Truly the light is sweet, Ecclesiastes 11:7
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Welcome to Searching for Sunshine! |
For my non-South African friends: A "monkey's wedding" is a South African term for a "sunshower". Hello wonderful people! I hope you are all doing well and that you have taken the time to go outside and soak up some sun! Today I want to talk about grief, specifically during a breakup, and why we don't need to feel guilty for not feeling sad.
I just recently got out of quite a serious relationship, and I want to talk about some of the things I learned. Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, break-ups suck. I thought this person was "the one", we'd been dating for over 2 years in total, I loved him more than I thought I could ever love anyone. Aaannndd, then it ended. It wasn't some brutal, "hate the ex", kind of break up. It came quietly, the clouds rolling in slowly, so that you almost don't notice them. You don't notice the drizzle when it starts, you only realize things have changed once you start to shiver from the cold, and wet of the rain. By then, it's too late for an umbrella, it's time to go inside. Just because it was time, doesn't mean that it didn't hurt. I still cried, I liked being outside, I liked the sunshine, I like the breeze. I liked being in this relationship, I liked being able to say I had a boyfriend, I liked the security I felt for my future. I still mourned the loss of that relationship. But I didn't mourn for nearly as long as I thought I would. I was able to get up and go about my day. And at first, I felt bad for that. I know, weird eh? I felt guilty about not being sad. "This relationship was serious to me, why am I not more sad??" I think there were a couple reasons for this. The first is quite simple: God. When I last went through this I was very far from God. I didn't talk to Him, I didn't pray, I didn't want His help. This time I am much closer with God. I talk to Him all the time, I pray, I ask for help, for understanding, for peace. And God has blessed me with that, with peace and understanding. When I determine how sad I should feel, I base it off of how sad I was when we first broke up. That was 2 years ago, and I was in a pretty bad place as it was. So the pain of a break up felt a million times worse because I was already so overloaded with emotions. Now that I am healthier, I am able to process emotions in a more "normal" way. Now this last one is a bit difficult to explain, but it's also the main reason I am writing this. my ex and I didn't fit. Yeah, we're great friends, we work together well, but we don't fit as a romantic partnership. As much as we might have wanted it to work, it couldn't. And I think deep down I knew that. Our dynamic had changed, we behaved as friends. When we broke up, not much changed. Rather than saying "boyfriend" I said "friend". We still speak, I still volunteer for him at the church, nothing changed. I just removed the word "boy" from our friendship. So when it came down to it, I didn't mourn for as long, because there wasn't as much to mourn. I still kept my friend, I still kept the good parts of our relationship. We just took out the part that didn't work anymore, and we're much better for it. As for the love part, I had it wrong. I loved him, I really did, just not in the way I thought. I loved my boyfriend, I loved what I wanted him to be, but I did not love him for who he was, and it took breaking up for me to realize that. I'm still learning from this experience, learning about myself, about what I want. I'm learning to trust God, that even if I don't know what His plan is, He still has one. I've realized quite a few things over the last few weeks, and I will do my best to articulate this, however it will take more than one blog entry. So for now, I leave you with this: Everybody grieves differently, and you don't have to feel guilty for not being sad.
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