Hello dear reader,
It is after a long time that I am shaking hands with a blank page today.
It is hard to believe that six months of 2025 has already passed. I am nervous to show up in your inbox after such a long time. 8 months to be exact.
If you’re here reading this, thank you for your patience and to my new readers, I thank you for joining me.
I hope you have been doing well and that even with all the terrible news from everywhere around the world, I hope you are still holding onto peace, prayer and hope in your heart.
As for me, after my 7-year relationship ended last year, there had been so much going on in my mind, and all of my energy was spent only on trying to live as best as I could each day.
I won’t deny that at this time I gave in to a lot of distractions that I am not proud of, and I felt rather far from my truest self.
I sat down to write many times, but I would always stop at hitting publish.
I would feel like an imposter if I tried to share anything, and so I abandoned it altogether.
Even so, I am really thankful for my blog and all the emails I received now and then from people who said that they missed my newsletter and wondered how I am doing. That touched my heart.
Anyway, today I want to share with you all that I have in my heart.
This is kind of like an open letter from me to you about my story, lessons on heartbreak, love and surrender.
This might be rather long, but I feel called on to write about this.
I don’t think I will be able to write about other things that I used to write earlier unless I first let this out from my heart.
So kindly bear with me.
…….
We had been together since 2017~ our University days when we were both pursuing our master’s degrees. He was my classmate turned best friend, turned neighbor and lover.
It was unlike any other relationship that I had before. As for him, I was his first.
I remember I would tell him that first loves don’t last. But as the years passed, I forgot about it, for this love felt like a byproduct of our friendship, and we went together like milk and honey.
University days went by in a flash in friendship, love and laughter.
We cleared exams together, and soon we were adults trying to navigate our own lives and trying to make sense of the world.
I really used to think that we were the best, and I loved us more than anything. And I know for certain that anybody who had known us loved us too.
But it’s strange how life and love are always uncertain.
You can never be for sure that you are going to be together forever unless both are willing to do the work.
Sooner or later, loving another will always bring up our inadequacies, our fears and our lesser self that we need to work on, for love is our greatest mirror.
But if we keep running away from that mirror, it is never going to work.
It won’t work no matter how much you feel, “But we just get each other, unlike anyone else”
“But it just flows effortlessly with us”
“But our connection is so great”
“But we laugh and enjoy together so much”
This is what had kept me going all the while when we were together.
This is also what made me briefly get my walls down and let him in again when he came back, saying the same things.
But now I know that just connection isn’t enough for love to last. Love itself isn’t enough for love to last.
When we broke up last year, it was the hardest thing I had faced in a really long time.
Usually, I could go on despite anything that life threw at me, but not this.
More than anything, it was the grief, not about what happened, but more about what didn’t.
Some small choices, but then it has their effects for a lifetime.
How he and I were separate was a fact I couldn’t digest for a long time.
Breaking up is hard because it turns your whole imagined life upside down.
It feels almost as if you have been uprooted from your home, and you don’t know where else to go.
Reminiscing about it, now it feels almost as if I were passing through a storm.
However, time and knowledge do heal things because with them comes acceptance, and acceptance is always the first step towards healing.
Now that the dust has settled and I have finally gotten the closure that I needed, I feel like my nervous system has finally been able to relax and come to be at peace with what happened.
I won’t tell you what he did or did not do because that is on his part.
However, this part that I am writing is about mine.
This heartbreak made me think about what ‘to love’ truly means.
Love isn’t just a feeling; love is a skill that you must be willing to learn.
We all have our capacities to love. But when you truly love another, you have to be willing to expand your capacity to love; otherwise, you tend to do more damage than good.
How true it is what Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love”.
Often we do love, but we don’t quite know how to love well.
Nobody teaches us how to love, and when love comes up as a mirror, as a teacher, we run away to the path of least resistance so as to protect ourselves.
But healthy love requires self-awareness. It requires the thoughtfulness to expand our capacity to love, to be generous, to think more about giving than receiving and to be a steadfast presence through it all.
Healthy love is about learning the ways your partner would want to feel loved, rather than loving in the only way you know you can.
All this while I had been running after connection, spark, rightness, not knowing that love takes more than that to build.
What truly matters is how well you connect over things when things don’t go well, how well you think you can build a life together you can be proud of, how well you can serve each other and as well as others through you, how emotionally mature you can handle things and how kind and thoughtful your partner generally is just as a person, because if they are kind and helpful as a person, they will always be kind.
And now, after all that happened in the end, I don’t know whether to think he loved me or not.
Maybe he did or maybe he did not, but I can say for myself that I did and I have no regrets at all, both to love and to lose.
I can choose to see everything either in the light of anger and betrayal, or I can choose to take it as a lesson on love, healing, timing, alignment, protection and surrender.
Also, another thought that comes to me now is that- when things don’t go our way, (and I am telling this not only in regards to relationships but everything), you can be mad and let anger or frustration creep in, but what good would it do?
Instead, if there is anger, but if you are aware and mindful that you are angry, then that is enough to not be angry about it so much anymore, and it will be easier for that anger to turn into something else, such as forgiveness, creativity or even deep thankfulness.
Life will do what life has to do.
You and I are no special beings for life not to happen to us.
Life — encompassing happiness, sadness, mistakes, failures, complexity, heartbreak, joy, and renewal — is what makes life life.
Surviving and living through it all is when we can say that we were truly human and that we lived a full life.
I choose to now let that chapter of my life end with grace.
I choose to surrender to receive the blessings.
I choose to thank him for all the good times we had, and to accept that perhaps this is how it was planned for us.
Finally, I choose to now allow myself to be loved in the way God wants me to be loved.
Love is a teacher. Heartbreak is a teacher. Every experience is a lesson, and we must learn to be forever good students of life.
This much for today.
If you have read this far, I thank you for your kindness.
P.S This was a part from my Mindful Monday Newsletter. To receive my newsletter directly to your inbox, subscribe below. It would be wonderful to have you ❤️
Journal Prompt of the Week
Table of Contents
How did you spend the first half of the year? How do you want to really spend the next half?
Blog Post of the Week
Quote of the Week
One from Others
Sometimes you have to let go of what you thought you wanted to make room for the life that’s trying to find you
— James Mccrae
One from me
Nobody can do us more harm than our own unkind thoughts and unkind words, but also nobody can do us greater good than our own kind thoughts and kind words. You deserve your own kindness.
I wish you a wonderful week ahead
Love and regards,
Vishaka
This was beautiful. You have a big heart. And that itself is enough to carry you through it all!
Thank you so much!