Everybody Hurts...Sometimes

We all have had our share of heartbreaks in life. We all go through something or the other that tears us apart at some point of time in our lives. Some beautiful realities that don’t translate into a possible future, some lives that touch us leave our hands too soon. All of this, as sometimes it appears, is a part and parcel of our existence in this world and yet, they do leave us wounded in the process.

In this post, I want to talk about something that we always tend to do in response to heartache served to us by life in form of break-ups or loss of someone dear to us. Apart from being immensely powerful, memories are sometimes irritatingly clingy. Or maybe it’s just us clinging on to them, but they are definitely THE problem after any heart-breaking event in life. One way we decide to deal with them is by shutting ourselves to those things with which their memories are associated. Every time we come across the song that we shared with them or they sang to us, we change it at the first instant. We don’t want to go to places we visited with them. We don't want to watch those movies that once used to be our 'mutual' favorite.  Simply, we just avoid doing anything and everything in which we find a way to the past that doesn’t exist anymore.

Although, this is the standard response by most of us, but this is where we go completely wrong. Such actions are invariably rooted in fear. Yeah, fear. We are just plain afraid of breaking down when confronting things, that still for us, are them. What we don’t realize is that by avoiding those things to which their memories are attached we are merely fooling our hearts by delaying the inevitable. For one day destiny will put in front of you something that you had long been avoiding. Then, it will be a major breakdown, a major heartbreak. This will be nothing but a result of all the piling up that we allowed to happen all this while by ‘avoiding’. 

The way to go about memories is doing exactly the opposite. Do not avoid. Don’t run away from things carrying their memories. Be brave enough and face them again. It might hurt the first time, the second time, and even the third time. But by the fourth or fifth time, you’ll have new bits of experiences that will cling to those songs, those movies, those roads. And gradually, they will take you out of the saddening memory. In fact, it is quite possible that some years down the line, these same carriers of their memory have someone or something else attached to them. But that depends completely on your choice to take the first step and embrace those things as something having a meaning independent of your past memories with them.

So, don’t shut yourself to those things anymore for you can’t remain closed to anything forever. Open yourself to new experiences and let the new little experiences add up and oust whatever sadness and negativity existed before. They say time heals everything. They aren’t wrong but for the healing to happen, you’ve to give yourself to time. 

P.S - If reading this brought a smile on your face, do go ahead and listen to one of my favorite songs  to let that smile grow wider - Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.