I Broke My Own Damn Heart Trying To Be Someone I’m Not

We see heartbreak depicted all the time in various forms. Whether it’s from a ballad by Beyoncé, in the season finale of The Bachelor (because not everyone can get the final rose. Sorry Caila, girl!), or getting the TL;DR version by a friend who cries to you via Facetime, we all have an idea of what heartbreak is, and like that nasty stomach bug that has been going around… nobody wants that bad Juju rubbing off on them.

The one constant thing about its depiction, however, is the fact that heartbreak is always shown as something that happens to someone. We always see that other people are responsible for breaking your heart (ie. Chuck and Blair – Season 1-6), but what do you do when you’re the asshole, when you’re the one to break your own heart? What do you do when the person you need to get away from is yourself?

Well, just like any other heartbreak, the pain is gut wrenching, emotionally exhausting, and an absolute bitch to deal with. That punch in the stomach, I feel like shit feeling, is second nature to me. Though I always anticipated heartbreak, I never imagined that I would be the person responsible for my very own. If I were Taylor Swift would I have had to grab my guitar and sing a song about how crappy I am? Imagine being Taylor Swift’s Joe Jonas, John Mayer AND Harry Styles… It is not a good feeling!

Most people reading this would probably call me dramatic (I can admit, I am), while others are probably curious. What did I do that was so bad? That’s the thing. It was not just a single moment, rather it was a collection of moments:

Times in which I did not give something I should have my best effort,
Times in which I didn’t speak up for someone in need,
Times when unfortunately, I was pretending to be someone I am not! (This last one may have been okay for Hannah Montana, but she had good reasons… I don’t.)

While I appeared to be happy on the outside, this mask, this overly complicated facade, destroyed me, breaking my heart at every turn.

Here I was, the very girl that I hated. The girl I promised myself I would never be… laughing at jokes that weren’t funny, hanging out with people who I shared no common interests with, valuing money over my passions, swiping left and right for love or whatever…. Fuck that! Life is too short to pursue all of these lackluster things! I should have wanted more for myself, and yet, here I was… Just another modern day hypocrite, judging others for being fake, when I was the most plastic of them all. I was Cady fucking Heron!

Like Cady, I thought it was so cool at first, but I later realized it wasn’t worth it. None of it! So what if I got to go to the cool parties? So what if I was able to get double-digit likes on my Insta with a Drake caption? It wasn’t authentic, because it wasn’t me… because those parties I went to involved shit food and conversations… because those “naturally flawless” Instagram photos took about eight tries and two editing apps to make… because those captions people would say were “fire” were rubbish… (Heck, I don’t even listen to Drake! )

One day I finally snapped. I realized I broke my own damn heart, and it sucked! Channeling my inner Mulan I woke up and asked myself, who is that girl, and is this who you want to be? The girl who hates parties but goes just because it is something MTV said I was supposed to like? The girl who splurges entirely too much on clothes she can’t afford, just to keep up with the Kardashians? The girl who pretends to have it all figured out, when in reality she’s just getting started?

I didn’t want to be that girl. I wanted to be, well, me. A girl who is driven, and funny, not consumed by technology, and certainly not a girl who judges her self-worth by how many retweets she gets. I wanted to be the girl who is comfortable turning down an invitation, because she doesn’t care about the scrutiny she may get from her part-time friends. I want to be the girl who is comfortable in her own skin. And so that’s who I chose to be. I no longer was blinded by all the glitz and the glam. If I didn’t want to go somewhere, I simply didn’t go, and if I was having a good time, I didn’t feel the need to Snapchat every single moment (well… not as much as before). I was unapologetically me, living in my truth. And yes, I may have lost a lot of people along the way, but that’s okay, because in the end I found someone else a bit more important… myself.