It's a special day... a shiny new posting. Fuelled, as usual by a shot of alcohol, knocked back sensibly when I arrived home this Friday night, checked my work emails and naturally found that my best laid plans had gone a little tits up. What can you do? Anxiety eat? OR drink. From thereon in a rather sleep deprived, mental week all caught up and I allowed myself a good old read of emails passed and a sad lament over things which I don't otherwise have time to lament, especially as I have mostly been trying to avoid the horrific and much more real spectre of one of my most loved having cancer, and that little catalogue of emotions. No, I decided not to look at that tonight, but instead telescoped my misery around something a little less harmful - the topic of my broken heart. The heart I broke. The one that doesn't bother anyone except me, doesn't harm anyone except me, the one I can selfishly dwell on without any sense of using anyone else's distress as a channel for what frankly, is just the emotional culmination of a rough week. Here's what I wrote to myself. Read it, shrug (for you already know how it will end) and join me in a big old, rebellious ignoring of the real shitter - bad things happening to good people. Let's refuse to dignify that with any time. Here's a silly story about a silly woman. About a million silly women who all turned out ok....

So the 8th June is coming up and before anything happened, I'd planned to get back in touch with him and ask if he's still with the other woman. You know, the one he's in love with? Yes, that one.

I know, sadly that he will say that yes he is, that he's happy and that he's well and truly over me. It'll be rotten and I'll leave it and be miserable, all the more so because it WAS the right thing to break up 2 years ago, it just doesn't make it any easier to deal with the fact that now I'm ready for everything he wanted, he's over it.

And he said that was 'it' for him. Those were his exact words. That he'd never be with anyone else. I believed I'd ruined his life, because that's what he believe and what he wanted me to think.

Still. No right to be angry about that. Of course I am get over able. Who isn't? 

I just don't know what I'm going to do when I hear that from him. I've achieved what i wanted to career-wise, have my independence and feel comfortable in myself and in my own company. I feel like I've settled where most of my friends and colleagues are quite wildly sociable. I've done all this and for what? Nothing. I may as well have lived my life over 50 years, not two.

Ugh. What am I doing with my life?! The old me would probably have been driven to greater success by this sort of sadness, but I feel so, so heartbroken. It's unbearable. All my past triumphs remind me of him. He was there, he thought I was pretty good at stuff, he celebrated my achievements with me at the time when my life really started to become what i wanted it to be. I dream about him all the time. If only I'd known all this when he still wanted to be with me (only a few months ago, before he met the other person!)

I feel like I've lived my life already. I'm 27 this year and I've had one relationship, one love, and it feels like it was all a sham. What am I supposed to think of myself?

I think pull yourself together, keep your chin up, carry on, it'll work out ok. I guess that's the thing. They say nobody ever dies of a broken heart, because if your heart is big enough to be broken, it's big enough to hold the hope that keeps you going. Even if it comes to nothing, at least it will keep you going long enough to meet somebody else. Somebody not quite like the first, but different in their own way. I mean he got over it. His new woman got over whatever was in her past. They found happiness. Great. There we go. Case... study.

It just seems a shame to me that you can love more than once, but I suppose that is my problem. It's actually rather wonderful that you can, otherwise people who lose their husbands and wives wouldn't move on and they'd be miserable forever, all the more so because nobody in the relationship thought it was a good idea to end it, but other things intervened.

Losing someone close to you - in the non breakup sense - has got to be the worst. Much worse than having a choice in matters. That's the fear I've been fighting lately - the one that's truly overshadowed everything written here previously. A real and true terror, incomprehensible.

I can't face it, even now. Is is all pain from hereon in? Hasn't it always been? Just grades and shades of shaken foundations, crumbling truths? And if so, when did anything seem stable enough? You spend your youth learning, facing things you don't understand. Then you only realise you've got your head around things when something comes along to shake the tree.

Jesus, is it too much to ask, for the health, life and happiness of my loved ones to continue, and for the one I loved and lost, to return to me, forgive me and give me hope again, not in adversity but in a celebration of our own gamble. I guess therein lies my answer. Holding hope isn't enough - you have to drag yourself up and put your hope in others, place it in actions, risk it and test it and use it. But you rarely, permanently lose it.

Only then can we be free from regret and free from fear.