What Becomes of a Broken Heart
The room had been dark for days, and I’d barely stirred from beneath my pile of covers. I had missed a week’s worth of classes? Maybe two? I definitely didn’t bother with Educational Psychology at 8am. There was a bottle of sleeping pills by my bed. I took just enough to keep me asleep, not enough to nudge me into that eternal slumber. It was 1993. Or maybe 1994. Those two years are blurry in my memory. I was living through my first broken heart. A real one. The kind that even now, some thirty odd years later, makes me flinch.
Months after the break-up, an older adult made a comment about how I needed to get over it already. And when I broke down (again), lonely and barely holding onto sanity, the same person remarked that they were surprised at the depth of my feelings. That dismissal of my pain still stings.
I failed Educational Psychology and lost my much needed scholarship. I drove, fast and grief stricken, on a dark, rainy night and hydroplaned my car into a semi-truck. The boy I thought I loved picked me up from the hospital, and I was certain he’d be sorry for leaving me. He wasn’t. He returned me to my dorm and ghosted me for the rest of the semester. Or maybe that was years too. We didn’t say “ghosted” then. But I’ve come to think the word is perfect for how it feels when someone vanishes from your life. For the rest of college, I stumbled through a dozen boring boys without remembering anyone’s name. I owned that broken heart.
Until I met a love that was deeper than my first, and together, we’ve built a vibrant, rewarding life. On occasion I wonder what my life might have been like had I ended up with the one I thought I’d never get over. On those occasions, I smile with compassion for the young woman I once was. She couldn’t see it—but life had so much love waiting for her.
I was reminded of that pain recently. And in the reminding the question rose, what is the point? What is the purpose of our pain? And for the first time in 30 years I thought deeper into those long ago months when I forgot how to breathe.
I realized I’d used lessons from that hurt many times in my life, mostly in my parenting, occasionally with friends.
When I was inside that pain, I used substance to dull the hurt and found myself on the brink of oblivion. I once spoke in church about how a person can come back from that edge. That talk touched a fragile life, and they thanked me for sharing.
I checked out of my responsibilities, lost my scholarship and ended up $30,000 in student loan debt. I’ve been able to discuss with others the financial consequences of losing your balance and sight of your priorities.
Due to carelessness with my own safety, I was involved in a horrific car accident that totaled my car. My daughter was involved in an accident that unnerved her for months, and I was able to empathize with how that feels.
My feelings were dismissed, probably because I was barely out of high school and the old have a way of underestimating the impact of loss on the young. That one I use every single week. I listen carefully to the many young people who come through my music studio, and I am vigilant in honoring their life struggles.
I thought that love had been lost to me. It turned out that the love that I needed was still waiting for me in my future. And even that everyday kind of lesson resonates in all parts of my life. We don’t always know why our path is unwinding the way it is. But we have to believe that the path is leading us somewhere.
One of the most relevant connections I’ve ever come across regarding how we can embrace our pain is through the Japanese art of Kintsugi, meaning “gold repair”.
In Kintsugi, an artisan uses powdered gold to mend broken or chipped ceramic pieces. By doing so, the damage to the pottery becomes a part of its beauty. I have often imagined that if I were a ceramic vase in Japan, I would be riddled with fractures made of gold.
But here’s the hard part, my friends, the art of Kintsugi is intentional. The artist deliberately examines the fracture and imagines what it can be. The damage is repaired carefully.
Hurting is like that. Unattended pain? Ignored traumas? These just leave us broken in places, weaker at the fracture point. But when our healing is intentional, when we deliberately take healthy steps forward, our fractures become part of our beauty. It is only through careful reparation of our wounds that we are able to gain strength.
What is careful reparation when you have been heart-wounded?
It looks like many things, but for me it was about finding strength in the right community, creating a forward plan that reflected my personal dreams and ambitions, taking time to reflect through journaling and meditation, and, as you will come to know if you read here often, engaging a trained counselor to mentor me.
And so, all these years later, I like to think there’s gold in my many fractures. They don’t erase the pain I’ve carried, but they shine through it, transforming loss into strength, grief into compassion, and loneliness into connection. If you are carrying a broken heart right now, I hope you will trust that your own cracks can one day be filled with gold too. Healing doesn’t come quickly and it doesn’t come easily—but it does come, if you give it time and tend to it with care. One day, you will look back and see not just the break, but the beauty of how you were made whole again.
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