Win Your Breakup (eBook)

1. Without Death, There Are No Ashes to Rise From

How to Remember Who the Fuck You Are

The first thing you need to do after a breakup is remember who the fuck you are. But how can you remember what you need to when you were in a relationship that required you to forget what you could not afford to forget (your strength, your standards, and yourself)?

How could this happen after you gave so much and asked for so little?

Why wasn’t it enough? Why weren’t you enough?

There’s nothing wrong with thinking about everything you did for your ex. Hindsight only becomes blinding when it’s not grounded in reality. The reality is, you hold the value here—not someone whose sense of worth comes from getting you to question your own.

Think of the value in everything that you gave, excused, believed in, and took the time to explain.

Do you know how much of a rarity that is?

In a dating world of instant gratification, immature games, entitlement, and a lack of old-school values, you gave—with all of your heart.

You had a winning lottery ticket in a sea of ticket holders. And when it came time to grow those riches mutually, your ex choked. He wasn’t ready to handle the level of wealth you were so willing to share. Not because your riches weren’t “good enough” to ignite an appreciation for all that you are and gave, but because, after a while, those riches began to highlight his bankruptcy. He could no longer keep up the charade.

And when someone’s insecurities run that deep, walking away will always be easier than having to look in the mirror.

For him to win this breakup, your ex needs three things (three things that all toxic people need to survive):

• Your attention
• Your reaction
• Your low self-esteem

For you to win this breakup, you need to do three things (three things that he is convinced you are incapable of doing):

• Maintain silence.
• Activate indifference.
• Remember who the fuck you are.

But right now, you are stuck in the most painful and confusing limbo.

You are caught between the hope of resuscitating the man you miss (the man he was in the beginning) and the acceptance of that man no longer having a pulse.

Death is something that we are not wired to ever get used to. We are, however, wired to accept and heal in the finality associated with it. When a loved one physically dies, it is the most unnatural and excruciating feeling in this world. But at least we can mourn without having to wonder if and when they will physically return.

You are now experiencing the one thing that can feel even harder to get over than the loss associated with physical death: mourning the death of someone you thought you knew—as they live and breathe in a life that seems so much better without you in it.

Letting go of someone you love is hard enough. Having to accept their death while knowing that they are still walking the earth is soul shattering—no matter how much better you know you deserve.

Any attempts you make to resuscitate your relationship with a toxic ex will backfire. The resulting embarrassment will drain you of your self-respect and strengthen your self-sabotaging beliefs. This experience turns you into a magnet for more relationships that are just as unfulfilling as the one you have with yourself.

Your triggers will try everything to justify acting on desperation by getting you to believe in a pulse that does not exist—all while everyone looks on at the unfortunate dummy who’s trying to bring one back to life. This is why attempting to resuscitate your relationship in any way will do nothing but prove to your ex:

• How easy it is to fuck with you. He can play dead/ghost when he wants, come to life when he wants, and mix every signal imaginable.
• How insecure and dependent you must be.
• How weak you really are.
• That he can count on you to be an ego-boosting, grateful-for-anything, crumb-dependent option.
• That he doesn’t have to worry about you meeting a better man.
• That he won.

No matter what you’ve done or haven’t done up to this point, none of the above is true, or this book would not be in your hands.

So you have no other choice. You have to accept this death, right? But how can you accept death when there is death, but there also isn’t?

The only way that a feeling of post-breakup defeat can survive is if you are still in the game, and the opposition seems to be thriving amid your perceived downfall. Death disables defeat from seeping into your psyche because there are no players in the face of death. Death is the ultimate leveler. And even though this is not a game, you still want to win.

So back to the main problem:

How can you accept this death when all you see is your ex LIVING—a much happier life that you can no longer access?

It’s easy for friends and family to say, “Things will get better with some distance,” “Time heals everything,” “You dodged a bullet,” “Just turn inward; put yourself first,” “Take yourself out on a date!” None of this is applicable, nor does it make any sense right now. In fact, it makes you feel worse. You can’t feel hopeful for healing from the passage of time when, right now, you don’t feel like you can make it through the next hour. And how are you supposed to turn inward, take yourself out on a date, and put yourself first when you (and all of your best efforts) weren’t even good enough for your undeserving ex to put you first?

Breakups are a death that is forever subject to resurrection.

You could move on in the most life-changing ways and still, at any point, even many years down the line . . .

You get a call or a text from an unknown number that you don’t know why, but it looks so familiar. You get an unsolicited update on his status from a mutual friend or from your sister after she ran into his. He pops up in your social media notifications right when you finally start moving on with your life and feeling like yourself again. You may even run into him in a city too big to make any sense of how he’s suddenly standing right in front of you.

And just like that, there’s one less ex who’s six feet under in your relational graveyard.

With toxic exes, in particular, breakups used to ignite a sense of entitlement in me. I assumed all the pain, suffering, and failure was just a rite of passage on my way to the Happily Ever After I had earned. It had to be. I was a good person, and even though I struggled with enforcing standards, loving myself, and being a total contradiction, I knew on some level that I was a catch. This pain was just me having to “pay my dues” so I would never take for granted the guy who was going to come along to save me, complete me, and see everything in me that I could not see in myself.

Believing in this eventual return on investment was the only thing that made the pain survivable, but it came at a cost. The cost was my power, self-respect, and the life I was so willing to exchange for a licensed renewal on delusion.

Being a good person who can endure toxic relationships does not entitle you to be saved by a man (whose job should never be to save anyone). Nor does it prevent you from being a doormat in the lives of people who have no problem hijacking yours. Endurance will never attract the life you want, nor will it birth the winner you are about to become—evolution will.

But don’t think that all you have endured is useless.

Your ability to endure what you have is proof that you can evolve into The One That Got Away, the winner of this breakup.

If you saw a child who was learning to read and having a hard time pronouncing the words in a book, would you ever say, “Whoa, you better stop. You are not a reader. Here, take this coloring book instead”? Of course not. It would destroy the child’s ability to believe in a capacity that they had all along. You wouldn’t say that because you are confident that with endurance, lessons learned, and evolution as a result of having the sheer courage to act on those learned lessons, the child will evolve into a reader. You are living proof of that evolution, or you would not be reading these words right now.

If you can say, without a doubt, that you would never label the child as a colorist and not a reader, stop being a contradiction. Stop minimizing and labeling yourself as the resident colorist whose only purpose is to add color (at the cost of her own) to the colorless lives of shitty people. Start maximizing your ability to act by capitalizing on your already proven ability to sense toxicity and endure the kind of pain that is now driving your desire to win instead of defining your downfall.

This shift is not about hardening and becoming cynical. It’s about becoming sharper and being able to call your own relational shots. It’s about acting on the acceptance of what is beyond resuscitation (your relationship) so that you can rise and reinvent in a way that your ex (and anyone who has ever fucked with you) could...