Have you ever fought so hard to hold a relationship together to a point it was beyond its dead point? You don't want to believe it's actually ending. You can't believe it. Even if the relationship was awful, even unbearable at times, the idea of living without it is unacceptable. Still, it's becoming clear that the two of you aren't going to make it. You are finally starting to compute that it's over. You've gone from, "Don't leave me...!" to "Okay, I give up..." But you still feel anything but okay. The moment you get off the phone with your ex, or the texting finally stops, or you leave each other's space, you experience withdrawal, and you are hit relentlessly by the reality of the loss. It can be a brutal process, and it can take a long time until you feel deserving of investing in your own independent, reshaped life path. You may have known somewhere within you that this breakup was coming, even for months or years, and yet you are still blindsided. Perhaps it was over before it even started, and you wasted a lot of your time for nothing. No matter how the lead-up has looked, now that the breakup is actually happening, you may be overwhelmed, immobilized and haunted by fear, loss, and despair about life without this person. This story is about some of the stages you can anticipate going through-they often occur all at once, or in varying orders at varying times during the process of letting go.
9 parts