Chapter 1
I got my heart broken at twenty-seven, which is a deeply humiliating age to still be this destructible.
That was the first thing I could not stop thinking about. Not just that I was heartbroken, but that it had hit me this hard. At twenty-seven, I thought I would be smarter than this. More guarded. Less willing to let another person rearrange me so completely.
Instead, I was falling apart in private and calling it a normal week.
Work didn’t stop. It just… faded in importance. Emails stacked up. Deadlines stretched past me like I wasn’t even trying to catch them. I told people I was “a little busy traveling,” which wasn’t a lie. I was always somewhere new. A different city, a different room, a different view outside the window.
But none of it felt new anymore.
The movement, which once felt like freedom, now just felt like nowhere to land.
And then the days started disappearing.
Whole afternoons blurred into nothing. I would lie in bed in unfamiliar rooms—Airbnbs, boutique stays, places I used to be excited about—and stare at my phone without really seeing anything. The curtains stayed half-drawn even in the middle of the day. A cup of chai would sit untouched on the bedside table, going cold slowly, quietly, like everything else.
Hours passed like that—me doing nothing, feeling everything.
I barely ate. Barely slept. Even small things felt heavier than they should have. A text. A shower. Opening my laptop. Existing, honestly.
I tried to outrun it.
Booked another trip. Extended a stay. Changed cities faster than I needed to. As if a new place might interrupt the feeling.
It didn’t.
The quiet followed me everywhere.
And then there was Instagram, which felt like a personal attack.
Every time I opened it, someone was getting engaged, married, proposed to, loved out loud. Soft photos. Stupid captions. Men who seemed certain. Men who chose.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in oversized clothes in yet another temporary room, emotionally bankrupt, trying to understand how I had become the kind of girl who could be reduced to this.
That was the part that really scared me.
Not just the sadness. Not even the heartbreak. But how unfamiliar I felt to myself inside it. Like somewhere along the way, I had disappeared and left behind this tired, hollow version of me to deal with the aftermath.
I wasn’t like this before.I wasn’t this dependent.I wasn’t this… affected.
At least, I didn’t think I was.
But maybe I had just never been tested like this.
Maybe it’s easy to believe you’re emotionally stable when nothing has ever asked you not to be.
I told myself it was just a breakup.
People go through breakups all the time. People move on. People don’t let it derail their entire sense of self.
So why did it feel like something much bigger had broken?
Why did it feel like I wasn’t just grieving him… but questioning myself?
I tried to make it smaller.
Tried to reduce it to something manageable. Timing. Distance. Different paths. The kind of things people say when they don’t want to look too closely.
But the truth kept sitting there, quiet and heavy.
At twenty-seven, I did not expect to be here.
Not like this. Not this undone. Not this unsure of myself.
But I was.
Heartbroken. Ashamed. And slowly starting to realize that losing him was one thing.
Losing myself with it… was the part I didn’t know how to come back from.
