From great pain comes great art. The Stiletto muse has been steeped in poisons and antidotes coming out of a recent break-up. I wanted to share what I have found to be 4 poisons that we must fight to survive in such situations.
I. The poison: Omnipresence
The antidote: Your choice of the meaning you ascribe to things
It was a Thursday night. I’d managed to get from the airport to my house to the California Academy of Sciences Big Bang party in the space of an hour and a half. There were many couples glamorously dressed up wandering around arm in arm. This was an event I had been looking forward to coming to with my significant other. Now post-breakup my other significant other, Rachel, was going to be my plus-one and arriving any minute.
There were women dressed as nature, covered in green leaves and flowers, on stilts. They reminded me of Groot, from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, which I’d watched with him. I moved on to the dinosaur exhibit.
“He liked dinosaurs” I whispered to myself as I looked at the T-Rex. Then I frowned. No, he didn’t actually, the voice of rationality spoke in my head. You liked dinosaurs. You went to see Jurassic world together because you wanted to. “Oh that’s right” I said to myself.
When Rachel arrived, I was elated to see her smiling face, and I had my friend to go explore the wonderful terrain of Cal Academy with. We stood in the line for a photo in front of a space background. “Reminds me of him” I said. “Aparna, everything reminds you of him” she said. She was right. The stars, the moon, any space reference, the name of the ice cream shop in the Mission, the Mission itself (an entire neighborhood in San Francisco). Whilst watching “The Little Prince” (excellent movie), I thought the Little Prince bore a striking resemblance to him. Christine later reminded me that not all blonde people look the same and affirmed lack of any meaningful resemblance.
The fact is the first hardest part of a break-up is breaking up all the associations you have with the person. These associations are irrational and just point you down the path of grief. Remind yourself of the complex world we live in, with all of its items that can take on so many meanings. You give every item meaning, and you don’t have to give it painful meaning.
The moon and the stars and space are for us all.
II. The poison: What if? analysis
The antidote: Accept the fact that people can’t change, including you
What if I had done X? What if I had not been so tired and emotional? What if he had said Y? What if I had said Y? What if I had been more accepting of Z? What if, what if, what if…
After the fact, What if analysis leads to unhelpful second-guessing. Once you’ve both made the decision, you have to move on. The fact is this: people don’t change. Most people can’t change in any deep way, including you, including me. There are traits I’ve been working on consciously counteracting for years and they still show up (people-pleasing is one example). If you couldn’t accept the person as they were and/or they couldn’t accept you the way you are, it was going to be frustrating. “What if” analysis puts too much hope in change that isn’t possible.
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might just find
You get what you need” – The Rolling Stones
III. The poison: The dream
The antidote: Reflecting on reality
I had a dream and a vision, and San Francisco was the wrong city for parts of it. Because the dream wasn’t just of start-ups and IPOs, it was of creating a family some day as loving as the one I came from. Having pictured that future many times with the person I was with, it was hard to let that image go.
Despite being conscious of it, I still struggle against the realities:
i) That life is full of trade-offs. You can’t have it all. You have to choose whether you want a high-flying career, a relationship where you both invest in it fully, time with family, tons of hobbies, a six pack etc. People can appear like they have it all on social media – it isn’t the reality
ii) That you can’t have all of what you want because circumstances out of your control will often get in the way
iii) That you have to accept losses – sometimes the silver linings feel like slivers and there is no sure way of knowing whether the lessons learnt were worth the pain endured. You just have to say “I failed, I lost, it hurts” . You waste your life if you try to keep a scoreboard of winning and losing – many of us type A individuals are obsessed with such toxic concepts internally.
IV. The poison: The endowment effect
The antidote: Consciously reversing it and taking your person off a pedestal
In his book Essentialism, McLean writes about the endowment effect: that owning something makes it more precious to you. In a relationship this is accentuated – the person you are with is more valuable than anyone else you could be with, because you’ve already invested the time and effort and feelings in them and you feel like they are “yours”.
This can be what holds you together…
In the Little Prince, the Prince loves a rose that is on his planet, and to his knowledge the only rose in the Universe. Then when he lands on another planet he sees a hundred thousand roses and is shocked and heart-broken. A wise fox points out to him that his rose is unique. And after some great dialogue, the Prince sees the light and says to the field of roses:
“Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen…Since she’s my rose.” — The Little Prince
This is beautiful, but also about a great love that isn’t a romantic love (my read). Personally, I think romantic love isn’t the greatest love in the world, but is inaccurately made out to be on every channel (movies, books, the way people talk to each other etc.). And our treatment of it is very illogical…
On the one hand, we idolize romantic love, on the other hand, we have 50% + divorce rates and break-ups left, right and center and a real culture of almost-encouragement building up around not working on a relationship and instead finding someone who is compatible out-of-the-box (I’m guilty of this as much as the next person). There’s a balance in there somewhere, but the point I’m trying to make is this: romantic love is actually secondary to many other types of love. Parent-child love is probably the greatest love out there.
So if you don’t have major commitments and entanglements together and are coming across issues that require more work/discomfort/compromise than any of you are willing to put in, you need to put your rose back in the field (the break up) and then STOP idolizing that rose. Finding another rose is bloody hard work but that’s a challenge for tomorrow. Today, just stop idolizing the rose.
Rupi Kaur writes this in her book “The Sun and the Flowers” about the middle place:
Stiletto Muse 