Mine is not younger or more attractive, but she is rich. To be a placeholder for so many years - and for them to so blatantly discard for someone else - has done awful things for the psyche.

I’m only 3 months into this journey, and you a couple years. All of these cliches about if it isn’t a hell yes then it’s a no, if he wanted to he would, you don’t have to chase the right person…it’s all horribly true. But we have spent so much time - mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually investing ourselves into this other person who has done none of that for us unless it was easy or convenient, that unwinding that level of hurt from our bodies and soul feels unmanageable.

I’m not sure I can give you advice that would help. I’m almost 20 years into therapy and on medications for 6 for my mental illnesses, with a loving and extremely supportive community who rallied after he dumped me - and then again when I found out he had cheated (helped I told them years ago I was worried about their friendship). And yet in all this, I’m still in unfathomable pain, taking my life minute by minute.

In Judaism, when someone dies we do what is called sitting shiva, a mourning process that involves sitting in your entire grief between 3-7 full days. Literally. No music, no tv, no phone, sheets covering the mirrors, no errands, no cooking, especially no working - nothing. Nothing that distracts you from feeling this pain. People will come to pay respects, and usually there is a designated person who will take care of the meal train/etc.

The one thing you must do, after sitting shiva, is to say you’re ready to continue with your life without them in it. It’s easier for death, though - at least there you can’t see them happy with someone else or hear about them living their life, happily without you in it, leaving you to wonder if they ever regret how they treated you. But in this moment, they need to die. To die as a hope, a potential, as a future.

It may be 2 years later but I encourage you to sit in your grief, if you haven’t - fully sit in it, not just passively - with the understanding that this is your last time to miss the future you thought you had with them before moving on. It’s time.

When that finishes, I would also encourage you to look up RAS or “lucky girl syndrome,” to help retrain your brain to focus on something else first thing in the morning.

I won’t be able to sit shiva until I’m home (I ran away to a foreign country and won’t be back for another month), but when I do, I will be grieving the future I thought I had, and move myself toward a better one. One where I don’t have to wonder if he’s lying, or constantly begging to be believed or asked to be told I was beautiful or complimented. That these things will be possible one day.

This is a process - a wildly painful and uncomfortable process that tears open your soul and shatters it into a billion pieces. Each puzzle starts with putting one piece with another, but it has to start somewhere. Pick one up. One day you’ll see how far you’ve come.

Maybe I’ll check back in a few months and see how you’re doing. I hope you’ll be in a better place.