love is giving someone the power to hurt you and trusting that they’ll never use it
on heartbreaks
Heartbreak is a part of living. Not the dramatic, firework-crash kind you see in movies, but the quieter, more ordinary one. The kind that sneaks in while you’re brushing your teeth. The kind that sits at the edge of your bed while you scroll through photos you forgot to delete. It shows up in the supermarket, when you pass their favourite snack. Or when a song you both loved starts playing in the middle of traffic, and suddenly you’re wiping your face at the bus home on a Tuesday afternoon.
No one teaches you how to grieve someone who still exists. Someone who is probably brushing their teeth too, or picking tomatoes at the market, or laughing at a meme that would've made you snort. And yet there you are—rewatching old videos on mute. Remembering their handwriting. Rereading that one message where they said, “I’m not going anywhere.” You know they meant it. And yet.
Heartbreak doesn’t ask for your permission. It doesn’t knock. It just settles in, sometimes slowly, like dust collecting on shelves you were too tired to clean. You’ll be okay, you tell yourself. You make coffee, take walks, do your skincare like you’re trying to soften the pain from the outside in. But everything reminds you of them. Even the parts of you that you thought belonged only to you.
Because that’s what loving someone does. It bleeds into everything. You start liking the songs they liked. You start laughing like them. You start texting them inside jokes before you can stop yourself. And when they leave, or fade, or disappear without the dignity of closure, it’s not just them you miss. You miss who you were when they were around. You miss the version of you that believed they’d stay.
You think maybe you imagined it. Maybe you were too much. Too clingy. Too intense. You spiral into every little detail—what you said, what you didn’t, what you should’ve said instead. You remember how they used to say your name. And how, toward the end, they stopped saying it like it was a soft thing. Started saying it like it was a chore.
And here’s the worst part: they don’t look heartbroken. Not online. Not in the accidental glimpses you get through mutuals or algorithm slip-ups. They look like spring. Like they bloomed after you. And it’s so easy to assume you were the problem. That maybe you ruined something golden just by being yourself.
But maybe heartbreak isn’t about being broken. Maybe it’s just life peeling away the parts that weren’t yours to keep. Maybe you didn’t ruin anything. Maybe you just loved honestly. And that’s a hard thing to carry in a world that treats detachment and non-chalance like a flex.
I’ve always believed that heartbreak, in some twisted way, is a kind of proof. Proof that you let yourself feel. That you tried. That you didn’t sit on the sidelines. That's what got me through my most recent one, one from someone I never expected such treatment from. It’s the receipt for every good memory, every laugh-so-hard-you-snort moment, every 2AM conversation where the world felt soft and possible.
And it hurts. God, does it hurt. But pain is such a weird thing—it feels eternal when you’re in it. But one day you’ll wake up and the ache won’t be the first thing you notice. Healing is sneaky like that.
And no, this isn’t a glow-up story. Or a “now I love myself more” monologue.
Healing doesn’t mean you suddenly stop caring. It means you care without crumbling. It means you sit with your sadness without trying to dress it up as strength. I read somewhere that love is giving someone the power to hurt you and trusting that they’ll never use it. And I think that’s why healing is so hard; you never thought they’d use it, but they did.
And, despite, you still carry them, in small ways. In the way you fold your laundry while watching the show they loved. In the way you write poems or make playlists for people you haven’t met yet. In the way you keep rearranging your bookshelf like you’re rebuilding the universe from scratch. You still love them, maybe. But it doesn’t consume you anymore.
And I think that love doesn’t disappear. Not really. I don’t believe you can un-love someone, even if they started distancing themselves from your life. At least, I can’t. I think some loves just become quieter over time. Less demanding. More tender. They stop asking for space in your present, but they still live somewhere in your chest—in the parts of you that learned how to feel deeply because of them.
There’s something poetic about how we keep going, despite it all. How we laugh again, not because we’ve forgotten, but because we’ve learned to make room for joy next to sadness. Like a shelf that holds both your favourite book and the one that ruined you. You start living like that—open, scarred, but still soft.
Sometimes I think the worst heartbreaks don’t just come from people who leave. They come from people who make you believe they never would. Sometimes the worst heartbreaks come from the people you least expected it from, the ones you thought you could trust. Until one day they show you a different face, someone who doesn't trust or respect you. Someone who puts their own good over it will make you feel. And you carry those feelings around, you bottle them up, you put on a straight face and pretend they didn't hurt you. You keep showing up and supporting them endlessly, like you'd expect them to have done. There’s a special kind of devastation in trusting someone with your tenderness and watching them fumble it like it was never a big deal. But that doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you human.
You weren’t naïve. You were brave. You opened your heart when you could’ve shut it. You let someone in even though the last time ended badly. And even now, even after the mess, you’re still choosing to feel. That’s not weakness. That’s the kind of quiet courage no one writes poems about. But they should.
You don’t need to hate them to heal. You don’t need to rewrite or delete every memory and convince yourself they were terrible. Sometimes people are beautiful and still not meant to stay. Sometimes timing is a villain. Sometimes love just runs out of language. And that’s no one’s fault.
It just… is.
So no, you’re not dramatic for still hurting. You’re not stupid for still caring. You’re not weak for not being over it yet. Healing isn’t linear. Some days you’ll feel free, like you’ve finally let it go. Other days, you’ll be right back at square one because a random scent brought them back. That’s okay. That’s human.
And maybe one day, you’ll meet someone new. Someone who doesn’t make you shrink. Someone who asks about your playlists. Who likes your chaotic coffee rituals and asks to read the poems you don’t post. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll just keep building this quiet, tender life for yourself. And that’s enough too.
But before that, there’s this. This weird, lonely middle part. The ache. The remembering. The random waves of missing them when you're already doing okay. The overthinking. The journaling. The fake to-do lists. The late-night deep dives into your own past. It’s all part of it. You're not behind. You're just in the middle.
Heartbreak is a rite of passage. Not something to chase, but something most of us will walk through if we ever dared to love deeply. It doesn’t make you broken. It makes you real. If anything, it chisels you. Softens you. Makes you a better witness to your own heart.
And when you’re on the other side, you’ll look back and realize—you didn’t just survive it. You stitched yourself back together with every walk, every playlist, every page you turned when you couldn't sleep. You didn’t just move on. You grew into someone who knows how to stay soft, even after being left.
That’s what heartbreak does. It breaks you, sure. But it also hands you all the pieces and whispers, build something softer. And you will, I’m sure you will.
thank you for reading this <3