I doubt there is anyone among us who hasn’t had a broken heart at least once in their lives. It’s a risk you take when you let yourself love someone, and yes I do think it’s worth the risk. (Just as well really; a quick count reveals mine to have been at the very least cracked about eight times – lordy! – with probably two or three really shattered-into-tiny-pieces breaks. Never let it be said I don’t love with my whole heart!)Anyway, it’s quite a well known fact that you can’t avoid crappy feelings; you can try, but they’ll just resurface later and demand to be dealt with. Generally the best thing to do is sit through them (I know) and deal with them as they come. And while you’re doing that there is a Law that states:

Thou shalt take extra super special care of yourself during this sad time, and thus bring great comfort to yourself and learn that you are in fact able to do this for yourself.Repetition of the word ‘yourself’ I know, but actually that’s kind of the point. We all ‘know’ that expecting or hoping for someone else to fill in our gaps or make up the shortfall never works; certainly I’ve known this for flipping ages but I think maybe only in the purely intellectual sense. To really know something in your heart is totally different.

I think I can safely say I really know in my heart now that only I can be responsible for my own happiness. If you give that responsibility to someone else they will break it, or run off with it, and bam! You fall apart. They don’t mean to (usually), but it happens. I think because someone saying to you ‘Here, can you take my heart and look after it and be responsible for its comfort and wellbeing at all times’ is quite a scary thing to be asked.So while nursing my certainly very very cracked and chipped heart right now, I’m doing everything I can to be there for myself. I’m watching movies, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows in it, baking cookies so I can eat them (and give some away!), reading, writing it all down, lying on the sofa, looking at art that inspires me, not setting an alarm in the morning, eating what I want when I feel like it, and also trying to be there for the people I care about, because giving is a very good distraction and has multiple benefits to all concerned. Here are some of the cookies I baked, ready to go to my friend: I’m secretly quite pleased at my brainwave of putting them in a Bonne Maman jam jar with a ribbon, an idea borne of desperation because I don’t have a tin. Necessity/mother/invention etc.

I cried while I was making them; I’ve cried already about six times today and there will no doubt be plenty more crying. And when I am crying it feels in that moment like everything I’ve just written is total bullshit and that I’m full of crap and pretentiously pretending to be wise when I’m so not, and just scrabbling around for something meaningful to make sense of these horrible feelings. But I’m not crying right now and I know it to be true. And also those are just mean, unproductive thoughts that carry no real weight and have no basis in truth.

It’s an up and down process but I know I’ll be ok. Probably quite a lot fatter, but ok.