Every day my heartbreak was the first thought in my head, it sat with me throughout the day, I lay in bed unable to sleep with it on my mind, and when I fell asleep it woke me up. For months it had been this way, it was defining my life.

So one afternoon I went to a quiet place, a desolate place, the empty beach in autumn, and I sat with myself. I sat with my pain. I let it wash over me, I accepted it, there was no point in denying it, hiding from it, pretending it wasn’t there, it was everywhere. I had tried and failed to get rid of it. I admitted defeat.

As I sat on that beach on a cloudy, breezy autumn day I let my pain sit beside me. And I wept, I wept for what I had lost, I wept because I could not get it back, I wept because this was my new life now. I wept because I felt alone, I wept because I did not want this, I wept because I was afraid. And pain sat with me.

But I knew that I could not go on in this way, I could not let this define me, I could not let this defeat me, I did not want to live my life this way.

I told pain I accepted it, that I understood why it was there. But I told it that it could not stay forever, that I was not going to allow it to stay forever.

Pain told me to allow it to help me, to see the things I had not seen about others and myself. It asked me to allow it to help me get stronger, to understand things, it told me to turn it into a thread in my cloth of life, not my entire cloth of life.

I told pain I would accept it, but I would not allow bitterness to join the conversation, because I knew that pain and bitterness could go hand in hand, and I knew that bitterness was the thing that could destroy me. I told pain I was not prepared to be destroyed.

Pain told me that it was not there to encourage bitterness it was there to make me stronger, resilient, and to understand things and not to fear being vulnerable. It asked me why I was there with it, because I loved someone and they had caused my pain, it asked me to remember that.

It promised me it would leave when I understood.

And it did.

Rosie

Making This Better the book is now available including the journal entries for the first 5 years of our recovery & the whole 21 days of ‘The War’. Available internationally in paperback and ebook  at Amazon and Barnes & Noble also available at Xlibris and Apple Books for iPad and Waterstones Bookstores for click & collect