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Anyone can break our heart, cause us pain, hurt our feelings. But there is usually someone in our lives, that someone special, who holds a very unique heartbreaking place. Maybe they broke our hearts once at the beginning of our emotional journey, when we were young and raw. Maybe we took a second chance and allowed them to break it twice. Maybe we just let them do it multiple times across the years. A history of small daily jolts on your body’s engine that made the wounds deeper and eventually lead to a slicing of your heart in half. This is what a heartbreak feels like, a sharp stab. If we experience it multiple times, there is shredding of the halves into small pieces. Do the pieces bleed? Can all the pieces still beat, pulse individually? Can they survive this emotional butchery?

Our immune system helps the body go through healing. There is a magical force within us that says life must go on, let’s repair. Bones take a few months to heal, tissues a little less. How long does a broken heart take? Healing a heartbreak is a very personal affair but somehow certain songs, places, words and images stir up a very similar pain in a lot of us. What about a butchered heart? Can it be healed? A butchered heart does not need even small triggers to bleed. When we let the tears join the flow, our soul becomes a drought. The absence of joy becomes a sensation in our bodies. The sensation of void.  The hurt takes away our vital energy, we feel depleted. We often think the pain will last forever. And maybe it will. If love can last forever then why not sorrow?

The butchery of a heartbreak is very familiar to me. It’s that broken trust, the violation of my vulnerability, it’s the commodity that I use to write and to connect with others butchered. It is also a familiar practice that sometimes I take pride in. There is sadistic pleasure in saying: “I broke someone’s heart”. Because one cannot deny that there exists a pleasure in giving pain, specially for those who have intensely felt powerless. Weren’t they asking for it, when the butchered offered their entire selves to another. The signs are always present but noticed only post-butchery. Was it a form of subconscious consent, if such a thing exists? Who is responsible for that, the butcher or the heart lying bare, next to a cleaver?

Vulnerability, the opening of the heart, holds power and invites risk. How powerful and energetic do we feel when we connect to someone deeply? Vulnerability is fearless of pain and hurt. It is wishful and inattentive of risk. Giving your heart is something exciting that turns devastating as power moves from curiosity and connection towards shame and fear. The shame of rejection and abandonment, slice away your heart while all your fears come true. How poetic is the butchery of a heartbreak. Makes good content indeed.

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