Working Through [and out of] Heartbreak
6 Lessons on Heartbreak, Work, and Productivity
Heartbreak and Grief
Romantic heartbreak, usually arising from the termination of a relationship, is intimately connected with grief.
Despite the continual debate over a unified definition of grief, it is accurate to state that it is a highly universal experience, processed at the utmost individualised level, and has very tangible effects on our health, social life, and of course, work.
Grief can almost be seen as a disease of the soul, triggered by the monumental impact of loss. While loss — another universal signpost of human experience — can present itself in many forms, with a wide spectrum of repercussions and impact.
Unfortunately, in my own experience, I have grown closely acquainted with both grief and loss from a young age, across a range of contexts. As such, I have come to increasingly reflect on its impact on how we function as human beings, seldom for better, and often for worse.
This intimacy with grief has made it a great teacher, and my last encounter pushed me to take a breath and write down 6 Lessons I learnt from the uninvited educator.
1- Accept you are not as functional as you were
The individual nature of grief means that its impact, and length, will vary according to the context of each relationship. If you loved and lost someone to the point of mourning their absence, chances are that many practical, daily-life tasks will be just as disrupted as one’s emotional state.
In my case, I lived with said person for around two years, at her place; The immediate consequences being obvious, especially during the current economic climate, where it is borderline impossible to find affordable housing at the speed of a breakup.
The security of predictability and stability can be swept away with the swiftness of a ‘we need to talk’, and the mountain starts to grow at a vertiginous rate; until the peak is nowhere to be seen.
Most of us are not equipped for this, but when there’s no choice, the choice itself is made.
When faced with the shrapnel of a life imploded, there can be a very real and practical conflict between what we NEED to do, and what we WANT to do. No one is unbreakable, and accepting it is the first step toward realising that being broken is not an unreversible condition.
It is the difference between being ill and being dead: one is manageable, the other one is final.
Being proactive in grief is one of the lessons I am most thankful to have learnt in life. Once you realise the pain is there whether you are in motion or sitting in a dark room, you understand that you have some say over said pain; it becomes a dialogue rather than a lecture — an incredibly undesirable conversation, but one where our voice does affect some aspects of the outcome, no matter how small.
Accept you are hurt, and that you will have to make adjustments. Accept that life is inevitably worse in one or more ways. Also accept you are a part of that process, not just a passive hostage to your own suffering.
Get out there — at your own pace and respecting your new set of limitations — and take care of business.
2- Strip down to the bare minimum
There is no such thing as a breakup leave — unlike when a close family member dies — but the suffering and processing involved are pretty much real. As such, a priority assessment should be made.
At this stage, it feels hard to focus on anything other than the source of one’s suffering. It is interesting that both the beginning and ending of a relationship share at least one thing: the impossibility to think naturally about anything other than that person and context. In both love and heartbreak, life would be impossible at a practical level without readjusting our focus, in one way or another.
This is akin to swimming in the ocean while simultaneously trying to fully contemplate a beautiful view: the waves are still coming despite the scenery, and if we do not move about, we will drown.
The breakup version would see us swimming while witnessing the eruption of a volcano on a crowded beach, where everyone is dying, nature is charred to bits, and the skies are turning black: you cannot go back ashore, but you definitely cannot stop swimming either.
Now is the time to assess what is necessary for life itself not to fall apart further, and what can be postponed (or at least slowed down). At this point, prioritizing is key, because if we do not, rock bottom can give way to the gates of hell.
It can get worse.
From a practical standpoint, being unemployed and heartbroken, is worse than just being heartbroken; as it is with being homeless, in debt, losing friendships, or hurting those around us AND being heartbroken.
To let our (very legitimate) impulse towards inertia take the wheel can turn what feels like the end of the world, into the actual and practical end of our personal worlds. This may seem like an overly dispassionate perspective — especially when the breakup is fresh -, but how we manage our heartache immediately after the crash will affect our lives in the upcoming months, and even years.
It may not feel fair that we are bleeding and are forced to keep running, but life very seldom cares about fairness. All you can do is adjust the pace because stopping is never a real option, and thank yourself later for it.
Keep a roof over your head, pay your bills, preserve your relationships. You will still bleed, but in comparative peace, and in your own terms.
3- Communicate with those you work with or for
Not everyone is comfortable discussing their personal lives with their employer, colleagues, or even friends; Although, it is important that (at least) those working closely with you, understand you are in a situation which affects your cognitive and emotional abilities.
You do not have to vent about every (or any detail) of the breakup, but, as when it happens with physical illness, you cannot be expected to be fully functional. The same principle should be applied when grieving.
A large part of the process can become easier, or at least more practical, when we see expectations as a major determining factor in both our feelings, and the outcomes of said feelings. In this regard there are two main types of expectations.
We have self-imposed expectations, which are a recurring theme throughout this article: how I think I should feel; how I think I should act; how I think things should be; and so forth. These expectations are already hard to manage, even when depending mostly on our individual actions, and become an impossible and futile exercise of borderline self-destruction, because the situation is not going to change, and we have no say over it. The other person had his/her/their reasons, and they need to be respected, regardless of how painful or disruptive the outcome.
More aligned with this point, there are also the expectations projected onto us by others. In the context of working relationships, these should be managed carefully, openly, and thoroughly. So, when I write about communicating your grief with those working with and around you, this is what I mean.
When all is well, and we are fully functioning and (dare I say?) happy human beings, harboured in the safety of healthy relationships, there is a predisposition to execute tasks with less resistance, a greater ease, and in greater volume. Therefore, it is only logical that, when living on the opposite end of the spectrum, our capabilities are diminished in one way or another, according to each individual process.
In the analogy of professional sports this is more apparent, because your teammates will not be expecting the same performance from you when recovering from an injury.
The problem being that a broken foot is much more visible than a broken heart.
There is a big difference between being unable to do something and being unwilling. That is why communicating your present state as clearly as possible in the workplace will reduce frustrations, increase cooperation and productivity in the long run, and (as importantly, if not more), contribute to a speedier and healthier recovery.
4- Make the Bigger Picture your anchor to reality
This too shall pass, but the work you are engaged with will not wait.
The repercussions of losing sight of the bigger picture can be catastrophic, and our grieving process must be faced in a patient and grounded — albeit emotionally honest — manner.
The feeling of the obliteration of the world as we know it — in one way or another — is directly at odds with the continuity and maintenance of said world. Illusions can cloud reality, and feelings can act as magnifying glasses capable of eradicating all sense of perspective.
Much like Schrödinger’s cat, our world can both be dead and alive simultaneously.
On the one hand, relationships, especially lengthy ones, involve the intricacies of families, routines, joint responsibilities, friendships, and the enveloping presence of a consistent life partner (for better or worse).
This means there is a certain, and very material, reality that manufactured the world around us: The people we meet, the things we do, the things we think, the places we go, and the ongoing sharing of personal information with one person who intimately knows your trajectory as an individual (at least) since you first agreed upon such social and emotional contract.
All of that is indubitably gone.
Regardless of the process or causes that led you there, once the contract is no longer in place but your emotional muscle memory is still accustomed to the movements of shared life without context or need, a world has been obliterated.
On the other hand, the work you have been engaged with, the responsibilities you pledged to follow-through, and the monument to individual life you have built are still there.
Yes, your house might have crumbled, but the city still stands.
As such, for all the energy and focus your pain is demanding from you, you must find the strength to take a step back and ask: “Is this going to make sense in six months’ time? When I will, for better or worse, fell inherently different?”.
Picture yourself in a museum, someone took you there blindfolded and by surprise. After carefully placing you in a particular spot, a few centimetres from a colossal, wall-sized painting, the person removes the blindfold.
It is one of those borderline clichéd, religiously themed, paintings. Your eyes contemplate nothing but flames, tumbling buildings, mutilated bodies and deformed expressions of people, animals and demons alike.
Your reality is what you see, and removing the blindfold induces you into the error of believing that the conditioned perspective is the painting itself.
Upon processing the initial shock, you are allowed to think beyond the painting: your surroundings, your context. You realise (despite the painting’s depictions) you are free to take one, or several, steps back.
And that itself is the only thing that matters.
Whether the full painting depicts more death and destruction, some form of heaven or paradise, or just a bunch of random shapes and colours attached to an ugly frame, is beyond the point.
Not knowing until you take a step back is the point. Ultimately, acknowledging that the present moment does not come close to a definitive representation of life, is also the point.
There were things you wanted to do, work, build, or become in parallel with the relationship that caused the destruction of your personal world.
That is your ultimate anchor to your reality: the thing that will, depending on the length of the chain, keep you from drifting past a point of no return on what Johnny Cash called the ‘Sea of Heartbreak’.
Take a step back and think not of who you are, but who you want to be.
5- Care for those who care for you
It is impossible to overstate the importance of a solid support network. Not just for you, but for everyone.
Feeling sad, heartbroken, distressed, and overwhelmed are inevitable byproducts of being alive. It is part of the involuntary, implicit, and invisible terms and conditions signed at birth. Life is going to hurt, and for most of us, more often than not. The good news is that the individualist nature of self — regardless of the size of the community around us — means not everyone is hurting the same, for the same reasons, and at the same time.
Once we accept the pain that envelops us during this period of our lives, it becomes somewhat simple to accept another thing: in spite of our pain, we are not inherently incapable of bringing happiness into the lives of those around us.
It is fair, but inaccurate, to mistake the capacity of feeling happiness (very broadly speaking) with the ability to generate it. The sense of gloom brought about by our current situation, mixed with a (justified) feeling of entitlement to be cared for, may induce us into inertia towards those we love.
In other words, I’m going through something catastrophic, therefore it is only natural that people care for me. And because I am currently incapable of feeling good, I am in no position to make others feel good.
At worse, this illusion leads us into further isolation, at best it can deprive us of agency over our own actions towards the ones we love, which is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing.
Caring for those who are there for us (as best as we humanely can), is the first step in generating the goodness in the world we feel robbed of. We may have lost a lot in this process, but that void cannot be replaced with a renewed indifference towards the wellbeing of those around us.
Putting a smile on someone’s face, or just producing a small gesture that can brighten up their day, may prove to be the foundations of the new world we are building for ourselves. Acknowledging our limitations also implies understanding where they end and what tools we have left at our disposal.
By caring for those who care for us we are reasserting our own self-worth, and proving beyond reasonable doubt we are still fully-functioning and intact human beings — not hostages to our pain.
We can rebuild our world based on love.
6- Just let it bleed
Much like poison or a drug, the remnants of a past life will hurt, and take some time to leave our system.
The distress is all in the context: One day you are person A, with person B, in context C; The next you are still person A, minus B and C. This disorienting and abysmal contextual change is as violent as removing a fish from water, leaving it to adapt in record time or die.
Make sure to let your bad days, painful ways, and mistakes run through you like poison leaving your body. Remain conscious, but fend off any long-lasting judgments. The grieving process does not define you any more than a cocoon defines the butterfly. Whether you want it or like it, you are incubating your future self in an all-enveloping hurt that will harden your outer shell, and further develop your inner self.
How effective or transformative this process will be depends how we face it, what tools are at our disposal, and what environmental factors surround us — keyword being ‘Process’.
A transformative and traumatic ongoing event does have the very unfortunate side-effect of reducing one’s existence to the process itself, instead of the things that make us fully functioning and wholesome individuals.
Yes, we are still breathing, and (hopefully) still functional enough to avoid vegetative states, but this is not the same as being our true selves. The things that make us who we are exist beyond survival, and when poisoned, hurting, and attempting to rebuild the ruins of a collapsed world, very little room is left for anything but survival.
Make sure to understand there is very little ‘You’ in the ‘Process’, even though the ‘Process’ is all you can be for now.
The reason why you are here, right now, is because nothing lasts forever, and so, the poison and the process will also progressively allow for a renewed individual to emerge, fully capable of seeing, thinking, and feeling a new world.
The Summary
If you somehow found the time and patience to read through this lengthy rambling, I really hope my own painful process helped you in any shape or form. There are no shortcuts to transformative hurt, and everyone will have their own timing and toolkits to deal with it in whatever way they feel, and think, will serve them best.
If there had to be a summarised list of catchy phrases (albeit overly simplified), to summarise the lessons outlined, these would be:
1 Understanding, not Conformity.
2 Prioritization, not Cessation.
3 Communication, not Exposure.
4 Vision, not Illusion.
5 Selflessness, not Naivety.
6 Acceptance, not Inertia.
Just know that whoever you are, wherever you are, and whenever you are, I am rooting for you.
You got this!
References & further reading:
Canela, R. A. (2021), “Straight Through my Heart”, VCU Theses and Dissertations, VCU University Archives. [Accessed Online: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6561/]
Eyetsemitan, F. (1998), “Stifled Grief in the Workplace”, Death Studies, 22:5, 469–479. [Accessed Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F074811898201461]
Verhoef, H.P. (2013), “The effect of dissolved workplace romances on the psychosocial functioning and productivity of involved employees”, Theses and Dissertations (Social Work and Criminology), Theses and Dissertations (University of Pretoria). [Accessed Online: https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/41502]
