October 1, 2026
When you put a man on a pedestal, your whole life begins to revolve around his.
You become so invested in the life you’re building with him that you stop building one with yourself.
You lose touch with friends. You stop working out as much. Your hobbies stop becoming a priority. Before you know it, your schedule revolves around his free time. Your plans include him. Your future includes him. Even the things you once enjoyed alone somehow begin making more sense when he’s there.
Little by little, without realizing it, you stop being the center of your own life.
Then the relationship ends.
And you’re left wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do with yourself.
It’s not just that you miss him. You miss the life that existed around him. You miss having someone to call. Somewhere to go. Something to look forward to.
You grieve plans that never happened and versions of the future that will never exist.
Sometimes, you even mistake that emptiness for proof that you lost the meaning of your life.
But you didn’t.
You outsourced it.
And maybe finding yourself after failed love isn’t really about becoming someone new.
Maybe it’s about returning to the person whose life you stopped tending while you were busy tending to someone else’s.
I’m learning how to tend to mine again.
Calling my friends. Going back to the gym. Picking up the things I stopped doing. Finishing the projects I abandoned. Making plans that don’t depend on anybody else’s availability.
Taking myself places I’ve been waiting for someone else to take me.
And finding out what makes an ordinary Tuesday worth waking up for.
For me, it’s creating.
I have an album to make. Songs to finish. ARTIFACTS to build. Poems to write. Stories to tell. I have music and words and pieces of myself that I haven’t even discovered yet.
The ideas living inside me don’t exist anywhere else yet, and if I don’t make them, they never will.
But meaning isn’t only in what I create.
It’s in the people I love, too.
It’s spending time with my family. Creating new memories with people who are still here. Laughing. Talking. Sitting around doing absolutely nothing important.
It’s realizing that an ordinary day doesn’t need a man standing in the middle of it to mean something.
I’m creating again.
I’m living again.
And maybe that’s what I’ve been returning to all along.
My own life.
I’m learning to build a life so full of things that belong to me that love, when it comes again, has somewhere healthy to live.
Because I still believe in love.
I just don’t believe it should require abandoning myself to have it.
Love should add to my life.
It should not become my entire reason for having one.
So, here’s my reminder to myself, and maybe yours too:
You give meaning to your life.
~ Jane
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