When Heartbreak Feels Like a Stone on Your Soul

You know that feeling — when your chest physically hurts, like someone is pressing down with the weight of the world, a suffocating kind of heaviness that makes it hard to even breathe. They call it heartbreak, but that word feels so neat, doesn’t it? So… insufficient. Because when it happens, when someone you love is suddenly out of reach, it doesn’t feel like your heart is merely broken. It feels crushed. Like it’s been ground into dust under some immovable rock.

I’ll be honest — the first time I felt this, I thought something was wrong with my body. I remember waking up with this gnawing ache right in my chest, clutching at it, wondering if my heart was giving out. I even Googled “heart attack symptoms in your 20s,” because the pain felt that intense. But no, it wasn’t cholesterol or clogged arteries. It was grief, sharp and unrelenting, just settling into my body and making itself at home like an unwanted guest I couldn’t kick out.

What’s wild is how universal this feeling is. No matter who you are or where you’re from, heartbreak levels us all. Ancient Sanskrit poems describe the pain of separation as a fire that consumes the heart, while Dante’s Inferno describes the lovers Paolo and Francesca trapped in an unending storm — blown together and apart, over and over, unable to escape. Even modern science tells us that heartbreak actually mimics physical pain. Your brain, in its confusion, lights up the same regions when experiencing emotional loss as it does when you, say, stub your toe or break a bone. No wonder it feels insurmountable — your brain doesn’t know the difference between a breakup and a car crash.

And yet, somehow, heartbreak always feels incredibly personal. Like no one else could possibly understand the way it twists and tears at you. I mean, how could they? They wouldn’t know that your laugh now feels hollow, or that the sight of their favorite coffee mug in your cupboard fills you with a tidal wave of sorrow. They don’t know about the text you keep typing, then deleting, or the photos you can’t bring yourself to delete — but can’t look at, either.

I think of Khalil Gibran’s words in The Prophet: “For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.” God, isn’t that just the truth? You want the beauty of love, the sheer joy and ecstasy of it, but when it leaves — when it cuts you down to nothing — you find yourself questioning whether it was even worth it. And yet, we still keep risking it, don’t we? What else could we do? Not loving at all seems like a fate worse than heartbreak itself.

When you feel like this, spirituality and philosophy have a way of offering comfort, even when answers are hard to come by. I think about the story of Rumi, who famously wrote his most soulful poetry after his beloved teacher and friend Shams of Tabriz disappeared from his life. His heartbreak turned into verses that people are still reciting hundreds of years later. “Don’t grieve,” he wrote, “anything you lose comes round in another form.” As hard as it is to believe that in the moment, loss does have a way of revealing itself as transformation — one we might not welcome, but one that still shapes us.

And of course, every religion tackles heartbreak differently. In Islam, trust in Allah’s plan often serves as a balm for those grappling with loss: “Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease” (Qur’an 94:6). In Christianity, there’s the comforting idea that God is close to the brokenhearted. Psalm 34:18 always comes to mind for me: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Crushed — that’s exactly the word. Faith gives you patience to hold on long enough for the pain to loosen its grip, even when it feels endless.

Still, let’s be real: no amount of scripture or philosophy completely shields you from heartbreak. I once read a passage from a Japanese haiku writer who said, “When my love left, I stood in the falling rain until I was soaked. I wanted the heavens to cry with me.” That image stuck with me because grief often feels like that — like you want the whole world to acknowledge your pain, to stop for a minute and mourn what you’ve lost. But life keeps going. The sun still comes up, people still laugh, holidays still mock you with their cheerfulness. And you? You’re just trying to stay afloat.

By the way, is it just me or does heartbreak have this terrible way of making you second-guess yourself? You start replaying every conversation, every argument, every text you sent that They didn’t respond to quite the way you hoped. You lie awake at night, wondering if you were too much, or not enough. It’s maddening. But here’s the thing: heartbreak isn’t proof that something’s wrong with you. It’s proof that you cared deeply, that you opened your heart and let love in. And even though it hurts now, it also means you’re capable of feeling something real — something that scared the crap out of you, no doubt, but was brave all the same.

It’s uncomfortably awe-inspiring how people have learned to survive heartbreak over the centuries. Look at Emily Dickinson: her poetry is soaked in the quiet devastation of love unfulfilled, and yet she wrote some of the most timeless lines about resilience and hope. “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain,” she wrote. Even she, someone surrounded by her own sorrows, believed that healing someone else’s pain could be worth her own suffering.

You know what I think? I think heartbreak is like a storm at sea. At first, you’re drowning — you can’t see the shore, and every wave feels like it’ll crush you completely. But eventually, eventually, the storm starts to pass. You begin to see flickers of light in the distance, little glimpses of hope on the horizon. They’re small at first — a favorite song that doesn’t make you burst into tears, a day when you don’t check your phone to see if They’ve texted. And then, one day, you wake up, and your heart doesn’t feel like it’s being crushed anymore. Like maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to breathe again.

So yeah, I don’t know if heartbreak ever gets “easier.” Every loss feels different. But I promise you this: it always changes. Like Rumi said, whatever you lose does come around again — in some form or another. Maybe it’s in the form of new love, or maybe it’s in the form of an unshakable strength you didn’t know you had. Either way, that crushed feeling won’t stay forever. I swear to you, you’ll find your way through it. Until then, just keep breathing. Let yourself feel it. And know you aren’t alone in this — none of us are.

Because if there’s one thing heartbreak teaches us, it’s this: all the pain in the world isn’t enough to stop us from loving again. And thank God for that.