Don’t ever let anyone define you as a person. This sounds like such an “easy” thing to remember yet when we are experiencing heartbreak, at least in my experience, we often allow the experience to change the way we view ourselves.

It is easy to believe you are hard to love or not worth someone’s time. It truly depends on what your insecurities are because usually our preexisting insecurities are enhanced by heartbreak. For instance, you might start disliking the way you look or judging yourself for the way you love. For me, it has always been a mixture of both. Yet I am trying to learn that just because one single person decides that I am not meant for them, it should not lower my value as a person. You are valuable regardless of who is estimating your worth.

Have you heard the phrase “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”? Well, this does not apply to your own personal beauty. You need to learn that regardless of whether someone considers you special or not, it does change your value. You are special. You are worth loving. You are worth everything you give out to the wrong people. One day someone will give it back to you, I promise.

Everything happens for a reason. Yes, another cliche. However, this is a cliche that I live by. In the midst of the chaos, I often forget to look at the bigger picture, but once I allow enough to time to pass, I begin to understand that there are reasons (even if I am not yet sure of what they are) why things turned out the way they did.

In other words– and I know this can be hard to do, try not to let your overwhelming heartbreak cloud your view. Understand the situation from an objective perspective. Maybe in the back of your mind you can find possible reasons why things didn’t work out, hold onto those. Hold onto those reasons even if they might not be the right ones and even if you would have still wanted things to be differently. You will come up with a trillion “but I would have made it work.” Yes, you would have but it doesn’t mean it was right for you. Give it time, soon you will understand why it didn’t work out.

Consider other situations in which you haven’t gotten what you thought you wanted and how that might have worked out for the better.

Sometimes love isn’t enough. I thought about this for a long time. I said this more often than I should have because I never believed it, but I guess it’s true. Sometimes loving someone is not enough to make them stay. Sometimes just because you love someone, you might still be able to realize that you are better off without them.

This realization comes with time. At first, it seems like you had the power to solve it because if you loved them, then why didn’t they stay? Yet that thought process will always make you feel like you had the power so you are responsible. But you aren’t. You loved them, and maybe they loved you, but sometimes love isn’t enough. There might have been little hints throughout the relationship that looking back, they were signs that maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

Whatever you do, do not blame yourself– for not being enough, for not doing enough, for not staying for a little bit longer. Everything you did, you did with love. That’s all that matters.