The Positive Side of a Breakup (It’s not all Blue)

 

The right definition of a breakup isn’t only when a couple, who were romantically involved, split up. Breakup at its essence is the breaking of your heart into a bazillion pieces. When you want something from all your heart, mind, and soul, whether it’s a person or a thing or a goal, and you fail to procure it or you lose it, that’s essentially a breakup.

When you yourself leave a person or a desire then that’s not a breakup, that’s more of a relief. But when the person or that desire becomes out of your reach for whatever reasons, then that’s when your heart eviscerates.

Here I am not trying to deny the reality and say it’s all well and good. I am not even gonna charge you up with hollow motivational one-liners. A Breakup of any kind sucks donkey ball. Really yeah! There’s no denying that.

I am simply gonna help you understand that while there’s all the pain and agony, there are also some positive sides to a breakup nevertheless. In no way, I am trying to tell you to forget about the pain, or even ask you to undermine the suffering, but simply assisting you to look at a breakup in a potentially more rewarding manner.

Breakup Creates an Energy

Anger, frustration, desperation, and sadness are some of the emotions that spike up whenever we go through a breakup. Now, the thing to understand here is that these all are just emotions aka energy in motion. Emotions in themselves don’t carry any meaning, it’s we who assign a meaning to these emotions.

Energy isn’t either positive or negative, constructive or destructive. Energy is energy. Fire is fire, you can either use it for your gain or burn yourself. Electricity is electricity, you can again go either way with it. 

Similarly, all these emotions which we have labeled as ‘negative’ aren’t actually negative if we can look at them from a broader perspective. You can use the very same energy into a different dimension to create something meaningful out of it.

In fact the bigger the breakup, the more profound will be the energy and the bigger actions one is capable of taking. One can either totally become devastated and do all kinds of crazy things or can use that energy to completely rebuild oneself from the ground up and forge a totally new identity.

Think of a scale that stretches from -infinity to +infinity. The energy that was generated as a result of any kind of breakup, is neutral until we decide to use that energy to either go to the positive side of the scale or the negative one. The choice is always ours.

 

Love VS Breakup

When you are in a state of love with a person or a goal, the kind of energy you experience is passive and relaxing. You are completely at peace and feel a sense of calm. It almost seems like the world has come to a halt. 

When you fall in love with a person or with your work or with a vision, you’d feel deeply connected to it, as if it’s actually a part of you only. Purely from the energy intensity perspective, this kind of energy is scattered and uniformly spread throughout your body. You will the positive sensations in your entire body.

But when your heart breaks, then the intensity of energy grows multiple folds. It becomes concentrated at a single point, generally around your chest, and the impact it can bring with it is simply massive.

A ton of great artists in history used this particular energy only in some way or the other to break the shackles and transcend the normal to create something totally magical. This kind of energy is so strong and infectious that even if you want to, you can’t really distract yourself that easily from the clutches of this power as it’s so unidirectional and concentrated. 

You might feel distracted from time to time even when working on the projects you love where then you have to forcibly shift your focus back onto the work. But one of the positives of a breakup is that you simply can’t take your mind from the pain and the void it created. You have to try real hard to keep your mind distracted.

Interesting, isn’t it? All I am saying is, why not use that razor-sharp focus you developed into something constructive? I mean you are already hurting because of the breakup, so why now let that drag you further down the soul-sucking black hole. 

The energy that is accumulated will either come out constructively or destructively. So, if it has to come out one way or the other, it might as well come out creating something good. And only you can channelize that energy to experience the positive side of a breakup.

 

Head VS Heart 

Under normal circumstances when you create something from your head or your mind, it can be outdone by someone with more caliber or experience or skills in the same field. But, when you do something with your heart, then that’s beyond the realm of comparison altogether.

The pain, the energy emanating from the heart after a breakup, when put to good use in such a way, that you totally lose your own self during the process, then that’s when you establish something that’s beyond good or bad, positive or negative, success or failure. Your creation becomes love itself.

Whether it was the Taj Mahal of Shah Jahan or Van Gogh’s masterful portraits, Shakespear’s literature or Adele’s music, or the hundreds of other timeless artists who made themselves immemorial through their craft, the sole reason they were able to do what they did is because of the thing I am rambling about for the past 10min.

A real entrepreneur transferred his energy into building something revolutionary, a musician into creating an elixir for our ears, an artist into turning a canvas into a masterpiece, and a sportsman into something worth drooling over again and again.

 

You Become Fearless

A real heartbreak can really be deplorable. You can literally feel your heart being chopped off into a bazillion tiny little pieces. The pain is insurmountable and the effect isn’t worn off that easily. The positive side of heartbreak or the silver lining is that you eventually become fearless.

I am suddenly reminded of Tyler Durden who famously said, “It’s only after we have lost everything, that we are free to do anything.”

You no longer fear going broke when you are already a beggar, you no longer fear losing a job when you are already unemployed, you no longer fear about your health when you are already in a hospital. When you are in the worst of scenarios, the word ‘fear’ instantly vanishes into thin air.

Now, that you went through a breakup already, you no longer have all those trivial and pesky fears left swirling in your mind, that used to suck up your energy. You no longer care about the small things that would earlier eat you up without adding any value to your life. 

And I don’t know if you’d realize it at the moment, but there is this sense of freedom that you’d experience, which can turn out to be a gamechanger if leveraged in the right way.

Time to Introspect

You might be the busiest person on the planet, but when you meet a breakup of any kind or when life throws a sneaky uppercut punch that literally turns your life upside down, your mental space suddenly expands in an intriguing way.

There suddenly is a lot of time for you to think and ponder about yourself. What went wrong, how did it happen, what could you have done differently, what lessons can you keep in mind from the next time onwards, and so forth.

Essentially, you get time to ask the right kind of questions, get to know more about yourself, and rebuild yourself inside out. That’s possibly the biggest positive of a breakup. The emotional energy trapped in you—if given the right direction—will help you discover dimensions you had no idea existed. 

 

Measure Yourself in the Truest Sense

Another amazing positive of a breakup is that you get to know how strong you are from the inside. You’d have no idea about how firm and bold you actually are when everything is going smoothly and according to you.

It’s only when something you never even imagined in your wildest of dreams becomes your reality can you actually measure what you are truly made of. 

You won’t realize exactly how talented and skilled you are until you are fired and are looking for a new job, you won’t realize just how profound your business skills are until you are forced to build from the ground up after going bankrupt, and you won’t acknowledge how emotionally strong you are until your heart is broken.

Being able to consciously observe and test yourself after any kind of breakup and seeing your true character is indeed a silver lining. You’d be able to see how much pain can you actually bear. And that fun part is that this is the only way to actually transcend the breakup phase.

If you try to run away from it, suppress it, deviate your attention from it, or reject it, then you are just gonna aggravate the whole issue even more. Only when you face it to see your limit, can you actually hit two targets from a single arrow.  

Say this to yourself, “Ok, let me see how much worse can this get and how much agony and affliction can I actually face? Let me see if this pain is fatal or not, let me see what kind of destruction is this torture capable of, let me see what’s the upper limit of this suffering. I am not afraid of it!” 

When you say this, you are taking the first step to becoming one with the pain, which indeed is the only permanent way to grow out of it. You will also come to terms with the fact that psychological pain is purely subjective and it varies greatly from person to person. Two entirely different reactions can be expected from two people of different backgrounds for the exact same situation.

Not bad for a breakup to help you realize so many things, eh?

 

Becoming More Self Aware

This is actually an extension to the previous positive of breakup only. You must have noticed that whenever you hurt yourself unconsciously, whether it is biting your tongue, or stepping over a banana peel or burning yourself while cooking, you become all the more aware of these scenarios.

You’d chew your food with more attention, you’d observe more while walking into unchartered territory, and you’d take all the necessary precautions to keep yourself safe while in the kitchen. And the reason is simple, you don’t want to hurt yourself again, at least not intentionally.

Now, when it comes to breakups of any kind, you will simply become more self-aware of what kind of people or situations to steer clear from to avoid future potential heartbreaks. Your analytical skills and your measuring abilities to evaluate the current scenario will go up multiple folds.

So, it is actually possible that you might avert an even bigger heartbreaking situation in the future because your previous breakups helped you prepare for that and made you wiser than before. That’s another positive of a breakup. See, I told you it’s not all blue.

Sparks Inner Motivation

Whenever we are hurt or fail, then one of the two things happens. Either we are so brutally tormented by the breakup that we simply give up hope altogether, or we get so charged up from the inside that we simply become unstoppable until we change the status quo.

This isn’t an absolute positive of a breakup as it’s highly subjective. But hey, the opportunity is there. It depends on you and you alone as to what kind of a response you wanna make. 

The interesting thing about this kind of motivation is that it stays for a longer period of time. Most kinds of external motivation don’t really persist and it’s utterly temporary. But, when it comes to a breakup, the silver lining is that the pain it brings with it kinda sparks the inner inspirational lamp which never really runs out of fuel. 

 

It Might Actually Free You

Well, this is one of those things which you don’t realize instantly but eventually. Sometimes some people you are in a relationship with, some goals and dreams you envisioned, or simply any desire that grew in you just aren’t healthy for you.

Instead of pushing you to become better and help you discover something new and amazing in you, they kinda become the reason for your hindrance. 

You won’t even realize it until it’s too late as on the surface you might think it’s all well and good as long as you are able to extract positive and feel good emotions out of it. But what you might miss out on is the fact that those temporary positive feelings might be leaving a permanent scar on your soul.

Anything, be it a person or a dream, if they are not helping you grow from the inside, support your core beliefs and values, and aren’t contributing in any way to strengthen your soul, it’s better to cut them off. That’s another positive of a breakup right there, addition through subtraction. 

 

Empathy and Self Love

When Life lands a solid punch, you kinda realize your position and become humble and grounded. Whatever you thought you were in your mind, no matter how high you were in the ego ladder, life would take just a jiffy to throw your egotistical ass down to the ground and drag you through hell. 

The positive side of this is that you will discern what being empathetic actually looks like. You will be able to understand the pain of others in a more realistic and relatable manner, helping you form deeper bonds with the people who have gone through the same.

Essentially, it’d also help you rekindle that self-love in you, in case it was lost somewhere. When you are hurt and you have no one by you, you will have to console yourself and be there with you more than anyone else. 

No one can possibly understand the myriad of emotions you are going through but you yourself. So, I think it surely is a positive side of a breakup, if it can help us fall in love with ourselves all over again. At the end of the day, you only have you yourself who you can count on unconditionally and unabashedly.

It’s very easy to pat yourself on the back when you do something amazing, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park to place a hand on your heart and say ‘it’s gonna be alright’ when you are not too sure yourself. A breakup can surely help us accelerate the process.

Life Goes On

You will finally get to know more about the nature of the life we have been bestowed with. The simple mantra of life is that it will keep on progressing, and it won’t wait for anyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s your heart that is broken or an asteroid that’d kill all the giant lizards, a person that betrayed you or a world war that’d wipe half the population, life simply doesn’t give a shit.

You can either get on board with it and learn to move the hell on, or be stuck forever in the past which is actually dead and non existent. 

 

So, now that we talked about what you can or should do with the energy that arose due to the breakup, it only makes sense to shed some light on how to make that transition as smooth as possible.

 

It’s Ok to Feel Bad

Remember that at the end of the day, you are only human after all who is filled with emotions and feelings up to the brim, so it’s natural to feel bad after an ugly breakup, or after your dream shatters into a million pieces. 

You wanna cry? Cry. You wanna mourn? Mourn. You want support from your friends and families? Please do. Wanna show your vulnerability and open up? Don’t wait. Don’t act like a superman who’s gonna remain impervious to anything and everything happening around him. 

You are only gonna be delaying the whole healing process, which will ultimately abstain you from all the goodies waiting for you after you overcome this hurdle. Don’t try to fight off your natural reaction or impulses. You are just wasting your energy trying to get rid of your ‘negative emotions’.

Like I said earlier, there is no negative or positive. Emotions are simply energy in motion. The more you try to suppress an inflow of energy the more it will pester you. You just gotta give it a new direction.

 

 

The quote “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” seemed apt to end with.