They keep saying that the only way out is through. How many people, I wonder can really say that they sat with their pain and faced it. They call it “The Hero’s Journey,” and indeed, I can understand why. For the last 8 weeks, my heart has been breaking. I have always known that a break-up breaks me apart. I love really deeply, actually I just generally feel really deeply. And this relationship in particular was not one I had foreseen an end to. I had been encouraged by my ex to let go of “my backup plan” and so I did and I walked towards the future we were dreaming of with absolute commitment. Probably the first time I have ever done this in my life.

My call for this relationship had been to choose between love and career. I chose the latter. And for the most part I am really glad I did. Except for now, when things didn’t work out, and I sit here with the blankest canvas I have had in front of me since leaving university in 2008. I truly have no idea where to turn. I have no idea how to transform my unusual skillset into something that is going to turn into my career path, generate an income and provide me with the purpose I am seeking.

In the first week of the breakup, I took myself off for 4 days and took a journey into myself. I had so many experiences and so many insights come through around what had happened in my relationship and how I thought we could repair. But, that takes 2 right. You can’t have one person wanting to repair and the other person wanting to walk away. And so, when that settled in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd time, I realised now I really had to sit with the end of this life I had dreamt with him.

The tears have not stopped flowing. One minute I will be engaging with a bunch of people and the next minute, this wave of grief flows through my body and rises up in my throat like a massive gulp. And then my eyes fill with tears, my body shakes a little and I have to get out of there. I have to have time on my own. I have been sitting with why this particular break up feels so hard. And I keep getting encouraged to look at the “lack” that is driving my “need” to go back. To be honest, I keep asking myself can it not just be as simple as I really love him, I really miss him?

But people I trust to guide me are encouraging me to look at this as an opportunity to turn the love I was so freely giving in my relationship onto myself. My needs I was so freely bypassing, need to be met by me now. The fight in me says I love to love him. I loved to care for him. What if that is just who I am? But, there is a part of me that knows that love for me requires a certain amount of self-sacrifice that may border on the line of imbalance. This process has required brutal honesty with myself and pages and pages of writing, hours and hours of walking meditation.

I want to understand myself better at the end of this, why do I give up so much of myself. What allows me to stay when I am not treated the way I deserve to be? What part of me reacts when I wish to respond? The interesting lesson in all of this for me has been how to sit with an emotion, not attach a narrative to it, call up the feeling in my body and allow it to pass through. It has shown me how much power I have in my body to choose the response to the stimulus.

I am powerful beyond measure.