A few weeks ago, I was driving down the street, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, my brain decided to fully process the events that have unraveled this year.
For the first time, 2022 hit me. All of it. At once. Like a flood.
The best way to describe it is to say it felt like an outer body experience. It felt like someone was explaining the details of another person’s life to me. It was as if I were hearing everything I, Taylor Gilliatt, have been through for the first time.
You mean… I went to Italy? For 3 months? Met the sweetest human I’ve ever known in my life? And WE fell in LOVE? Me? That was me? Are you sure?
^ That’s pretty much how the processing portion went down. Then came the physical feelings, and well, I’ll spare you the flood part of the story for your own good.
During the moments I processed the reality of my own life events, I also slowly came to terms with an intense feeling that I really don’t think we talk enough about.
Let me lay it out for you:
I feel like we categorize relationships into two parts:
The Love
The Heartbreak
There are obviously many subcategories underneath “The Love” and “The Heartbreak”, but I think we‘re missing a whole phase entirely.
In my rendition, it’d go a little like this:
The Love
The Heartbreak
The Coming Home
There's a transition that takes place after (maybe even during?) heartbreak that I was deeply aware of because, quite frankly, I don’t know how I could’ve possibly been oblivious to it. It’s this “coming home” feeling no one really ever talks about, and it's not until you get into a relationship, experience the feelings of heartbreak, and move through all of its many phases that you really understand what it means to “come home”.
When you're single, you have an independence about you that just exists because you're simply your own person. But when you get into a relationship, you have to learn how to work together as a couple, and a piece of your independence molds into the stuff required to be in a relationship. Better yet, a partnership.
The definition of a partnership means you are no longer on your own. You’re now working together as a team and nothing falls on just one person. You don’t lose your independence, but rather, you gain support, love, companionship, and a vow to fight everything side by side. For me, this phase was difficult because I had been single for such a long time. It was only after a lot of learning that I became comfortable being in a partnership and having someone there to do life with.
However, “coming home”-- it’s a transition from being in a relationship to being single again. It entails unlearning what it means to be in a partnership and relearning how to be fully independent again the way you were before the relationship started. I also want to point out that I don’t mean “unlearning” as in, “forget everything you just learned,” but more so as, “dismantle those lessons and save them for later because they are no longer useful at this point in time”.
Which… takes a lot, for me at least. “Coming home” might sound nice, but it’s pretty hard to do when you were just getting good at offloading some of your militant autonomy.
Although I was always independent to some degree (and my boyfriend and I were long distance so I really was on my own a lot of the time), there was just this air about being in a relationship that made it feel as though I was never really alone. That I always had somebody to lean on, to support me, and to go through the hard things and easy things with.
It's funny because I don't have someone to talk to about all of my day’s worth of activities now, and I don't have someone to text when I wake up or when I go to bed or when I'm done with work. I don't have someone to look forward to calling, and I don't have someone to look forward to getting on a plane for. There's a lot of things you just kind of have to deal with on your own when your relationship ends and one of those is learning how to be by yourself again.
This “coming home” phase is really about introducing your new self to your old self. The person you became during the relationship to the person you were before the love started. It’s about building on top of the foundation you already laid down and being the strongest, most equipped version of yourself that you've ever been.
For me, a couple weeks ago, I had a revelation about this “coming home” concept. The catalyst was actually processing that I had gone to Italy in the first place, met a man who changed my life in more ways than one, and experienced a profound, healthy love with him.
It then finally hit me, and I thought, “Oh my God. That was me. That wasn't just a character in a book or somebody in a movie. That was me. I was the one who went through all of that.”
I think for a while I was almost disassociated with myself because I was so used to just going through the motions, but the end of my relationship really signified to me I was back in my body, back from this experience, back in this consciousness. And I think that’s something a lot of people go through. If you’ve ever experienced heartbreak you also have simultaneously experienced the shift from a partnership to complete independence, and although it’s a tough phase to live through because there’s a lot of relearning to do, I think it’s also a time of immense growth and reconstruction.
If I can, I want to say something in the least cocky way possible… “coming home” is not all bad. In my case, I feel as though I’m on the precipice of meeting the most dangerous, empowered version of myself I've ever been.
~
Love is a really beautiful thing, if you get to experience it in a healthy, happy way. Heartbreak is a doozy, and none of us like it, but I want to encourage you to not let it mask the opportunity to strengthen who you are at your core. Every ending is also a new beginning, and when you look at it like that, you’re able to see that you’re right on the cusp of the good stuff.
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