This week marks one year since my ex boyfriend told me he was taking a job in NYC.  My heart was shattered into a million different pieces that day.  The subsequent months were filled with tears, sadness, and despair.  I fell into the darkest period of my life.  Had it not been for amazing friends, who kept me busy and got me out of my apartment, co-workers who cared to ask how I was doing and people I pretty much just met who listened, I would not be standing here today, the pieced back together and much stronger man that I am.  In there too was an amazing trip to Africa, which would come to be the last with my wonderful friend and travel companion, Lesley, along with Cary and Charlie, who experienced with me the transformative experience in the wilds of Africa.  Along with all of those things, what I know now is that people you don’t expect, come out of the woodwork to support you, that new friendships have blossomed, and that my own strength and courage helped me put one foot in front of the other each day.  I have experienced physical pain, remember the collarbone/blood clot incident of 2006 or the broken hand this past July?  What I learned through this experience is that physical pain ain’t got nothin’ on emotional trauma.  A pill can take away physical pain, but difficult, emotional work, and time,  must be the only thing that makes us better and helps us through emotional pain.   I recognize that I am not the first broken hearted man, listen to most music and you’ll see, but it’s people who have been heart broken who shine through like beacons of light during the darkest times.  What this experience has afforded me is the strength to move on, to grow, to learn, to be, to feel, to experience, all the lows and highs of life.  If we never experience sadness or disappointment, can we truly know how happiness feels?  If we never experience a broken heart, can we truly know what love is supposed to feel like?  I will never love in the same way again, he was my first love,  but I will love again, in a much different way.  That, I know for sure.

“and maybe a happy ending doesn’t include a guy, maybe it’s you, on your own, picking up the pieces and starting over, freeing yourself up for something better in the future.  Maybe the happy ending is just moving on.”

I have struggled with moving on and letting go.  Not even the stellar song by Adela Dazeem (Idena Menzel) “Let It Go” from Frozen could get me out of my funk.  I recently read a post from http://www.Tinybudda.com called “Finally Letting Go of the Pain and Moving on from the Break-up” by JR Hughes.  In it was a description of how I’ve felt for the past year, “For the year after the break-up I got on okay with life, but the shine had gone. A veil hung between me and true engagement with the world. I could smile but the smile never went to my eyes.”  Oh my god, that is me, I thought, or sang rather, “The past is in the past.  Let it go.  Let it go.”  It is time to lift the veil and bring my smile back to my eyes.  It is time to move the  F on.  I’m an amazing, wonderful man with so many great talents and passions to share.  I’m missing out on finding a new, great, wonderful man to share many adventures with, and my love.  I need to Say YES to Life!  I have to make the decision that this is over.  This is done. And I have done that.

When I recently found out my ex has moved on, like leaving me for a job in NYC wasn’t enough to tell me he moved on Matt, I found out he is dating someone new.  The news hit hard, for a day or two, then I was fine.  Last week I was completing the final days of Deepak Chopra and Oprah’s 21-Day meditation free series.  That particular day, 51 weeks after the break-up, was themed, “Expressing Wisdom.”  I WILL buy this series, if only for Day 20 and Oprah’s 2 minute message at the beginning.  It is no secret that I think Oprah is pretty amazing.  What she says rang so, SO true to me today.

 “I call it my sunrise faith, because as long as we’re on this planet, the sun always rises.  That is a truth we can count on, regardless how many shifts and twists and turns we experience in our lives, The Sun will rise tomorrow.  The true nature of the Universe is just like the sunrise.  It is always there.  It is always True, with a capital T.  We too are each in our truest selves, a part of the greater capital T, Truth.  What I know for sure, is the more closely we connect to the Source, capital S, of every truth, the more wondrous and full our life experience will be.  What is our true self?  We feel it when we’re lost in moments of doing something we love, or connecting with someone we love, or in those Ah Ha moments of light and insight.  We feel it in the essence of connection.  We feel it in the quiet, steady power of the sunrise.”