The Heartbreak Chronicles

I said to my parents the other day, “my love life, my grandmothers, the economy & Stephen Sondheim are all dead…what am I supposed to do now?”

I’ve since realized that the answer to my hypothetical question was “Write!”

At the beginning of last year, I was lamenting to a friend about how a creepy guy I didn’t know listened to my podcast (**Since I mentioned it, here’s a quick plug to go listen to We’re All Just Doing Our Best Here! on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.), found my personal email address and sent me a 19 page email about how much we belong together. I said to her, “Why do all these weird things happen to me?!!” She replied, “You’re a writer and God’s giving you good material.”

So here we are. I just recently and very unexpectedly got broken up with by a wonderful guy who I genuinely thought I’d be with for a long time. It’s made me very sad and very doubtful that the romantic love-stuff will ever be for me. The last time I went through a break up I wrote a full length stage adaptation of Little Women (I’m an overachiever, what can I say?). So my goal here is to write until I feel better. That’s it.

This will essentially serve as my breakup journal. We’ll do some self reflection, definitely some moping & hopefully we’ll stumble upon some wisdom along the way. So if you’re reading this and feel inclined to join me on this journey, I’m going to do my best to update it at least once a week and to you brave and kind souls I say…."It's gonna be a bummer, but let's get started!"

I always felt a bit like a miracle growing up. I was the only child my parents were able to have and they had found each other after being pretty deeply hurt by their previous partners. I was the product of the magic that comes from people falling in love when the world was against them.

Though my parents are still together and I deeply admire their dedication to maintaining at 30+ year marriage, it turns out that I was actually the product of two people who were trying to heal from being broken by others. My mom used to say to me growing up that the old adage, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" was a load of crap and that it was much better to guard your heart and never love than to let someone else break you. So, I developed into a hard shelled introvert with a gooey, lovesick center...like a human Cadbury Egg, if you will.

It didn't help that I was also growing up in a deeply Evangelical Fundamentalist environment where young women are told to only date someone that they might be willing to marry and that men are only after one thing from you so you have to wear dresses down to your ankles and up to your chin. It was a confusing time to say the least and as a deeply anxiety-riddled child, I took all of it to heart. I was also bullied a lot and just felt like I was disgusting and not someone anyone else would want to be with....so I said all that to say that I didn't do a lot of dating growing up. STRIKE THAT. I didn't do ANY dating growing up. If I told you the age I went on my first date on, you would feel really bad for me...like really bad.

I truly hit my solid dating years recently and have in turn undergone my first real heartbreaks recently. The last one in particular being the one that is still bumming me out but let's vaguely break these down individually for context, shall we?

Heartbreak No. 1 :

I've been acting since I was 17 and have continued to do community theatre throughout my life...especially when things get difficult and I need an emotional outlet. In 2019, my life really hit the rocks. I was working somewhere that made me feel like I was really making a difference but was slowly killing me. It was also around this time that all three of my elderly grandparents' health began to vastly decline. I needed that emotional outlet! So, I auditioned for a local production of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. It's in my nature to say that I got the leading role of Elizabeth Bennet out of some magical happenstance but the truth is that I am a very good actor and that's how that happened.

I don't know if you know this but there aren't a lot of dashing young men who participate in community theatre. Don't get me wrong! There are some and leading roles are basically thrown at their feet when they show up, but as luck would have it, not many of them showed up for this particular audition so the director of the play asked a friend who had worked with her on a previous show to step into the role of Mr. Darcy.

Now, being the secretly romantic little Cadbury egg I previously mentioned, I have developed huge crushes on guys that I have shared the stage with from time to time. However, going into what I knew was going to be a very mushy story and now being in my late twenties, I told myself that it would not be the case this time and boy, did I not listen to myself.

It came on pretty slowly. It's almost hard to remember now as I've done my very best to put the whole thing from my mind, but I do know that I typically find really good actors to be very appealing and he was a really good actor. He would tell me on our way out from rehearsal how well I was doing and there was chemistry there. It might have just been because we were both good actors acting out incredibly romantic, angsty scenes together but over time, the intensity there seemed to get stronger and stronger. I'd literally catch him staring at me from across the room sometimes.

It certainly wasn't without it's bumps in the road as being the handsome-good-actor playing Mr. Darcy in a production of Pride & Prejudice obviously leads to some competition in the guise of ex-girlfriends showing up at performances and other ladies in the production having giant crushes on him as well, one of whom he had already been talking to. I tend to consider myself a giant unlovable monster human and competition send me running the other direction. However, the morning of our last performance of the show, my grandmother sadly passed away. She was the first significant person that I've lost in my life and I just wasn't ready to let go of someone else...so I struck up a DM conversation with Mr. Darcy the night after the show closed. As the youth say it, I did in fact slide into HIS DMs.

He was sweet. We complemented each other's performances and made fun of each other over things we'd stupidly messed up throughout the run of the show. Later that week, my family and I buried my grandmother, and to pile on as life tends to do, I was fired from the job that I loved even though it was killing me. I would love to go into the specifics of that as they were ridiculous and heavily linked to the Independent Baptist movement that I no longer consider myself a part of, but to protect the innocent and the guilty who have previously brainwashed me into protecting them even though they probably deserve some karma coming their way, I'll skip over that part. My life was literally in shambles and the one thing I decided to cling to was this beautiful, intelligent, talented, slightly dangerous looking guy I had just developed a crush on. I was too scared to tell him I had just been fired so I would time my responses to his DMs regarding how his recommended Peaky Blinders binge watch was going.

We spent a couple months like this...DMing about his cat and writing a silly Marvel musical together and, all the while, I was feeling terrible about myself and clinging to the attentions of a guy who really knew very little about me and vice versa. There were moments where our co-star who had a giant crush on him reared her head and I almost gave up, but I finally told the guy that I had feelings for him and he said the same.

What followed was me being the happiest I'd been in a long time for a few months and then what followed that was the big C.O.V.I.D.

So what started as something that was kind of shaky because we were both in weird places in our lives but hopeful because I think we both liked and respected each other a lot became virtually non-existent because we could no longer see each other in person. We did okay for a couple months...Snapchatting our way through movies together, playing trivia games and sending each other flirty Covid-based pick-up lines. (Yes, that was unfortunately a thing that happened. We were all scared and this was early days when we didn't know how many millions of people were going to die. Cut me some slack.)

However, in late April, he disappeared into the ether, no doubt struggling with the new normal we were all finding ourselves having to grow accustomed to. What he didn't know was that my other grandmother had a pretty massive aneurism at basically the same time and my mother and I began taking 24-hours-a-day care of her at home. He officially broke up with me about a month later. I was devastated in all the ways.

It took me a solid five or six months to get over it as it wasn't one of those "hey, things are weird right now but let's still be friends" vibes. It was a "we no longer talk or follow each other on any social media anymore" vibes and that sucks, but you gotta do what you gotta do to move on sometimes. I felt like there was no hope for me in terms of falling for anyone else ever again, but thankfully, that wasn't the case.

We'll get into that in Part 2.

See ya then, friend!