Opening My Heart — Raw & Unfiltered Thoughts About My Life
This is edgy, this is really personal. A part of me wants to run and hide at the thought of publicly sharing everything I’m about to share.
It’s been no secret that I have been going through it recently after a soul crushing break up. This post is an act of vulnerability. I tend to openly share my emotions and inner landscape through poetry, but rarely do I dedicate extended exposé to unpack the depth of my emotionality.
And today, I am feeling open. It is both methodical and meditative for me to explore my inner psyche. So welcome inside. If anything, relate to the depth of experience, of feeling, of heartbreak. What I share here isn’t meant to be taken anywhere off this page, or as a form of blame—it’s me sharing my emotions as a form of art and inspiration of living.
I wouldn’t trade the caves of darkness for the flat plains, for I would never achieve the depth, or grow my roots so to say, to soar untethered. As hard as this has been—and it has been the hardest, most painful splintering, shattering of self—I am here to be present to it all, to lean into feeling all the feelings, and hopefully grow and realign to the wandering path of life.
Cracks let the light in, as they say.
As many of you know, I adamantly journal every morning. It is my ritual, my routine. Journaling helps me understand the totality of my experience, helps me bring into the mental plane the emotional overwhelm. The following prose is from a couple journal entries spanning October 2024. In choosing to share this to Substack, I have lightly edited the source content for clarity, when needed.
The Comedown
Not all highs lead to lows, and vice versa, but there is contrast in the swing of the pendulum going from one extreme to the other. And like the comedown from a good trip, the comedown fucking sucks. By contrast, normal and steady can feel like the depths of depression.
As alluded, the comedown has been hard. Emotionality constantly slapping me, tears bubbling under the surface, waiting to break loose with a tender thought or the right wrong question. The loss is hitting me really hard. All I want to do is curl up in a ball and cry. I keep thinking I just want you back home with me.
A trip to Texas for a music festival with some of my best friends cracked me open to new layers of emotion. I guess mixing medicine and music was going to carve new pathways to feeling. That and proximity. The visceral feeling of your heart beating next to mine never left my body, only intensifying as I crossed imaginary borders.
I can sit with the pain and loss, what really kills me is the dissatisfaction. To experience unconditional love is a blessing, and pairing that with experiences that make the soul sing… And yet, the gaping hole left by you was still ever present. Never dimming in intensity.
I only enjoyed myself as much as lapses in reality allowed—one moment blissed out dancing to the hypnotic beat and the next sobbing into Lillian’s hair as everything reminded me of you. There is purity in music moving the experience, better out than in, as they say.
Messing with brain chemistry, I’ve only been slightly manic. Too much energy buzzing my body, bounded by sad and lust-less flesh. No one thing can hold my attention for long, from wanting to do and achieve everything to the weight of the world slowly crushing me like a weighted blanket in the Arizona heat. No reprieve, no middle ground to walk upon. All desire paused, all action led by a slip into mania.
This heartbreak feels like it is too much to bear alone. The sadness is consuming me, heavy and overbearing. How do I move on and move through this? How can I flow with my joy for living when I am carrying around the weight of that?
Struggling with Gratitude
I’m disinterested in life. I feel like I’ve been transported back to college in regard to my general anxiety and dissatisfaction. Everything seems too hard and not worth doing.
Right now, I’m grateful to be sat outside with the sun shining on my skin and slowly sipping my morning brew while journaling. I love a crisp and quiet morning, and few things give me more satisfaction than daily moments like this.
But I’m also engulfed in this weird liminal space of just not wanting to be alive. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to deal with being me, lost in purpose and love. Questioning what is the point of it all. I’ve said it so many times—I miss my lust for life. I miss reveling in just being alive and present.
Maybe the lesson is in the contrast.
I’m literally living my dream, everything I’ve been slowly shedding and letting go of has created the capacity for the work I am doing now. I was just offered another studio class. I’m excited, and yet, I hesitated in immediately accepting the offer, because it initially just felt like more work. And the kicker is, I was the first person on the list to offer it to, I was their first choice. I’m amazed and so proud of myself. I act on the desires of my heart and soul, and my life reflects this.
More proof—not only knowing that I am on the right path but experiencing the unfolding because I keep getting handed these opportunities. And it feels like I’m not grateful because I’m in an anxious and apathetic state.
I am so grateful, I am living my dream. And yet, there is this part of not enough-ness, of not being fulfilled because my love left me. And as whole as I feel within Being, in my humanness I feel completely empty, an expression of the void.
The person I loved most didn’t feel like our relationship was worth the effort, that we were better off without each other. And this has ripped me apart to my core. There is no steady ground for me to walk on. Nothing feels worth doing, because if our relationship wasn’t worth the effort and energy, what could possibly be? Everything feels menial and mundane.
In feeling love, I mentally know that it is me and an expression of my energy. And in experiencing love, I recognize that it is you who has been my key. No one has ever inspired more love in my heart and fire in my soul to live a life of love. And now I just feel empty. Like so incredibly empty and alone. Nothing really matters. I’m just going through the motions of living. I don’t feel alive. I’m just a shell that feels pain and sorrow and hurt.
How can one be so miserable, and yet, so blessed?
Acceptance
And in all this, I am somehow not the totality of me when I choose to ignore the pain. It’s picking and choosing parts of me that are deemed acceptable. Pushing away pain creates a bigger shadow to bear. I won’t be doing that. Brave—or masochistic—I’m choosing to feel it all when the wound is fresh and painful to the touch. And when the ache finally starts to dull, I’ll know there’s cleanliness in healing, no surprise infection to take me down later.
Where is the balance? Love and grief marrying the experience like an oroborus. Consuming self or a slow and steady march down the cyclic path? This has never been a casual relationship or a casual heartbreak.
Would I still have chosen you if I knew where our path would lead? Would I choose this encounter knowing that it would leave me shattered? And still, I think I would. How could I say no to experiencing this kind of love? And how can I still respect my tender heart—which has been blasted open more times than I can count? Meeting you was a transcendent experience. Up-leveling every aspect of my life.
Is this how I accept the ending? How do I walk through all this with grace? All I feel is pain and sadness and anger. I want to ask you, scream at you: How dare you? How could you? And expect us to just continue along separate paths. And there is a part of me that still believes that we were forged for each other.
Further Reflection
I experienced transcendent ceremony at a Porangui concert (not shocking). I had a profound realization, and it’s not a happy one. My life has been completely altered. I will never not feel the depth of this loss. There will always be a part of me that bears the weight of grief. A part of me that will always mourn that fact that you’re not by my side, regardless of how blissful the present moment is. There will always be a piece of my heart that aches for you.
I know the intensity will eventually subside. But I have profoundly shifted. I will never again walk through life without a piece of you with me. Entangled so completely, cord cutting aside. The weight of this realization bears down on me too, I have a new understanding of the experience of baggage.
I think of this depth of attachment as re-tethering. I was solidly me before you, then you came into my life and everything shifted. All of a sudden, my center of gravity wasn’t just me. I learned to trust you, rely on you, care about your thoughts and feelings as much as my own. I’ve never had a romantic partner that shifted the way I was tethered to Earth. For a blip of time, it couldn’t just be me, it was we.
And now I am alone with me once again, yet it’s not the version of me who walked before. I can’t be tethered in the way I was. That ship has long sailed. I walk with new awareness, greater capacity to love and ache.
Promises to Me
So much contrast. Blissful soaring and scraping my hand and knees as I crawl through the dirt.
And mostly, the realization that I’ve lost my lust for life. In my adult life, one of my greatest embodied understandings has been that I find purpose in Being. I love experiencing the experience. Feeling the sunlight dance across my skin and hearing the flutter of hummingbird wings; dipping my toes in icy water, sending blissful chills up my spine; the thumping music beating alongside my heart as sweat drips down my neck, feet methodically tapping to the tempo as my hips sway; losing my breath as I push myself past the confines of my mind in pleasure and adrenaline and discomfort, only to come back to my breath because breathing through it all is the only way through.
The aching of this ripped thread is incomprehensible. How do I come back to myself in love?
I want it back. I want to feel so juicy again. This doesn’t feel like depression, just life-altering grief, a dark cloud of heavy emotion hovering over me.
I’ve been intentionally distancing myself to feel all the things and not bring my friends down with me. I have a big aching hole in my heart for companionship, a hole that only I can fill and feel.
I recognize that in giving myself the space to feel and process, I’ve dropped some of the things that spark me.
Coming home to myself is finding joy in living again.
Poetic Disposition
Tear stained cheeks, salty and throbbing. Clenched jaw, closed fists. Shattered heart, devoid of love and light.
Darkness swallows me whole.
Steam rises from my coffee mug, slowly drifting away into the ethers. And here, I too, wish I was the steam evaporating into nothing.
Am I so malleable that everything now means nothing without you here? It meant everything to me before you. Then you had to light up my life with your brilliance, and now in the aftermath it’s all dull. The color sun-bleached away.
I thought I was a happy person with sad moments, but maybe that was an illusion too. Maybe I am a lonely person who had a few good years. I was an incurably sad teenager, my only solace found in books. Always lonely, I never truly believed that I belonged to this world.
I chose you with my whole heart and you threw me away.
I was never going to be shiny enough from a couple states away. What kills me the most is that you thought text was appropriate. Ho’oponopono doesn’t grant you immunity from your actions. Did you think so little of us that you couldn’t even end it with a proper conversation? Pathetic is me being kind in my use of adjective.
Lack of belief in us is a reflection of self. I told you my words were sharp.
And here I am, still loving you. Always. But from afar. I will not let you make a plaything of out of my heart.
I guess I should have seen this coming. Things come in threes. Silly me to hope that the third time was the charm. Everything was different, but you’re the same man who broke my heart.
I wish I could see the blessing on this go-around. I’m still too knotted and snared with scars that I’ll always keep.
Now I’m losing sleep, a zombie among the living. Not dead or alive, but too fucked up to move on. Stuck near death’s door. Clinging to this cycle.
Your heartbeat reverberating next to mine. Always reminding me of the love I lost. Echoing in the void of my vessel, nothing left but pain and loss. Lucky me.
The End
In the end, there was no point to make to you, reader, in this post. I guess I just needed an outlet to share myself. There is no wisdom to take home with you (unless you’re reading between the lines). Just feelings.
I’ll end here with saying that I am okay. It’s not all doom and gloom. I know the intensity will eventually subside.
The integrity of this transmission is important to me, and it feels important to state that these are snapshots of emotionality during a very specific point in my life. In sharing, I don’t want to remove the context of me and my experience, while leaving room for relatability. I speak to the totality of the human experience, while being very consumed within my experience. It is both subjectively personal and omnipresent.
Lastly, and maybe the only teaching I weave in here, is recognition that I am not my emotions nor my thoughts, I am not even my body. To put it to words, I am both the observer and the experiencer. And this has been an interesting play at duality—the humanness of Madison has been consumed in pain and grief, while the soul-ness of I has been removed and distant, knowing that if I were to run the show, emotions would be left unfelt and buried. This understanding of inner duality has brought solace and new levels of awareness to my grief.
For I still believe that to be human is to feel it all. The gift is in the experiencing. My higher self knows it will all be okay and my human self grieves in ways I never knew I could.
Thank you for reading. From my heart to yours,
Madison