Let Your Heartbreak Break You Open

I'm on my knees in the dim surf shack bedroom, face pressed against a lumpy, terracotta comforter that smells faintly of salt and damp. This isn’t my room, not even my vibe—mint-green walls, a faded regatta poster screwed into the wall, a dust-coated humidor, and a massive TV looming overhead, its cord dangling like a lifeline.

But today, it's my sanctuary.

The blinds are drawn, the darkness soft around me as the conversations of peppy mid-morning walkers drift by outside. Johnny Cash whispers that I could have it all—his empire of dirt. His voice winds around my throat, prying open cracks I’ve spent decades trying to seal.

I begin to shake, then sob—guttural, raw. Tears, hot and unrestrained, spill over my cheeks, mixing freely with snot. My shirt is soaked, my hair tangled across my face like wild seaweed. Dolly, my little black dog, sits quietly at the foot of the bed. She doesn't flinch or try to comfort—just looks steadily with soft eyes, as though asking, silently, "What else? What else is here?"

The Quiet Belief Beneath My Skin

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried a quiet, brutal belief: love—the big, forever, grateful-on-my-deathbed kind—isn’t going to happen for me. This isn’t heartbreak. No recent breakup, no singular loss. Just the slow-burning ache of a thousand small disappointments. The years spent believing I was flawed—desired, but never truly loved.

I don't know exactly when I started believing it. High school, maybe earlier.

I was the girl who got asked out but never felt chosen. Who went to prom with her high school crush but still somehow felt like the seventh grader with cystic acne and braces, watching friends fall into relationships and wondering if something was fundamentally wrong with me.

The belief blistered quietly.

I soothed and bandaged it with constant personal growth. Workshops. Retreats. Therapy. I studied with shamans, sat with Jungian analysts, traced the ancient roots of Tantra. I threw myself into the wilds of self-discovery and I traveled, constantly. New cities. New time zones. New versions of myself.

I had always assumed that if I just did enough inner work, love would arrive like a reward. That if I mastered myself, I would be met. But love isn’t a meritocracy. It doesn’t come as a prize on the path to “enlightenment.”

And in the midst of all that movement, I was dating. Always someone intriguing, charismatic, almost-there. A man in another city. A man wading out of heartbreak. A man who hovered near commitment but never quite landed.

I remember my best friend saying, “You’re dating unavailable people because you’re unavailable. I barely know what country you’re in each day of the week.”

I laughed. But the words settled.

When you don’t believe love is fully possible for you, you choose people who confirm it. And you create a lifestyle that perpetuates it. And for a long time, I did.

It was always electric at first. The push-pull. The chemistry. The slow burn of uncertainty. But beneath the thrill, there was always the knowing. The waiting. The rationalizing. I told myself I was open to love, but in truth, I was chasing ghosts—men I couldn’t hold, and men who wouldn’t hold me.

Then, something shifted. I made a choice: no more. No more almosts. No more men who aren’t fully here. No more men who don’t know what they want.

And I have never felt emptier.

Without the familiar thrill of chasing almost-love, there was only silence.

The Fear of Grief—and the Invitation to Let it Break You

Today in the surf shack, something changed.

I didn’t just notice the belief and try to quiet it with affirmations or distract myself with Instagram. I met it head-on.

This wasn’t my first emotional reckoning, not my first surrender into the grief of this belief— I had danced with this feeling after breakups, when I could mourn it pressed against the shadow of a man. But I had never chosen to go headfirst into the darkest cave of that heaving, formless belief alone without a flashlight or a ripcord.

It’s just not going to happen for me.

I let it dance me, drag me under, have its way with me.

I let my mind shriek every dark thought, piled away and dusty in the “do not look here” category.

And I let myself unravel fully.

Because we don’t find freedom in wallpapering an old belief with affirmations or carefully contorting our lives to live around it.

It comes from pressing into the raw place, into the ache beneath the skin, and daring to feel what we swore would shatter us.

It’s not loneliness we fear—it’s feeling the loneliness. Not heartbreak, but sitting alone with it, afraid it will swallow us whole. We tiptoe around the dark, terrified that stepping in too far means we’ll never return.

But what if we let it?

What if we let the grief break us?

Break our hearts.

Break our illusions.

Break us down to the bone—

And then break us open.

When I finally let myself fully enter the grief—when I let myself feel the terror of being alone, of love never arriving in the form I’ve envisioned it, of all the years stretching forward without that shoulder to nestle into or hand to hold —something in me cracked.

And instead of consuming me, the fear began to dissipate into an effervescent peace. Not because I had conquered it, but because I had finally acknowledged it. Held it. Accepted it. Loved it, even.

As Dolly, speckled with sobs like she’d just come in from the rain, stared into my eyes with calm, unwavering presence, I understood.

Love isn’t something you can strategize or hustle into existence. It is not an A+ to achieve, a reward for good behavior or spiritual mastery.

I laid there, damp and salty, surprised at the smile on my face and softness of my skin. And the thought came: I don’t need love to make me feel whole. Because I am already whole. I simply want it.

We fear heartbreak.

We fear breaking apart.

But this is what breaks us open — how we bring sunlight into the dusty corners locked away in our hearts — and maybe how we become whole.

The grief, the surrender—it was never the enemy.

It was the doorway.