The Poise in Pain

To lose love is to enter war. And war reveals the depth of love.

I was dumped by text message about seven weeks ago. I only knew the person for a few months, and she hadn’t treated me great throughout—hot and cold from the start, intimacy followed by distance. Truly brutal. I had fallen in love fast—not just with the person (or so I thought), but with the dream of a future. Children, travel, the safety and comfort of partnership… I was blindsided by how excited I felt, how lucky I thought I was, and how earnestly I wanted to dedicate my life to making this person happy.

To love and to lose is a tale as old as time, yet that does little to mitigate its sting. When the person you love disappears, it’s as if you are taken from the warm comforts of bed and thrown onto a cold, unforgiving battlefield. Bullets whiz past, and you hit the dirt. Your mind isn’t strategizing—it’s just screaming: Survive. Your very foundation is shaken. For a moment, you stood at the top of the hill, and now you’ve been buried beneath it.

The woman who broke my heart did so in about 150 characters. By text. I refused to be one of those men who beg, plead, and whimper. If required to bleed out, I’d rather do so quietly beneath the shade of my own dwelling. So I withdrew like a wilted flower, recognizing the sun shone no more, and I had to face a new, darkened reality. I ceased all contact and began the slow, steady process of accepting a love that had vanished in an instant.

It has been a challenging journey, to say the least, and I’ve been navigating through four “phases” of grief:

• The Reeling Phase: I was spinning, lost in the rawness of pain, and to survive was the only goal that mattered. The relentless urge to make sense of the senseless plagued me.

• The Dealing Phase: I was dealing with the pain, although at times it felt like the pain was dealing with me. Everything still sucked, and color faded to black and gray. But I went through the motions as a human ought to. I was still alive, after all.

• The Revealing Phase: I began to separate my brain from my heart, and certain quiet truths became louder and clearer. The pain continued to ebb and flow, but between bouts of suffering came flashes of wisdom. I started recognizing why this person is now my past, and I started seeing myself, my perceptions, and mental blueprints in a light I had not seen before.

• The Unsealing Phase: I was no longer completely stuck in what had been but actively building toward what is and will be. I still carry pain, but it continues to transform into a sort of fuel—one that feeds my mind, body, and soul. Motive, paired with action, leads to growth.

One habit I have tripled down on is reading and consuming knowledge as if my survival depended on it. In the last 40 days alone, I’ve read the following and acquired powerful lessons along the way:

• The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself: To let go is to be free.

• Meditations: You alone are the captain of your ship.

• The Courage to Be Disliked: Your burdens are yours to carry—no one else’s, and theirs are not yours.

• On The Shortness of Life: The quality of life is determined by what we do with it, not how long we live.

• The Collected Dialogues of Plato: To live a virtuous life is the greatest life one can live.

• Enchiridion: Placing your happiness in external forces is choosing suffering.

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt: Pain and failure cannot sink you—unless you let them.

I need knowledge like a drowning man needs air. When my sun was blotted out, books became my brightest light. My days felt dark, my thoughts tortured: Who else has been here before me? What can I learn from them? Again and again, I consistently find that no great life has ever been lived without intensity, suffering, and hardship. Strength is not in avoiding pain, but in enduring and using it with courage, integrity, and grit.

Besides, what alternative is there? Pain is the gap between what is and what was—and the refusal to accept the difference. But reality does not yield to preference. In my case, I cannot get this person back. She and yesterday are the same: gone. And even if I could bend reality to my will, would I? No. You cannot rewrite what is written, no matter how loudly your heart screams or your mind begs. I was dumped. She is gone. I am here. I go on.

I recognize, through my own life and the lives of so many incredible humans I’ve studied, that truth stands alone above all else. Love truth. Hate truth. Ignore truth. But truth does not care.

The Buddha taught us to let go, to let go, to let go. But what if there was nothing to hold on to in the first place? Perhaps "letting go" is just returning to where you started, before you imagined you had something to lose. If nothing was ever truly "yours," then what, exactly, are you letting go of? Maybe the form of things changed, but the reality never did. You are as whole as you ever were.

Another truth: To live is to act. Thinking does not move the world—action does. That is why we have hands, feet, bodies, mouths. To take what is within and transform what is beyond. I cannot tell you how much pain is needlessly suffered when thoughts and emotions are not followed by action. The remedy is in doing. The healing is in movement.

One final truth: Love is not earned. Love is not currency. It is not something to be "won" or "achieved." It is energy freely given and wholly embraced. I only recently learned this, and have suffered greatly in my attempts to "earn" the love of others. To treat love as something that must be performed for is to diminish both yourself and the love itself. You are the love you give and receive. Love is absolute and complete. If someone makes you feel uncertain in their love, you are building a castle on sand.

So I return to where I started: I was broken up with by text seven weeks ago. Both emotionally and philosophically, I have traveled a great distance in this short time. I now occupy a liminal space between the pain of yesterday and the vague promise of tomorrow. I suppose this foggy, curious sort of hallway I traverse could very well be referred to as the “here and now,” the present.

But perhaps "living in the moment" is not simply a deep inhale, an exhale, a meditative sense of peace. Perhaps life itself is the battlefield—the chaos, the blood, the guts, and the few rays of sunlight that pierce through the smoke. Perhaps the truth is that no truth can ever set you free or chain you down. That no person, no loss, no triumph, no failure can make you, break you, or define you—unless you allow it.

I do not allow it. And I never will.