Pain Is Meant To Happen For Better Reasons

          With inspirations from the people-parents, siblings, best friends and the like-that surrounded us as we grew up, we molded the perfect person we want to be with in our minds. The one that could and would equally love and adore us as they did. The one that would not hurt or make us cry. The one we could and would give our heart to willingly. But then we grew older. We realized we created illusions and perfect was just a word. We got knocked with sense of reality that we loved through rose tinted glasses and deceptive ideas and that even people who professed to love us could equally break us. Pain was inevitable.

  Pain was consuming. It gnawed and clawed every fiber of our being. It was there in every thought, squeezing cells in our brain for answers on why and how things happened, slowly failing our reason. It was a deafening sound that repeatedly slammed our rib cage, crushing the life of heart's every beat. It became the blood that flowed in our veins and defined the life we never wanted and roused the urge to hurt as we were hurt. It was addicting, easier to succumb to, though we tried to fight it.

  We latched onto something-numbness or anger and held onto it-that made sense to what was going on inside of us; a swirling vortex of every emotion possible mixed with nothingness. They became the blood that flowed in our veins, the heart of our being, and it was everything that mattered. They became our cloak and shield to protect ourselves from falling in love and to prevent people from closing in. We felt good walking around and going through the motion of living “protected”. Scarred, tired, and hurt, we threw in the towel and said, “Never again”. Never again to dating. No more to men or women who would and could stir our lives. But, amidst the tears, while wading through the bitterness from a heartbreak, we asked if there is someone out there for us.

  Living with pain, bitterness, anger, or numbness, could be tiresome. It could get lonely in there, going through the daily grind without enthusiasm-frozen. That awareness became a “wake up” call. It was like being snapped back from an extended stupor, and the first thing that came to mind was, “That was not me”. But everything that was had been a part of who we become. Whether we like it or not being broken was meant to happen, a bittersweet experience paid handsomely for a lifetime.

  A blessing in disguise-if we really think about it. We felt proud of learning and surviving. The newfound insight we wore like a king’s crown and walked with it taller, wiser and better. The strength that possessed us after the ordeal became our armor. We felt invincible and fearless. What could possibly hurt us more?

  We began to examine ourselves and to know us from within. All that we went through had become a “guidebook” of what shall be. The thing was, despite being broken, our ideals never changed because we were familiar with them and knew them to be something good and beautiful-only we got entangled with the wrong person at the right time or right person at the wrong time or it's just awfully wrong in all sense. That “something good and beautiful” we wanted to happen to ourselves, in our lives. It was that longing for “something good and beautiful” that pushed us to keep going and to keep trying and to keep looking and to keep waiting.

  We learnt that we felt let down because our expectations were never met. But with the new “us” we modified them to some extent, relative to what we learnt. We could not eradicate our expectations totally, but we tried to meet and be met halfway. With acquired wisdom, self-respect, and regard to our higher ideals, we considered dating again. But this time around, it became more of connecting with somebody who shared our principles, rather than bending ours to fit theirs. It became more of satisfying ourselves, thus, not settling for anything less. It's about loving ourselves more.

  But you know what's the most important thing that happened from experiencing the pain of loss and broken heart? It taught us to be better humans; more emphatic, more sensitive, more forgiving. Not only our "rebirth" resulted to a tougher and better version of us, but with it came compassion for others. The understanding of how pain could break a person gave us the license to help spare as many souls as we could from falling into the same abyss of darkness we had been to. We want to lift people to be a better version of themselves and us. We then realized we have a lot of love to give than we ever did before. And that to me is "something good and beautiful".