a 28-step guide to heartbreak 💔

You can seek validation that you are loveable from others your entire life, but it will never fill the gaping hole that tells you that you are unlovable and not enough.

Last weekend I went to London to take care of my friend’s teenager while she was away on a work trip. The boy was still at school and my friend was already gone so I was met at the door by her lodger.

Twenty-six — a singer-songwriter with wild dark curls, a childish figure and a thoughtful nature — she introduced herself as Victoria.

“I’m Vienda”, I smiled in response kicking my shoes off and following her into the living room. We sat down and I politely asked her how she was.

Without taking a breath she dove into a 40-minute detailing of her recent heartbreak.

"I know, you are going through hell right now. You are sad, confused, angry, depressed, numb. You go from sad to angry then to numb and then a combination of them all. It is totally normal to feel what you are feeling and to even be confused about what you are feeling right now.”

She continued sharing a verbal waterfall of thoughts and feelings to which I offered consoling sounds for a while, tears in her eyes, staring down at her shoelaces, unsure of what to do with herself.

“I ended a relationship myself last week. It was only a short one but endings are never easy. Here’s what I know about healing heartbreak.”

Inviting her for a walk around Hampstead Heath, a city-centre wilderness in the middle of London — a place that offered me solace in many of my own rock bottoms — I told her these truths.