How to Mend Your Broken Heart
By: Alma Hall
Tags: Jealousy, Healing, Heartache, Heartbreak, Self Esteem

I get jealous. I get competitive and sometimes hateful.

Whenever I encounter someone/something and I am in the right kind of mood, it causes pain. It causes pain because I am in a mood that is already causing me to dismantle myself into parts and pieces. I spend the day rating these parts and pieces, wondering which one matters, which one doesn’t, which one people do, or will, like more or less. I construct a world in which this all matters and hone it and clean it and refurnish it until I can’t tell this from reality anymore. This process takes my mind off the fact that I am already in pain and pretending I am not by focusing on my self-image and what other people think (as if there is ever a way to actually know this) helps me feel safe. Believe it or not, most of us were taught that pleasing others keeps us safe.

Then I see someone else. Or that thing that bothers me, say it’s a woman with nicer hair, happens. Let’s say having the Nicer Hair matters to me because my mother really cared about how my hair looked and entered me in beauty pageants and I got recognition for my Nice Hair my whole childhood and adolescence and this guy I like recently told me that if he decides I have the Nicest Hair Ever, I will get Something Awesome, for example, his approval and “love.”

Then I see a woman, and, I may be wrong, but it looks like she has Nicer Hair Than Me. Then, all these people around her start to confirm that she does have Nice, maybe Nicer, Hair and they don’t see me at all. Her hair looks even Nicer than that other girl I have been worried has Nicer Hair than me. I think about how ugly my hair is all the time. I neglect to eat lunch.

And I watch her and everything looks fine on the outside but on the inside my life has ended. My heart is broken. I am angry. I am not enough. Again.

This happens to me, to varying degrees, all the time. It is a personal “defect” I have been gradually working to meet with courage and love over a long period of time. The last year in particular has been forcing me to face my unwillingness to accept who I am, which has (both in the fictional example above and in my real life) nothing to do with my hair, or anybody else’s, or how it compares with anybody else’s. That person in me is pretty simple — so simple I pass her by constantly, even as I search for her. She is like a minnow and I keep being distracted by other minnows, or tadpoles or turtles or snakes. She is the plain green-gray-brown of a lake and she is one of millions and sometimes I don’t like her and sometimes I don’t see her and sometimes I forget her.

If my fictional mother hadn’t been so invested in me getting accolades for my hair when I was a kid, do you think I would have cared about my hair? I mean, more than normal? If my mother had been different and said, “Darling, I like this hair because it’s on your head and it’s beautiful and you’re beautiful and hair doesn’t matter anyway. Who are you? How are you?” do you think I would have developed such an extreme sense of self around my hair?

The short answer is no.

We need love (and when we don’t get it, we will take approval in its place) to survive. When we are little there is nothing else we are looking for. Children are not logical and what they understand is, If I am not loved, they will leave me, and if they leave me, I will die. This is certainly more nuanced in real life but I am certain the love we don’t receive and our obsession with survival have an inverse relationship. In the case of Me the Hair Girl (and I was never in beauty pageants but I definitely have a person in me who is identified with my hair), if my mother’s love centers around my hair winning me accolades, and my hair doesn’t do that, it makes sense that I will freak out and feel like I am going to die.

Our subconscious isn’t clean-cut. We have a million childhood experiences in which we conclude “I need to be this or I will die” and that forms our ego. The number of experiences in which we learn “I will love you no matter what” counteract these, and that establishes our ability to feel safe, to reach out, extend and be ourselves. It allows us to be ourselves, without self-obsession. I believe obsession is the result of fear. We would become obsessed with a lion prowling nearby if we had new babies, or we were somehow vulnerable, and the lion wasn’t making up its mind about what it was going to do. Obsession is not a happy experience. It is fight or flight run riot. (I am also obsessive. Extremely obsessive.)

At the center of jealousy is what the version of me who is obsessed with the identity around her hair concluded when the other girl had Nicer Hair. I am not enough.

I am not enough.

We say it to ourselves so often. Why? Many people see kicking the knees out from under their children as a means of building them up for a world in which enough isn’t enough. One needs to be bigger, better, stronger. Too often this means meaner and colder too.

That ability to win as compared to is like an extra badge. If you always get that badge, even better. Pretty soon it becomes evident there are many more people like you who are used to always being better, and The Rat Race is born, and reborn, and Born Again. Why be good enough when you can be better?

It makes sense. To the empty heart, which has nothing, it is everything. If your society appears to hold up empty values, then it only makes sense to be empty in order to succeed in that society.

I believe the idea that one is better or not, etc, is false. And always false. The more it matters, the more certain it seems, the more false it is.

One day something happens and you realize you’re worse than this person. And then it happens again — you’re worse, again, but this time it’s another person.

If your mind is constantly in comparison mode, because your identity is centered around being “better,” then you are constantly about to lose. The perception of “better” is subjective, which poses enormous problems to a mind that needs to be objectively “better” to survive. Once it becomes evident there is no way to win except perhaps to either figuratively or literally murder all of one’s foes, one would hope that is when they hit a wall. And they’re faced with a decision: murder, figurative or literal? Or death?

The right choice here, to me, is death. Death is choosing not to walk down the scary, horrible, painful road anymore.

Death is what you feel when you get jealous.

That little part of you, so big and powerful and diabolical to itself, faces a tiny death every time someone else wins a game you’re used to winning.

Some good news is, there is someone else, and they might play the game with you. Another bit of good news is, you’re good at the game. Love the little child inside of you who needed to be good at the game. Take a breath. You won’t die. You are enough. You would be enough even if you were bad at the game.

I personally am bad at almost all games and have given up on winning anything competitive, unless it is secretly/passive-aggressively competitive. Like, you don’t know I’m competing with you but I AM. If you ask me if I am competing with you, I will say NO.

Since I was a child I had trouble trying anything I didn’t think I was going to be good at. I had trouble accepting that you had to practice some things to be good at them. I had very little tolerance for the girl in me who needed to learn. I had to know, already. Or pretend I knew, so everyone else would think I did.

In college it seemed to me I stopped being good at anything. In fact, all but the bare minimum skills necessary to live stopped working in me. My nervous system quit. I bargained with the universe as I was entering this period, asking that nothing in my life be this hard again. It (sort of) worked with me on this. As I progressed, it became possible to change, which I had not been able to do, it seemed, my whole life. I began to absorb the idea that I was not who I thought I was, and people saw me differently here, even if they didn’t see me as much as I wished they did. I began to be told I was petite, something I had never heard in my life. I was apparently a “fast hiker.” But the most important thing was changing.

Emotionally, and physically sometimes, I felt like something metal that had gotten stuck under rubble in an earthquake. I was utterly deformed, and stiff, and felt like something other than human, a lot of the time. It would be an understatement to say it was alarming to feel like this. The only thing I could think was that the metal thing wasn’t me, and it had to go. So I began to communicate honestly about things I wanted and needed. I had lost a lot of my decorum and ability to communicate in a way that didn’t make people uncomfortable. I cared on a social level but since I cared more about my entire body and mind quitting and not being able to function normally, I just said and did things that I needed to say and do.

Once, I told someone I liked them. What I really meant was I loved them. I knew this was going to be a true test to the indestructible, terrible thing I had become in trauma, and I was right.

I didn’t know how it would feel. It was like I walked right up to that test not knowing what it was like to be hurt. And I didn’t. I didn’t know, and that threw me for a loop that lasted quite a long time.

This person, whether intentionally or not, broke my heart.

In that process my heart was discovered to be in me, but it was terrible. He did it unceremoniously, too. It was like being dropped on my face.

And yet, my heart did its job of saving me. It glowed in my chest. It watered something in me. It loved. I hurt and raged and it loved. It wouldn’t stop. It was so embarrassing and stupid. What even did I love, I wondered as this person and who I thought I was talking to when I told him how I felt drifted away from me. Look at that guy. What gives? He’s so lame. I am so much cooler than this.

But apparently I wasn’t. I cared. Telling someone you love them and being rejected is not, I learned, cool. It was the opposite of cool. Still feeling those horrible feelings that led you to that horrible feeling of all horrible feelings after you’ve been rejected is, I learned, even worse. I could not take it back.

Then I decided that there were worse things that feeling the wrong feelings for the wrong people, especially if I couldn’t manage to stop, whatever I did. There were worse things than being sincere, and transparent, and, god forbid, loving and vulnerable.

I kept falling on my face. It never stopped. It was horrible, horrible, horrible. And each time it was like another chink was broken in the thing that walled me in.

It never stopped until I stopped asking that person for what I wanted. I stopped asking in general, for a long time. I started to look for something bigger, something that could understand me, that could hold the love, and the subsequent pain and shame of it not being returned, that I could not. Something (and I doubted this was possible) that could, and would, hold me.

That thing was God. I have no other word for it. It was brilliant, echoing, powerful, huge, so very warm and it was love, and all of that was God. Thank God that God turned out to be something other than this person because I would have been screwed otherwise (look up love addiction, and making other people your Higher Power. Long-time problems of mine.)

I needed my soul back, and that guy gave me that. And then ran away laughing and screaming and pointing.

But guess what? I was still there. And I’m still here.

Now I find myself in some slight stability and a sense of myself as an adult, and I have to come to terms with inadequacy, something that followed me like the Boogeyman during the years I spent hoping for this person’s love.

I never wanted to be inadequate. And yet the only reason I would seek specifically another person’s approval was to not feel that way. I never got it, and I felt inadequate. I went in feeling inadequate, I came out feeling inadequate. But I came out with an awkward bizarre thing following everywhere called My Soul, almost like too-long skirts, and that was adding its own color to everything that used to hurt so bad I had to pretend it, and I, wasn’t there. And I could start to let it stuff in. And bear it. And think about it. And let it be. Eventually I could sometimes even let me be.

Right now I am in the process of accepting that I will not win in this particular story (whatever I think of as “winning.) That person may never apologize, come back, acknowledge I was maybe sort of good enough (like, for someone else, even, I don’t know). It is best to believe that will never happen. Because it hasn’t. Every attempt to make it happen has made me feel worse.

That place in me that burns when I am not chosen melts into a desire to cry, more often than not. I hold onto these other possibilities because I don’t want to feel it. It is the home of my heart, and so many “bad” things.

I don’t feel like a winner right now. I feel all kinds of gross and like a big fat loser. I have been feeling that way, and getting comfortable there since it won’t go away, for several years. I am fortunate that I don’t have tons of distractions and am not being bombarded with the usual fear-mongering the world habitually produces for me, and that has brought about a stillness that has in turn, after much wrestling with the idea that I am gross and a big fat loser, brought about the thought that this is not about me. I am not gross or a big fat loser. Who is my mind talking about? Who is it talking to?

It is a miracle to feel gross and like a big fat loser and have something in my head reply with, “I am not gross or a big fat loser.” I don’t have much more to say about this except that, sometimes, that happens when you start showing up for yourself repeatedly. You begin to directly contradict your internalized combative, hateful voices, and it’s not even a big deal. It’s like brushing something tickly off of your arm.

The way you mend your broken heart is, you don’t. I don’t know what happens but it changes into something else. Is there more breakage to deal with? I’m afraid to know how much more. It’s probably limitless. But, maybe, it doesn’t have to be terrible if I can just start with affirming myself and acknowledging the difficulty, and then staying with each thing as it comes.

In all of this, the best thing did happen: I became someone who never suffered the way I used to again. I changed. I loved. I changed. I loved again, and I changed. And I’m still here, and it’s all alright. I’m still changing. Maybe next time, the love will come with more dignity, more intelligence and self-regard, and therefore less fear. I don’t know. And who cares? Every time, more of me is here.

Remember this the next time you’re feeling icky: it’s all alright. Especially you.