Is It Just Me Or… Is The Only Way Through Heartbreak Becoming The Next Version Of Yourself?
Years ago, when I was emerging from the biggest romantic heartbreak of my life, my brother made a comment that’s stuck with me ever since:
“It’s like you’re becoming Megan 2.0”
He probably didn’t think much of it at the time, but he’d captured exactly what was happening to me: a brutal, beautiful evolution into the next version of myself.
Heartbreak forces us to peel away the layers of ourselves that have grown around the other person. When those layers are gone, everything is raw. Unbearable. We can’t remember how it felt before we had those layers. We wish that we could just go back to the version of ourself that existed before we knew them, but we can’t. Because we’re not that person anymore.
The only way we can move through the pain, is forwards.
By collecting up all of the energy, love and care we poured into that relationship, and learning how to redirect it back to ourselves and the people around us.
That might look like picking back up an old hobby we’d lost the time for. Tending to platonic relationships that we hadn’t been able to prioritise for a while. Remembering the things that make us truly feel like ourselves and that aren’t tied up in that person.
Gradually, we collect back what we’d given away in the relationship (often without even realising), and we start to re-grow layers that feel familiar. Then, when we aren’t quite as raw, we can start to grow new layers that we’ve never felt before.
We can become the person who takes themselves out to dinner (to places we always wanted to go with them). We can discover that we really do love that genre of music (we just didn’t play it before because they didn’t like it). We can make new dreams that they aren’t included in.
We will ache with growing pains but we will know – in our bones – that something bigger is happening. That we are evolving.
When my first relationship ended, the most unbearable thought for me was imagining that one day that person wouldn’t be the person I knew best in the whole world. That they would exist in my life but be somewhere far away from where I’d always held them. That they wouldn’t be my person. The version of me who existed at the start of that heartbreak couldn’t comprehend how I would survive that feeling.
What I wish I’d known then, is that I wouldn’t survive it. Or at least, that version of me wouldn’t. It wasn’t going to feel the way I imagined it would feel because I wasn’t going to stay the version of me who was imagining it. I was going to break. And hurt. And grow. And heal. Until I became the next version of myself. And that version (Megan 2.0), was going to be able to survive those feelings.
It wasn’t going to feel the same as I was imagining it because I wasn’t going to be the same.
And I think that applies to any future event that we tell ourselves we won’t be able to handle – how can we possibly know how something in the future will hit us when we have no idea what version of ourselves we’ll be then? Telling ourselves we won’t survive something makes no sense; we don’t know who we’ll be when that time comes or what we’ll be capable of.
You all know that I’ve been doing the heartbreak thing again recently – the breaking, the healing, all of the stuff I never wanted to go through a second time round. For a long time, it didn’t feel survive-able. I couldn’t imagine getting through it. But I did the process anyway, peeled away the layers, grew back the familiar, started to embrace the brand new. I evolved.
And right now, I can look back at the version of myself who existed that the start of this heartbreak and tell her that even though she can’t imagine it, she’s going to be more than okay. She’s becoming Megan 3.0!
And that next version? The one that she can’t see yet through the pain? She’s fucking phenomenal. She’s the woman we always imagined we’d be one day when we were younger. She’s outspoken and unapologetic and so grateful for every day joys: colours and singing and the sky. She is waiting on the other side of this for you. And she will know how to survive this.
There’s a brilliant poem by Clementine Von Radics called The Wedding, and it ends with these lines:
That’s the thing about heartbreak.
It’s the smallest of worlds ending.
Everyone goes around you smiling,
like it’s nothing to close a door.
It’s not nothing to close the door. It is colossal. Earth shattering. Unliveable at times.
But you have to know: you will not always be the version of you who was destroyed when the door closed. The next version of you will be able to touch the handle and stay whole.
You will become the next version of you because you were always meant to.
You will evolve.
And it will be beautiful.
Love,
M (3.0)
💜
Jesus Christ. I’m sat in a bar in the middle of Murcia spain on my own reading this and trying to contain my watery eyes. I ended a relationship 2 months ago, it was only a year a half, and I loved him so so much. It was a love that I had never felt and I got completely Blind sighted. But I was already Hannah 2.0 and I had learned that love wasn’t enough. My boundaries weren’t being respected. His words and actions didn’t align. Often I didn’t feel loved in the way I wanted because he couldn’t make space to love me how I need. And Hannah 2.0 chose herself and it was fucking the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Sometimes I wish I didn’t do it. But then I know that there’s this Hannah 3.0 that I cannot understand or imagine yet but I feel her and she’s the only thing that’s getting me through this horrendous heartbreak. And reading this literally reaffirmed everything. Thank you so much❤️
I remember that feeling. It’s fucking awful. But, I am so proud of myself and who I have become post-breakup, that I will always maintain that my breakup was simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen to me.