mulberryshoots

Who doesn’t have heartache over something? It could have happened to us when we were children, during high school or college, relationships that once were the end-all and be-all, only to fall apart. There are as many kinds of heartache as there are people, it seems.

Often, it occurs when we have something in mind or our perception of a person’s qualities that were mistaken or idealized rather than real. Sometimes it takes years, decades even, before the denial wears away and you see the person for whom he or she really is, or has become. And you ask yourself, “who is this?” rather than “what happened?” Sometimes heartaches are true and real. Others, not so much. Disillusionment is really self-inflicted heartache, you might say.

This post is inspired by an article about older people, in their eighties even, who have begun talking to therapists for the first time. As the population grows older and the older keep living, the prospect of living for another ten or fifteen years in old age shouldering anxiety, long-standing depression or heartache doesn’t seem like a very sensible thing to keep doing. Some even say they wish they had started finding new attitudes about their past and their lives earlier.

One said, “Everybody has a certain amount of heartache in life–it’s how you handle the heartache that is the essential core of your life….I found that my attitude was important and I had to reinforce positive things all the time.”

Ruminating about this, it seems to me that heartache can arise from the aspect of “blame.” Either you blame others or you blame yourself for something that happened long ago that you feel bad about. Blaming doesn’t really alleviate heartache, it just reinforces its presence. I’m all for not having heartache around. There’s enough to preoccupy us each and every day without it.

So here’s the article about “A load off their minds”.

And here’s to clearing out our own closets of heartache.