Sura 11
Sometimes, the Person You Need to Find Is Yourself
At the end of the day, I believe that one of the greatest mistakes we make during emotional breakdowns is trying to recover ourselves through other people before we have taken the time to understand what we are going through.
We lose someone, and we think we need them back to become whole again.
When we cannot get them back, we look for someone else to make us feel whole.
And when that person cannot give us what we need, or when we discover that what we thought we needed was only temporary comfort, we find ourselves breaking all over again.
But what if the answer is not always to find another person?
What if, sometimes, the answer is to find ourselves?
To understand why we are hurting. To accept what happened. To acknowledge our mistakes without allowing regret to destroy us. To recognize the difference between what we want and what we truly need. To learn how to receive love without becoming dependent on it for our entire sense of worth.
To understand that other people can support us, but they cannot live our lives for us.
To understand that someone can be important to us without being responsible for putting every broken piece of us back together.
And to understand that healing does not always mean getting back what we lost.
Sometimes, healing means becoming someone who no longer needs to repeat the same mistakes.
Sometimes, it means learning to walk away from what continues to hurt us.
Sometimes, it means accepting that the person we love has chosen a different path.
And sometimes, it means looking at ourselves honestly and deciding that, regardless of what happened, we will not allow this experience to make us worse human beings.
We will learn. We will grow. We will become more thoughtful in how we love, more responsible in how we act, and more compassionate in how we treat others.
Because the goal is not simply to stop hurting.
The goal is to learn something from the pain.
You may lose a relationship and gain wisdom. You may lose someone you love and discover weaknesses in yourself that you never knew existed. You may regret your actions and use that regret to become a better person.
And even when you cannot recover the relationship, you can still recover your sense of direction.
You may lose a person, but find yourself.
Finding yourself does not mean that the pain will disappear overnight. It does not mean that you will never miss the person you lost. It means that you can begin to understand that the person who left may have been part of your life, but they do not have to be the only path toward your happiness.
You can appreciate the people who help you. You can be grateful for the people who listen to you. You can love deeply, build meaningful relationships, and allow others to be part of your journey.
But you must also learn to stand with yourself.
Because when everything seems to be falling apart, the first question should not always be, "Who can I find to put me back together?"
Sometimes, the better question is, "What do I need to understand, change, or accept so that I can begin putting myself back together?"
When you begin asking that question honestly, you may discover that the peace you were desperately searching for in other people begins with the work you do within yourself, the wisdom you gain from your experiences, the support you accept from those who genuinely care, and the strength you find in God.
Not every loss will make you better automatically. Not every painful experience has to be romanticized. Some experiences simply hurt, and healing takes time.
But you can choose what you learn from them. And that choice can change the direction of your life.
Before you close these pages, I want you to think about something. Throughout this book, we have talked about the pain other people can cause us, the choices we make when we are hurting, and how those choices can either help us heal or keep us trapped in our pain. So, I want to leave you with one question. Not to answer for me, but to think about honestly, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
Who is hurting you more: other people, or yourself?