People say there are five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They also say you don’t have to go through each stage chronologically, or even experience all of them, or that you can go back and forth. But I’m fairly certain there’s some truth to it. I can definitely recognise some of them in my behaviour after I broke up with my first boyfriend. At first we just kept in contact and didn’t stop calling each other “love” and “sweetie”. After a while of not being in contact I became angry that he didn’t want to fight for me. Then I started panicking because I thought I had lost him for good and I started to think about reaching out and try to mend things. A little later I found out he already had a new girlfriend and that, of course, upset me greatly and took me a long time to get over. And finally, I accepted that he wasn’t the one and moved on.
But right now, it feels so different. It’s almost been two weeks and I don’t feel like my world has come crashing down. Time is still moving in a normal pace. Days don’t feel like weeks. His pictures on my wall don’t trigger me. The heart behind his name in my phone doesn’t make me sad. Talking about him is easy. So at some point I thought: maybe I don’t fully realise that he’s not my boyfriend anymore. You would assume I would notice, but during our relationship I have grown accustomed to the fact that sometimes I wouldn’t see him for more than a week with little to no contact, when he had to take some space to figure out whatever was bothering him, alone. So it can be that because of those moments I have learned very well to fall back on myself and become the most independent version I could be while still being in a relationship. That or just I don’t feel the loss yet because I haven’t actually experienced the long term effects. A year ago I went to study abroad for a little more than three months and he came to visit me after five weeks. The first three weeks I was fine, but the longer I missed him, the heavier it became. I’m afraid that’s in store for me now. Of course I can never be sure and I have to wait and see. I know I shouldn’t worry about how I might feel in the future regarding all this, but I just don’t want to think too lightly of the situation. I don’t want to accept the idea that maybe it isn’t going to be as heavy as I expected, and then be surprised in a month by overwhelming sadness.
Basically, I’m just surprised at how little time I spend thinking about him. My life just goes on. I’m working on my thesis, I go to work, I go out with friends. It’s pretty awesome. So either I’m already at stage “Acceptance” which I can’t believe so I’m denying that or I’m still at stage “Denial” which would require me to accept that. Ironic.
“We are not gonna worry until we have something to worry about.” – Jane the Virgin (Ch. 77)
Tea Time With Amber 