking survival and overall emotional survival she learned in this journey. I picked this quote mostly because the brokenness I feel right now can be summarized in the last part of that quote: when she says that sometimes there’s no choice to but let go after holding on really hard on to something. That’s how broken hearts feel in the moment. You hold on to the past, to a memory, to a feeling, only to realize that the more you hold on to it, the more broken and hurt you’ll feel. You’ll realize that despite the good times, and despite your desperation to make them last forever, there is no choice but let go.

David Jones is an author I discovered on Pinterest. His incredibly short, short poetry was on someone’s pinned boards and I went down the rabbit whole of reading all the poetry that was freely available on the platform. Some of it, it’s incredibly romantic, and some of it it’s incredibly to the point of what I’m feeling right now. It’s just heartbreak on a page. And it’s heartbreak from someone who’s obviously loved too deeply and loss too much; so he’s exactly what I need to hear a this very moment. Here are my favorite 3 quotes:

“It is both a blessing
And a curse
To feel everything 
So very deeply.” 
D. J. 

And that’s what heartbreak is: feeling so very deeply.

“Trapped
Somewhere
Between wanting
To forget
And wanting 
To hold on.”
D. J. 

Like the last quote, heartbreak is a desperate cross road of wanting to hold on to the feelings of love, excitement, and happiness, but at the same time, understanding that there more you hold on, the more hurt you’ll feel. 

“It will hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and then one day it won’t.” 
D. J.

And this is something we all have to remember.

All these quotes come from his three books: Love & Space Dust, Could You Ever Live Without? And Moonlight & You.

How to Break Your Addiction to a Person: When and Why Love Doesn’t Work by Howard Halpern

 A book a came across a Reddit post when I was doing research on broken hearts and how to heal them, this was the number one recommendation on broken hearts and broken relationships. 

This book breaks down your relationship in a way only a therapist could: are you in love or are you addicted to the other person? Is this a healthy relationship of mutual respect or is this a relationship that breaks you down in both self-respect and overall happiness? He also give you step by step guide to call it quits and helps you come up with strategies to overcome the feeling of loss and despair that usually follows the breakup. 

Heartbreak, Mourning, Loss, Volume 1: Detach or Die by Ginnete Paris

Another book that helps you overcome the idea of heartbreak but in a more nuanced way, because heartbreak doesn’t come only through romantic relationships but it can come in many forms, like loss of a loved one. This book is really easy to read and has multiple exercises and coping methods for every step of the grieving steps: denial, anger, bargains, depression and finally acceptance. We never think of heartbreak as a grieving feeling, but that’s exactly what it is. You’re grieving the happy hormones that went through your brain and that you’ve lost because of the end of this relationship. It’s not easy to cope with something that’s not there anymore, but this book gives you step by step tutorials on how to feel that void. 

But, truly, the best thing to do for a heartbreak is to follow three simple steps:

1. Get those negative thoughts out of your head.
If there’s one thing I learned from The Artist Way by Julia Cameron is that stream of conscious journaling is the best thing you can do to clear your head. There’s been a trend about meditation and journaling on the internet lately, and there will be a post coming up on the best techniques to do journaling best on various books, but this is something that everyone should do, regardless of their romantic status. Journaling is a great way to get things, and especially negative thoughts, out of your head, which are the main cause of sad emotions, or any emotions really, and is a great way to get those thongs out of your head and heart and into a page. Once you’ve had a chance to see them, with your own eyes, instead of feeling them, with your heart, you’ll finally realize that maybe, what it feels like is not that terrible after all, and you’re exaggerating your own feelings.

2. Get outside, or at least moving.
As you’ll learn form my summary on the History of Exercise by Bill Hayes, exercise is more than just a way to keep your body fit. Exercise not only forces the body to engage in the activity it presently is doing, much like sex, but it also forces the mind to be engaged and present in the activity. That’s why they say that once your mind wanders it’s best to change the exercise because once your mind wanders, your body won’t be as engaged. 

3. Allow yourself to feel.
And for me this is the most crucial part of it all. There’s a stigma to negative emotions that other emotions doesn’t really have and that’s the permission to feel them. Just think about it, when you’re happy, there’s no one that says to you: calm down, this shall pass, it’s not as great as it seems, and so on. But we don’t have this with sad emotions, all we want to do is stop them, and I understand, feeling sad is terrible, but there’s a reason why we feel negative emotions. If it was detrimental to the body we wouldn’t feel them in the first place, but negative emotions are there for a reason and the more we try to numb them down the more difficult they become to overcome.

So there it is. My personal guide to heart break.