Breaking up with 'the plan' 💔

on being newly single at 30...

Over the past few years, I’ve said becoming newly single at 30 would be my biggest fear.

I had it all mapped out in my head; settle down, buy a house together, get a little dog, have a baby, and maybe even get married at some point.

I was so sure going into my thirties would be milestone after milestone. Like checking off a tick-list of goals. I had no doubts that me and my ex would stay together, and build that life. I couldn’t imagine us breaking up. Now looking back, I think I was a bit smug about it all. I’d landed on my feet. Like I knew I would.

Last year, I remembered drinking a coffee in the park with my ex. We spoke about his friend who had decided he didn’t want kids, but his long-term girlfriend did.

‘He better hurry up and tell her!’ I said. ‘She needs to know soon. She really doesn’t have much time to start over again if she wants kids.’

Ha! I see the irony in all of this now. I was so blissfully unaware to what was waiting for me only a few months later. Now here I am, starting over.

What’s the saying? Tell God your plans and he will laugh. Yeah, well, he’s definitely laughing at me right now.

There is something so terrifying about everything being flipped on its head. Everything you once knew, gone. Plans you made, wiped out. Your visions of the future, now blank.

What remains instead is a big empty space. There’s a physical space next to me in bed these days. But it’s not only that, it’s an emptiness where my future was. There’s nothing there now. I have no pictures in my head of how it might look moving forward yet. It’s scary; the not knowing. The uncertainty of it all.

On good days, the freedom feels exciting - who knows what’s waiting around the corner for me! But on days like today, it feels like having the rug pulled from under me and suddenly I’m on shaky ground. I guess that is just going to be the ebb and flow of this transitional period, while everything is working itself out.

I’m okay with that. I just need to feel the feelings and let them flow through me. And maybe sob in another coffee shop with a friend (I’m racking up quite the tally these days).

If you’re going through a break-up right now, or perhaps you’ve landed in a position you weren’t quite anticipating. A position that you hadn’t planned for; that caught you by surprise and feels overwhelmingly scary…

Well then, I’m not going to pretend like I have all the answers or some magical words of wisdom for you. But what I do know, and what’s working for me on days like this is:

Just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other is enough for now.

The rest can come later. You don’t need devise some master plan for what’s next. You don’t need to keep yourself up all night trying to figure out the answers. Panicking and trying to somehow make everything okay again is not going to work this time.

No, now is the time to surrender and let things unfold, gently.

After all, none of us are ever really in control. So maybe we should take this as a lesson; that plans can never really be plans anyway, they are more like guesses. And sometimes those guesses can be wrong.

Life is unpredictable. Things happen that we can’t control, and we just have to learn to ride the waves.

As soon as you start to let go… maybe, just maybe, something better might fall into place.

But in the meantime, we have each other.

Sending lots of love.

ps. the song I attached might help.

x