Tuesday, 13 May 2025
When someone breaks your heart, it's not as painful as when you break your own. When you let yourself down, when you are disappointed in yourself, because of the actions/or lack of actions you took. When you didn't show up for yourself. When you didn't treat yourself the way you wanted to be treated. When you say incredibly hurtful things to yourself. When you self-sabotage and hurt yourself. No slammed doors, no goodbye letters left trembling on a table, just the relentless echo of promises you made and quietly broke when no one else was listening.
The voices inside your head whisper relentless accusations, replaying your mistakes on an endless loop. It's so hurtful, because you know you the best. You know the softness of your own underbelly, the tender spots where doubt seeps in. You wield the sharpest words because you know exactly where they will cut the deepest. "You're not enough." "You'll never change." Sentences that slide beneath bone and settle in the marrow.
You silence the alarm and bury your face in the pillow, but already the snow outside is falling with that inexorable hush, blanketing rooftops and resolutions alike. In that instant you have betrayed the ideal, the grand, luminous conception of the person you might have been. Later you will call the lapse insignificant, forgetting that history is a mosaic of such infinitesimal cracks, each one widening the chasm between what is and what ought to be.
Soon the betrayals multiply: you pass the blank page on the desk, white as an unsullied soul—and whisper to yourself that tomorrow will be kinder. You stand in gatherings of nervously flashing eyes, shrink from voicing a truth too incandescent for polite company, and feel a secret cowardice throb in your temples like a fever. Yet you do not cry out. Why should you? Cowardice is an indoor sin; it makes almost no noise as it devours the heart.
One evening, somewhere in the labyrinth of your mind, you will hear the faintest clink of chains and recognize the sound: it is your own potential, shackled in a corner, staring at you with the dim, reproachful eyes of a starving animal. You will wish, then, for an external tyrant to blame—a czar, a creditor, a capricious god—but discover only yourself, seated upon a throne of cracked marble, clutching a sceptre carved out of excuses. Is it any wonder that the most exquisite cruelty is self-administered? No stranger could wound you so surgically. It is you who knows the subterranean passages of your soul, where the most delicate nerves lie exposed.
And someday, when the voices in your head grow hoarse from their own dirge, you will surprise them with a whisper they have not heard before: "I am learning". The syllables will ring oddly gentle, like rain tapping on old glass. They will not erase the scars, but they will water the ground around them until the first green blade pushes through.
In that moment, quiet, uncelebrated, almost invisible, you will realize the simplest, most subversive truth: the heart you once shattered is still beating. Listen closely: each pulse carries a small pledge that the road ahead is wider than the wound behind, and the light still outweighs every night you have endured. It has been counting the seconds, waiting for the instant you decide to keep your own company with kindness.