On letting grief testify without handing it the gavel.
Two days after the breakup, I missed him terribly. Not in some dignified, wistful, gazing-out-the-window sort of way.
I mean I missed him.
I wanted to talk to him. I wanted the familiarity of him. I wanted connection. I wanted relief from the enormous empty space where this person had so recently been.
And my heart, which apparently had appointed itself both counsel and expert witness, presented what it considered an airtight case:
I miss him. Therefore, I should contact him.
At the time, that logic felt surprisingly persuasive.
Pain does that.
It arrives with tremendous emotional force and then quietly slips in an assumption:
Because this hurts, you need to do something.
Call him. Text him. Check something. Fix something. Make the feeling stop.
But I was trying to learn a different way of responding.
So instead of contacting him, I cried. I acknowledged that I missed him. I let myself feel what I was feeling without trying to talk myself out of it. Eventually, I turned my attention toward a project.
And then I did something that felt both completely inadequate and strangely difficult:
I waited.
I let the wave move through me.
The Case My Heart Was Making
Looking back, I can see that my heart was confusing two very different things:
A feeling and a fact.
The feeling was absolutely real. I missed him. That was true.
But from that true statement, my mind wanted to construct several conclusions that did not necessarily follow: I miss him, therefore I should contact him. I miss him, therefore perhaps ending the relationship was wrong. I miss him, therefore maybe I cannot tolerate being without him. I miss him, therefore something needs to happen.
None of those conclusions was actually contained in the original fact.
The only thing that missing him proved was this:
I missed him.
That was enough.
It didn’t need to become a verdict.
Feelings Are Witnesses
I have started thinking of feelings as witnesses.
They deserve to be heard.
Sometimes they have enormously important information. Fear may tell me that something feels unsafe. Anger may tell me that something important has been violated. Sadness may tell me that I have lost something I valued. Longing may tell me that someone mattered deeply to me.
I don’t want a Constitution that silences those witnesses.
But I also don’t want one that hands them the gavel.
A witness gets to testify. A witness does not decide the case.
And two days after my breakup, grief had a great deal of testimony.
Exhibit A: It hurts.
Accepted.
Exhibit B: I cried.
Accepted.
Exhibit C: I really, really miss him.
Also accepted.
Exhibit D: Maybe just one little text?
Denied.
My heart would like the record to reflect that it strongly objected to this ruling.
The record so reflects.
The Boundary Was With Myself
This is also where my understanding of boundaries has begun to change.
I used to think of boundaries primarily as things involving other people: what I would permit, what I would refuse, what someone else could or could not do.
But Article V of my Constitution contains a different idea:
A healthy boundary is not something I impose on another person. It is a promise I make to myself.
On this particular day, the boundary had almost nothing to do with him. He wasn’t there.
The boundary was between me and my own impulse to escape what I was feeling.
I was making myself a very small promise: I will not abandon myself simply because this hurts.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to miss him. It didn’t mean I had to pretend the relationship hadn’t mattered. It certainly didn’t mean I had to become some serenely evolved woman who gazed knowingly into the middle distance while whispering, This too shall pass.
I cried.
There was nothing serene about it.
But I didn’t ask another person to regulate the feeling for me.
I stayed.
And Then Something Happened
The wave passed.
That’s the part I couldn’t have written two days after the breakup.
I can write it now.
Weeks have passed since that day, and I have something today that the woman crying two days after the breakup did not have: evidence.
She didn’t know whether the wave would pass. She had to trust that it might.
I know that it did. And there were other waves. They passed too.
That doesn’t mean I never miss him.
It doesn’t mean grief followed some tidy downward trajectory until I woke up one morning cured of it.
Human beings would apparently like emotional recovery to operate like a package-tracking app: Grief departed facility. Grief out for delivery. Grief successfully delivered somewhere else and will never bother you again.
Sadly, no such service appears to exist.
Grief comes and goes.
But something changed each time I let it come and go without treating it as an emergency.
I began to trust myself.
What Resistance Might Have Cost Me
I understand something else now that I couldn’t fully understand then.
If I had spent those weeks fighting every feeling—trying not to miss him, trying not to think about him, being angry with myself whenever I cried—I might have remained emotionally attached to the struggle much longer.
Because then I would have had two problems: The grief itself. And my battle against the grief.
Instead, I let myself experience the loss.
That distinction matters.
Accepting grief is not the same thing as surrendering to it. Feeling longing is not the same thing as following it. And allowing an emotion to exist is not the same thing as allowing it to run my life.
The Ruling
So this Constitutional Case establishes a precedent I suspect I will need again: Feelings deserve to be witnessed; they do not automatically deserve to be obeyed.
There is an enormous difference between saying: I shouldn’t feel this and saying I feel this, and I still get to decide what I do next.
The first requires me to fight myself. The second allows me to remain myself.
That is emotional regulation as I am beginning to understand it—not becoming less emotional, but becoming less governed by the demand that every emotion must immediately be resolved.
I can be sad without fixing sadness. I can be lonely without immediately seeking company. I can miss someone without contacting them. I can love someone and still recognize that they should no longer occupy the same place in my life.
And perhaps most importantly:
When my heart hurts, I do not have to abandon myself to make it stop.
Several Weeks Later
There is something strangely moving to me about looking back at the woman I was two days after that breakup.
She was hurting. She didn’t know what I know now. She didn’t know how she would feel several weeks later. She didn’t know whether she could tolerate the longing without acting on it. She certainly didn’t know that one day she would turn the whole thing into a Constitutional Case and start making jokes about evidentiary standards. She only knew what was required of her that day.
Don’t send the text. Cry if you need to. Find something to do. Let the wave come.
And wait.
So now I can go back and give her the answer she didn’t yet have:
It passes.
Not instantly. Not neatly.
But it passes.
You don’t have to chase it away. You don’t have to obey it. You don’t have to abandon yourself because your heart hurts.
You just have to stay long enough to discover that you can survive it.
I did.
Disposition: Affirmed.
Precedent: Feelings deserve to be witnessed; they do not automatically deserve to be obeyed.
Missing someone is evidence that I miss them.
It is not a court order requiring me to return.
My heart has appealed.
The Court remains unmoved.
Court adjourned.