ART AND LIFE The pain and agony of breaking the heart of someone you once loved like crazy

We often hear about heartbreak from those mercilessly dumped by the “one” and left for dead on the side of the proverbial highway of love. Their stories seem to be everywhere; there’s no lack of verbiage surrounding the disappointments of having your heart broken because someone didn’t want you anymore. The same story is sung over and over like a bad Top 40 radio jam. But what about the rest of us? What about the ones who actually do the breaking up? Where are our stories? We’re the ones who faced a serious dilemma, a crossroads in our lives and ultimately had to make a decision. We’re the ones who’ve fallen out of love. We’re the villains of the tales of horror, the “Maleficents,” the dragons, the trolls. But ours is a different type of tragedy. Falling out of love is no easy experience. We don’t do it on purpose, and we don’t control it. Our hearts don’t always align with the visions we have for our lives; emotions aren’t always vessels of simple manipulation and, try as we might, we cannot make passionate love exist where it does not. Though being broken up with might break your heart, doing the actual breaking just might be the hardest thing of all. When it’s the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end starts slowly, almost unnoticeably at first. Falling out of love is a gradual process; it builds like a snowball rolling down a hill. At first, it’s just a pang of the heart, a strange feeling of distance, like your partner is covered in a kind of film. It’s like you aren’t there, like you’re simply a fading shadow. You don’t want to leave your partner’s arms, but you want nothing more than to be away from his or her arms either. You brush it off, tell yourself it’s nothing; it’s just a phase. This is your love, the person you can’t live without, the one thing that will always remain constant in your life because your heart is wrapped, evermore, around his or hers. But slowly, one by one, things begin to unravel. Days with them begin to feel like weeks. The sound of their voice eats at you like bacteria. You find yourself spending more and more time alone. Suddenly, you want your space. If you had your way, you’d have space for all eternity. Every moment you spend with your partner feels forced and unnatural, so you spend more time alone because it makes you feel less guilty. If you don’t spend time with your partner, you don’t feel as sad — and when you do spend time with him or her, it’s when you feel loneliest. You feel vacant, avoiding his or her eyes because you fear they’ll be able to see the emptiness, the fading love evaporating like dew on summer grass. It slips away so quickly that you try desperately to hold on. The more time you spend reading books in crowded parks or wandering aimlessly through the free sections of museums, the longer you can stave off the complete vacancy of your once endless love. You avoid your partner’s touch. You’ve replaced a once burning passion — a fiery longing — with abstinence. Your partner’s flesh begins to be a source of repulsion for you. You can only bring yourself to be intimate while heavily intoxicated because only then can you bring down the walls you’ve unconsciously built. You feel like an actor in your own life. Your romance is a bad stage performance, and you’re the lead. When he or she goes to kiss you goodbye in the morning, you force yourself to kiss back. Your skin burns when your partner runs a hand over your back the way you used to adore. You say everything he or she wants to hear as if they were scripted lines. These words feel dirty in your mouth and leave a wretched taste. You wonder if your partner can feel the falseness of them, the transparency. You can’t avoid the inevitable. You’ve come to a point where you can no longer take the anxiety of the situation at hand. Your desire to make your partner happy, to avoid hurting him or her, has been outweighed by your survival instincts. You can’t go on feeling this way because you know that in the end you’ll be left with a meaningless, hollow life. Maybe you met someone else, maybe you didn’t, but you’ve been emotionally cheating on him or her with the lies in the forefront of your brain. You can’t stave off this feeling of shame. Your partner begs you to tell him or her what’s wrong. Your heart breaks as the tears stream down both your faces. While you’re hurting him or her with the truth, you’re also hurting yourself. While you’re breaking your partner’s heart, your own heart shatters. You tell the truth because the burden of a lack of love is too great to bear. You want to love this person, you desperately want to love him or her, but you can’t. No one walks away from a breakup unscathed. No one walks away without bruises and scars. We never look at the other side, at the one who’s doing the breaking up. It’s not to hurt the other person on purpose. It’s not to be malicious or callous or unfeeling. In fact, we’re the ones feeling the most. Once love is lost, it’s lost forever. The only thing to do is cry until your tear ducts are empty, scream until your throat is hoarse, lie in bed in the throes of darkness until you feel light again. The only thing left to do is to understand that this is a freedom all on its own and what must be, will be done. Somehow, someway life will go on. – Gigi Engle/EliteDaily

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For parents:

Read this article by azuka of opinions online and decided to share: The dream of every parent is to know that their children/ward is doing well in school by studying well but the act or habit is meant to be instilled...This is his writeup I am among the luckiest fathers on earth. My wife is also among the luckiest mothers. Why? Our children prefer reading to eating. One is nine while the other is seven. Any time they have a novel in their hands, they cannot concentrate on whatever they are doing. I may get angry and reprimand them, but deep inside, I am overjoyed. When our friends see or hear about it, they ask: “How did you do it? I have bought my children all manner of books, but they don’t like to read them.” And the result is that our kids have got the fundamentals of language. They easily know when there is an error in tenses, which is the critical element in the English language. So, when you say something like, “I wish I were there,” you would need to explain to them why “were” should be used for “I” instead of “am” or “was.” In addition, whenever you tell them anything, they think about it, and if it does not sound logical, they ask you questions. So, I am confident that they will not grow up to become adults that will be led by the nose. Whenever they ask us questions about the galaxy, animals or micro organisms, we know we are in trouble. The reason is that they are always reading children’s science books and children’s encyclopaedia as well as watching animal channels and having access to children’s video dictionary. So, the interesting narratives in story books and the fascinating information and pictures in science books made them love to read books. These are complemented by the cartoon and video games they watch. One good thing this does is that it fills a child with stories and information to share with other children when they are together. A child who always has so many stories to tell is usually surrounded by other children who are eager to listen to him or her. That is leadership. Reading for fun is the foundation of reading to pass exams. We were first concerned about making our children love reading. Even though they were performing well in their exams, our target was to first make them love books. We were certain that once that was achieved, topping the class would be a natural follow-up. The best time to make a child love books is when the child is little. Even before the child is able to read, buy nursery books and stories and read them to the child. Even if you can’t read stories to them as often as you can, make sure they have story books with pictures that they can look at and play with. No story is boring for children. Some stories are meant to awaken their imagination, while some are meant to tell them about real people that existed and the feats they achieved as well as real events that happened in history and their implication. Therefore, it does not matter if you tell them stories about the tortoise and the lion, Perseus and Andromeda, Achilles and his heel, Isaiah and the prophets of Baal, King Jaja of Opobo and the English colonialists, Nelson Mandela and Apartheid South Africa, Gani Fawehinmi and Nigerian rulers, Julius Caesar and the Ides of March, or Shylock and his pound of flesh. What matters is that you tell them stories that excite their minds. Most times when I hear, “Daddy, I will not sleep unless you tell me a story,” I find myself in a fix. If I can’t bluff my way out of the conundrum, I look up and down, and if nothing comes to my mind, my eyes would rest on the TV or fan in their room, and a story would start: “Once upon a time, there was a TV named Kadongo.” I would proceed on my story that has no head or tail, pausing to find the next thing to say. Any time I pause, I would hear: “And what happened next?” Most times, just in a matter of minutes, they would have been sent to sleep by my aimless story. I would heave a sigh of relief and tiptoe out of their room. But sometimes I would not be so lucky, for the next morning, I would be asked: “Daddy, so what happened to the TV?” I would be wondering which TV the child was talking about. When I eventually understood what the child was referring to, I would start groping for words like a snail finding its way through thorns, all in a bid to complete my story. But sometimes when I don’t know what story to tell, I tell them that it is their mom’s turn to tell them a story. Even that excuse does not usually guarantee me freedom from them. Two years ago, in addition to running out of stories, I discovered that our children were reading too much of foreign stories like Alice in the Wonderland, Snow White, and Cinderella as well as Enid Blyton’s books. I challenged myself to write 100 original African children’s stories in 100 days. Sadly, I ended up writing only 33 stories, which they devoured in a matter of hours and asked for more. We have since got many Nigerian story books for them. We live in modern times where technology is available to children in different forms: cartoons, video games, computer games, phone games, etc. They need to use these, but the danger in them is that they are addictive and distractive. Children who immerse themselves in them excessively usually feel that books are boring, and these materials can never give the same value that books give. So, what we do is that we limit the hours and periods that our children watch cartoons and play video games. Sometimes, we limit cartoons and video games to weekends or when we are satisfied that they have read books and done all their homework. The rule is that whether we are home or not, our children must take permission before switching on their TV or the central TV for any cartoon or game. I have noticed that a child that reads extensively and watches different types of cartoons, and plays video games has a mind that is loaded with information and ideas. That is a child that begins reasoning early in life, a child that analyses whatever he or she hears, a child that questions things and is not easily deceived. Maybe, some children are naturally built to love reading while some are not, but my experience is that if a child is consciously and systematically introduced to reading early in life, it would be almost impossible for that child not to like learning as an adult... What's your own opinion?

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