A Dream Within A Dream

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once,” John Green wrote in The Fault in Our Stars, and those words resonated with me as it had with countless others because I knew the enthralling intoxication of gently and then rapidly slipping into a world where barriers and boundaries ceased to exist. And there are few things harsher than being jolted awake — the feeling of falling and being jerked into consciousness — and the peculiar sense of shock and confusion that follows.

I wasn’t trying to change our trajectory but was, in fact, trying to delay it. I didn’t want to stop thinking of him because I knew how quickly I would forget him. I wanted to hold onto the final moments of our relationship the same way you cling to those blissful fragments of your dreams you know aren’t real. When you’re teetering precariously between a state of euphoria and the cold reality of existence and each extra second of sleep — of being able to exist in this alternate dimension — is ineffably exquisite. You grasp onto the dream for each remaining, precious second because you know when you awake, those once vivid details will become hazy. And before you can even attempt to recall the specifics, that haze will quickly dissipate, lost forever in the roaring currents of your unconsciousness; and you will go about your day and the rest of your life forgetting it had even occurred.

I didn’t want to sleep forever — I just didn’t want to wake up just yet. Touching him, seeing him, and continuing to miss him was my way of trying to memorize him because I knew once I woke up, I would only be able to remember how I had felt abstractly — I would be unable to evoke those once palpable feelings in their entirety. But then I awoke, as slowly and quickly as I had fallen asleep; and when I did, try as I might, I could no longer remember what I had dreamt. I could no longer remember him. 

---

#004: They're Called An Ex Because They No Longer Ex-ist

Growing up, my thoughts on the matter of dealing with exes generally went something like this:

HBO/iheartsexandthecity.tumblr

A year or so ago, my approach to the matter changed when I figured it didn’t hurt to be friendly with my exes. We didn't have to be friends but we could be friendly, right? Why not? After all, this was someone I often spent a significant amount of time with; someone who existed during periods of my life where I grew into the person I am now; someone I truly cared about at one point. I didn’t care to become best friends with them but considering I had long since moved on from the time in my life when we were together and literally had the same emotional attachment to them as I had to an insect, I had no qualms with catching up, seeing how the other was doing, exchanging pleasantries, and wishing each other the best. Life is hard. At the end of the day, we should be adults and do our best to help and support those who are and have been in our life, right?

Wrong.

They’re called ex-es because you’ve ex-ited their life. They’re called ex-es because they no longer ex-ist in your life. They’re called ex-es because they’re ex-actly what you didn’t need. They’re called ex-es because it was ex-hausted. They’re called ex-es because... you get the point.  

I had one such ex in my life. I cut him out of my life because he was a cancerous tumor, growing and metastasizing; a parasite that latched on and sucked me dry, robbing me of emotional strength, time, and everything else that was valuable to me. But despite how things ended, I continued rooting for his success and happiness. My girlfriends rooted for him. I continued to validate and excuse his incredibly shitty behavior because I genuinely felt bad for him and he already had so much going against him without me wishing a wrath of unhappiness and destruction to rain down upon him. I felt a need to protect him in a way, because I knew he was deeply troubled — a broken person who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, self-confidence issues, substance abuse, and depression. Except he wasn’t depressed; he was selfish. These two are often mistaken and confused for the other. He was selfish when we were together, he was selfish when he refused to let me go to live my life, and his selfishness manifested itself, again, when he drunk dialed and texted me despite having a girlfriend; when he tried to once again involve me in his fucked up world of excuses and twisted rationalizations, years later, when all I tried to do was be a friend.

CW

Despite my cynicism in humanity, I’m always trying to find the good in people; always searching for redeeming qualities to prove me otherwise. I suppose the same way an artist picks up pieces of trash and tries to find the beauty in it.

American Beauty/DreamWorks

While I recognize and understand the desire to be a better person, a good person — someone who wants to revive, reclaim, and redeem people — you are allowed to walk away from people who do not respect you. You don't owe anyone an explanation for taking care of yourself. Respect yourself to know you made the right decision in deciding who was not worthy of remaining in your life. Because sometimes, a piece of trash will always be just that — a piece of trash.

someecards.com

---

#003: Winning The Breakup: You Can't Win What You've Already Won

“You know how when you break up, it’s not about who’s winning the breakup, but it’s kind of about who’s winning the breakup? And by 'kind of' I mean it is?” my 18-year-old brother asked me the other day. “Yeah, I’m winning.”

What is it about winning breakups that we are all so fixated on? Why is it that we feel the need to feel triumphant and victorious of living a better life than a person we once genuinely liked, possibly loved, and conceivably imagined our future with? Why do so many of our imaginary, triumphant moments revolve around us running into our sad, disheveled exes who are living a pathetic existence alone while we're 10 pounds thinner, look the best we ever have, and have an incredible, gorgeous partner by our side? And it's always a race, isn't it? Who moves on quicker, who dates first, who gets married sooner, who becomes more successful faster. 

Perhaps it stems from our desire to show our exes how smashingly successful we are without them while reveling in our joy and their dismay of seeing how miserable their lives ended up without us. A perfect, eat-your-heart-out, movie moment we can gleefully play over and over in our head. After all, if those single word "hey" texts we receive months and years later are so richly satisfying to screenshot and laugh about with our girlfriends, imagine the incredible high we'll derive from a face-to-face encounter. “Have you met my husband? He’s an English prince and was just featured on Forbes’ Top Five Richest And Most Beautiful And Brilliant Men In The World spread and he’s absolutely crazy about me. We first met at the finish line at the Tel Aviv Marathon and then again on Zuckerberg’s yacht on New Years Eve in Dubai. Oh, you saw my picture on the cover of Time from when I won two Nobel Peace Prizes for simultaneously bringing peace to the Middle East while curing cancer? You live here? On the street? In this box?”

Except, trying to win a breakup is pointless. I’m not saying this because I feel that kind of pettiness is beneath me or because I’m some sort of super human who transcends negativity and wishes peace and happiness upon all. I fucking love winning. In fact, if I came across a magic lamp, one of my three wishes would be to always win — at everything. And winning alone is not good enough for me; everyone else needs to fail, miserably. It’s just that the moment I break up with someone, whether it’s of my own volition or theirs, I’ve already immediately won. I don’t need to do anything better or different to prove otherwise because the scores have been tallied, the verdict is in, and the champion has been chosen: me. The fact that each and every one one of these men will continue to live a life that no longer includes me means they have already lost, permanently. They may meet someone better for them but they will never meet anyone better than me. So I could run into them with greasy hair, no make up on, in my rattiest sweats, unemployed without a boyfriend, and they could be married to a supermodel while running their own successful, multibillion-dollar companies, and I will still have won.

You can’t win what you've already won. Don’t focus on chasing empty moments, despite how great they may feel at the time. They're superficial, serve no purpose, and you have a countless number of ways to better live your life than spend your precious time focusing on “showing him.” You already did that while you were together, remember? Believe me, at some point in their lives, whether it’s weeks, years, or decades later — absent you having treated them like shit or having gone Fatal Attraction on them, and assuming you were sincerely honest and unapologetically you — they will undoubtedly, at least once, think about what it would have been like to live a life with someone who cared so deeply, loved so unconditionally, supported them so fiercely, who pushed, challenged, and propelled them towards greatness while being asked for nothing in return. Each and every time they experience betrayal, disloyalty, or disappointment in their lives they will remember that they willingly decided to bet on the possibility of something and someone better, that they readily discarded someone extraordinary and incredible, and in the greatest gamble of their lives, subsequently lost.

---

At The End Of It All

In the end you start thinking of the beginning. You’re left thinking of all of the great times you experienced together; the memories you created, the laughter you shared, and the early days of the relationship when you were both crazy and stupid about each other replaying in your mind like a movie reel on loop. You’re left to mourn and grieve the loss of the relationship — along with the hopes and wishes you had for it and the chances and possibilities of what it could have been — and you’re left to bury it in that unidentified space within your soul that exists somewhere between the darkest depths of your heart and the deepest spaces of your memories.

Everywhere you look you’ll be reminded of him. Something will always pull you back into his gravity. But most often it won’t be when you’re out and about during the normal course of your day, when you can surround yourself with people and distractions, that you’ll miss him. It’ll be when you’re lying alone in your large bed at night, remembering how your face fit perfectly between his shoulder blades, the way you liked to tangle your legs between his, the way his hair felt between your fingers, recalling the stories you told one another, that you’ll miss him the most. When anything and everything seemed possible — when a future together seemed to stretch endlessly before you.

But then you'll remember the unhappiness. It had come in like a mist, slowly seeping in at first but over time it became steadier, thicker, and towards the end, you had been drowning in it, surviving only through short gasps of air. He had long since stopped being the person he had been in the beginning, and one by one he was turning off the lights in the building while you were desperately running up and down staircases between floors trying to turn them back on. He was pushing further and further away and settling into a life that no longer involved you while you were fighting relentlessly to fix what you knew was permanently broken, wanting to hold it all together despite knowing how deeply unhappy you had become.

You're left struggling to understand why, despite the unhappiness, the overwhelming loneliness, you felt the need to show him you cared so deeply for him. Why, when he had showed you otherwise, you were delusional to believe things could go back to the way they once had been. And why we, as human beings, have a bottomless capacity for believing our partners will change. Perhaps because, despite the world and people proving otherwise, you believe, as someone once said, that people, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; that you should never throw out anyone. And you realize that it hadn’t been delusion but rather hope. Hope that you could bring light to a life that had been filled with sadness and darkness. Hope that you could show this person who had people walk out of his life what it felt to have someone work tirelessly to remain by their side. Hope that you could bring happiness and laughter into a man who had become increasingly serious, hardened, and isolated.  

There is something innocent and honest and earnest about hope. And having hope in someone, for someone — for that person to be the best version of themselves, to be the extraordinary man you know they are capable of becoming — and for them to experience a profound, powerful, pulsating love that shames the greatest love stories, one that spans eons of conscious existence and ripples at the speed of light throughout the cosmos, stretching boundlessly through galaxies and universes throughout the infinite reaches of space and time — a love that most people couldn’t come close to dream of experiencing let alone comprehending.

What is that if not love. 

---

The Greatest Show On Earth

Being broken up with is one of life’s more challenging experiences. It’s opening night, it’s a full house, and you’re being recited a well-rehearsed script that you never got a chance to look over. Stammering and stuttering, you try to find the right words to say, painstakingly making it up as you go. Then, in the blink of an eye, you’re thrown into the center ring of the circus and tonight, you’re the star attraction.

“Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages!” the ringmaster calls out. “Step right up and take a seat in the stands and behold the incredible Woman Who Was Just Dumped! Watch as she juggles the Urgency of needing answers this very instant, the Panic of not being able to accept that it's over, the Pride in maintaining her dignity, and the Inadequacy of not having been enough, all while she delicately balances on Not Fucking Losing It! Watch as we then proceed to tie her to this spinning wheel while the knife thrower expertly hurls daggers through her heart! Then we’ll roll her into a ball, stuff her in a cannon, and blast her off to You’re On Your Fucking Own!”

Except it doesn't end there. Once you recover from having been violently catapulted back to a reality you weren't prepared for, you better regain your strength and pick up that shovel because it's time to start digging. Put your back into it and don't stop until you've dug a pit deep enough to bury the Emotions and Memories because these ruthless bitches are still very much alive and they aren't aren't going down without a fight. Let's hope you win because these guys aren't fucking around, and if you give them the opportunity, they will hold you hostage and torture and torment you until you're reduced to something that barely resembles a shadow of your former self. If you do manage to subdue them, don't try to take the easy way out and bury them in a shallow grave because the slightest of winds and lightest of rains will bring it all right back to the surface, and you'll have to repeat the entire process, however many times it takes.

But once it's all said and done, despite how physically and emotionally depleted you are—standing there cut and bruised, drenched in your blood, sweat, and tears—how shell shocked you may be as you gaze upon the broken fragments of a life that once was scattered about you, you take a good look around because you know it's the last time you'll be standing there, at least, in that very spot. You know you will move on and away from this, stronger from having endured it, and in time, the bleak and desolate, barren wasteland in your heart—once ridden with a number of unmarked graves—will blazingly transform into rolling hills, emerald pastures, and endless miles of dazzling lavender fields of vibrant purples with the rise of the most resplendent and illuminating sunrise that will set the sky and your heart afire.

---

3 Steps To Getting Through Any Breakup Like A Boss

Breakups are love hangovers, and like their counterparts, they can leave you lying in a collapsed pile on your bathroom floor from agonizing pain and sheer exhaustion. Just as your liver needs a sufficient amount of time to break down the alcohol and purge your body of the toxins you poisoned it with, your heart needs an appropriate amount of time to expel the maelstrom of emotions you may be feeling. The following steps are my BOSSY GALS method of getting through any breakup like a boss. Learn it, love it, live it.

1. Be sad. 

E!/giphy.com

Fuck the people who tell you not to be alone; to go out and surround yourself with friends and act as if you’re perfectly fine when you’re obviously not. “That’s the thing about pain.” Augustus teaches us in The Fault In Our Stars. “It demands to be felt.” Pain demands to be felt. It is yours and yours alone. So feel it. Embrace your sadness, wallow in it, and let it consume every fiber of your being. Do whatever it is you need to do to truly feel the agony churning and spiraling inside of you, whether it’s by stuffing your face with ten pounds of junk food, playing violent video games, binge-watching Netflix for 15 hours straight, or drinking yourself into a stupor. Lose your shit, film your own version of Tove Lo’s ‘Habits’ music video, scream, cry, and punch things if you want. Throw it up. 

2. Stop being sad.

View fullsize

hyperboleandahalf.com

Spending any more time being sad than you need to is synonymous to paying to stay in college for an extra year after you’ve graduated. It’s equivalent to paying more for a pair of shoes than they actually cost, or staying by yourself at the club when everyone has already left. It serves no purpose and is an inefficient use of your time and resources. Don’t drag on anything or give something more attention and energy than it deserves. It’s done. Let it go. ​

3. Be awesome instead.

View fullsize

brocode.com

My last breakup I drank a bottle of wine, cried, passed out watching Parks and Recreation, and woke up feeling like a fucking boss. True story. Everyone has their own timeline for how long it’ll take them to get through these steps but don’t get caught up in any one of them longer than you need. Don’t do a disservice to yourself because Future You is going to be pretty pissed off that Past You took so long to start being your awesome self again. And always remember:

---