Together 5 years, broken up abruptly. She told me she saw me better as a friend and I believed her, but it turned out she was slowly growing a connection with her boss. Found out that they had sex a week after our breakup. Ouch.

I was looking everywhere for answers, from books to Google, to friends, to hobbies, you name it. I kept driving by our apartment on my breaks to see if she was there or not, checking my phone every 5 minutes to see if she replied or texted me back, and was just overall in a terrible mental state. Extremely bitter. Numb.

I woke up one morning and decided enough was enough and did what I do best. I analyzed what was causing so much pain to linger, why I felt this way, and how I can create a system to move forward. These are the ways I've started to find peace.

1. Do not, under any circumstances, reach out to them. If they broke your heart, wronged you, or simply walked away, realize that this is not something that somebody who genuinely loves you would do. You need to see yourself as your best friend who just went through a breakup. What advice would you give your best friend? To keep hanging on? To reach out and tell them you miss them? I would hope not. No contact works for a reason, no matter how much you want to reach out and pour your heart out. DONT. It restarts the healing process all over again. Which leads me to my next point:

2. Become best friends with pen and paper. JOURNAL JOURNAL JOURNAL. There is so much power in writing. The moment you start feeling any type of way about them, good and bad, you need to write about it. How much you miss them, hate them, how much you miss their body, write in detail your memories, the way they made you feel, how hard the breakup has been. There's no wrong way to do this. As long as you're writing words on paper about how you feel, you're releasing. If you feel all of this energy and emotions and don't channel it into anything, they fester inside you and cause bitterness and loss of self. Get extremely comfortable reaching for your notebook. You'll slowly find that over time you won't be writing about them as much, if at all. You'll see how your focus has slowly changed onto other things, other thoughts, other people. You can go back and reread what you've written and see how much progress you've made. This is vital to the process.

3. Start 1 new hobby that has nothing to do with them. This helps train your brain to create new neural pathways that don't include them. You might think about them while you're doing it, and that's completely okay, but the fact you are doing it on your own and are giving your brain to create new memories and ideas DETACHED from them is where the gravy is at. You don't even have to love the hobby, just something to pass the time and allow your brain to prove to itself that you can do new things by yourself. Boxing, working out, model trains, dancing, yoga, doesn't matter what it is. Just do something new.

4. Remove all things that bring up all negative energy involving them. That teddy bear they bought you? Donated. That blanket that still smells like them? Donated. The only exceptions to this are things that make you see them fondly. I personally have a few gifts from my ex that whenever I look at them, they make me see all of the great memories we created together and don't make me feel sad about how things ended. If it so much as makes you begin to miss them or feel upset, you need to remove it from your domain. Store it if you have to, but get it out of sight.

5. Arguably the most important... Shadow work, shadow work, shadow work. You CANNOT let your emotions overcome the reality of what happened. If your relationship was anything like mine, there were so many beautiful memories and amazing experiences had together, and you need to train your brain to look back on that fondly and with happiness. Realize the fact that so many people might never get to experience the love you did. Realize that you would not be the person you are today if this person didn't cross paths with you. We are very greedy and emotional creatures. We beat ourselves up so badly because we thought we would have this love forever and became so attached to the idea of infinity. Life does not work this way unfortunately. You need to take a step back and look at things as an observer, and realize how beautiful and amazing those times were, and now that it's gone, how much grit and wisdom you have. Now you know what true love feels like, what it shouldn't feel like, what you expect in a future partner, etc. No matter which way you cut it, this heartbreak you're going through is GOOD, because of how much has come of it.

Take this all with a grain of salt because everybodys circumstances and stories are all different, but I hope you take this advice and lessons I've learned and apply it to your own life in one way or another.

At the end of the day, always remember, life goes on.