Hi friend,
As we kick off the first installment of Our Common Threads and begin to unravel the complicated matter of heartbreak, I’ve been thinking a lot about origin points. How this first essay will serve as an origin point for this chapter on heartbreak, but also how the true origin point of Our Common Threads was really an ending – the swift and sudden conclusion of my long-term relationship.
An origin point is defined as the place where something comes from; the place where something originates.
The place where something comes from. When I first read this definition, the image of a tree came to mind: specifically, the mid-way point between branches and roots on a tree trunk, the meeting point where the tree synthesizes the soil’s nutrients into upward growth – into branches that reach in a thousand different directions.
Getting your heart broken feels a lot like being cut, cleanly, at this exact point. Heartbreak feels like someone has taken an ax and snapped you in two, like a tree that’s been chopped at the base of its trunk, left exposed and reeling with the impossibility of how it will ever resume its prior power and shape.
But trees – they have a habit of regrowing. Of reaching their roots even further into the Earth when the world above feels unstable, of reaching inwards to find the necessary ingredients for expansion. But when you experience the neat severing that is heartbreak, how do you begin this careful process of regrowth?
You begin by recognizing that in this exact moment, when you feel like you’ve been cut off at the knees, you are at a point of origin. You are at the place where something comes from, and it is up to you what that something will be.
If you let it, the something that comes after heartbreak can be anything. It can be everything. It can be self-knowledge and self-awareness, the by-products of learning how to reach inwards, of learning how to hold the softness of your heart in even softer palms. It can be the project that you’ve always wanted to start, the music you’ve always wanted to make, the art you didn’t even know you had inside of you until it was pouring out onto the canvas. It can be the decision to move to the city or the island or the cabin in the forest that’s been calling to you in the early hours of the morning, before the rest of the world has the chance to convince you against it. It can be the choice to travel to unknown lands, to put yourself into situations that you didn’t even know your soul had needed.
It can – and will – be the greatest opportunity for retrospection and growth that you have ever known.
When I think about my own moment of heartbreak eighteen months ago – my own origin point of the person I’ve now grown into – I think about how all I could see were the finalities. At the time, my mind was consumed with the ‘lasts.’ The day before my now ex-partner moved out of our shared flat, my mind continuously and sickeningly made note of every last moment: this is the last day that we’ll work from our flat together, the last time I’ll hear his voice echoing across the wooden floors, down the hallway, through the cracked door of the bedroom. This is the last hour we’ll share the same air, the last time I’ll feel the urge to wrap my arms around the sound of his laugh. And, then – this is the last time I’ll ever hear him softly click the door shut behind him.
The absoluteness of these finalities was harrowing. I couldn’t see anything except for the endings; couldn’t feel my way into caring about anything that would come in the future. I was trapped in a swirl of loss, of looking down instead of looking for a way out.
How I wish someone would have been able to throw me a life raft. How I wish someone would have been able to tell me that I was standing at an origin point: that I had both everything behind me and everything ahead of me, at the same time. That even though I felt like a tree that had been cut in two – my being was already beginning the meticulous process of regeneration. That a higher power was already reorganizing and reshuffling to provide me with the rare opportunity to grow into a multitude of directions.
How I wish someone would have been able to tell me that this moment, this origin point, was a forceful – and necessary – redirection towards becoming the person I needed to grow into. This moment would ask me to reach back into my childhood to heal the wounds that I had been unknowingly carrying, wounds that were preventing me from living with freedom and fluidity. It would teach me how to hold my own hand, night after night, in order to grow the kind of self love that is now the solid foundation on which I live my new life. This moment would cast a light on the friends I could trust to show up during a crisis; it would cast a light on the ones who I could not. It would call on me to travel to places with people I hadn’t even met yet, to build relationships with individuals who have ultimately provided me with a deep sense of family and community that I didn’t even know I was missing.
When your heart breaks, no one can tell you what comes next. No one can tell you the exact ways in which you’ll grow, or the exact paths that will appear, each one beckoning you with a hopeful promises and defining obstacles. We can’t see any goodness when we are trapped within the wreckage, and we cannot see the beauty that is blossoming behind the scenes, within the mist of the unknown.
But we can simply let ourselves be at this new origin point. We can take off our shoes, sink our toes into the grass. We can feel the tiny beginnings of new branches slowly prickling at the base of the soul, begging us to plant our feet into the ground, to lift our hearts into the open air. To look up at the sky with wonder instead of fear, and to accept that although we’re not able to see what’s behind the clouds, we can always trust that there is sunshine hoping to find its way through.
I hope these words can act as the life raft I had needed at the time – that it can serve as a reminder that although an old way of life is ending, and although everything feels overwhelmingly final – you are standing at an origin point. And that you have every path and every opportunity ahead of you, from where you stand right now, if you can just trust that it’s all unfolding for you when you are ready to begin, again.
In gratitude,
Cecilia
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Our Common Threads is written and edited by Cecilia Callas.