Chances are in the year 2016 you have experienced heartbreak. Chances are if you've experienced heartbreak, you've lost a little piece of yourself. Now while it's natural, it can lead to some very dangerous habits. The worst of all being forgetting how to love. For me, it started slowly. The world around me was glass, and I was a sledgehammer. Every piece I shattered, including my own, felt like a sweet symphony of erasing shards that could haunt me one day.

When all you know gets turned on its head, it's easy to become a monster. Now I'm not condoning this behavior, just the opposite actually. Why is it so easy, though? Drinking, smoking, or sleeping away your problems makes them seem like darkness when a light switched is flipped. They disappear. This lifestyle of partying until you feel nothing, so your feelings match your actions, I believe is the single greatest threat to relationships we have ever created. It wasn't until I was sitting alone at 3 in the morning with nothing but a half-empty bottle of crappy whisky that I realized something. Something important. I had spent so much time trying to love OTHER people the way I THOUGHT they needed to be loved that I forgot how to love myself. Years of playing the hero lead me to this point. Maybe you've had this conversation with yourself; maybe you never will. I wish for the latter. These are the pathways to forgetting how to love. Now let me share some other ways I've seen people forget to use their hearts.

Tinder, you know that dating app? I've seen successful relationships from online dating sites. However, I've also noticed the death of an "outdated practice" where you go out and look a person in the face; where you meet them by mistake, the most beautiful of mistakes. In line at a grocery store, a park, the library? Remember these places have people? I've watched something disturbing to me. With dating at our fingertips, we've lost sight of those we have at arms length. Now without digressing too hard, I'm going to come back around. A little while back I had my heart broken, and my pals made me one of those online profiles with the cheesiest of bios. I believe it said, "Let's talk over a cup of coffee sometime". I hate coffee. I did notice something, however. Most people were just getting out of relationships. Just getting over heartbreaks, or avoiding bad relationships and using it as a medium to cheat on their bad partner. It seems to me a lot of us are forgetting what true 'redundancy' is.

Don't we all want to feel the warmth of someone's care? One night stands are normal for my age group. Well, what happens when the night is over? Or the next one? The one after that? It can spiral to you sitting alone at three am with that nasty whisky I was speaking about. After already being hurt by another person, forgetting what love means, you can become your own worst enemy. Often times we do. I know first hand, as I expressed earlier, that it felt good to be bad at first. Burning bridges. Years of being the good guy and then letting the beast out of the cage seem like fun right? Wrong.

Too many people that I love, I pushed away, in any way I could, in any direction they would leave. That late night bourbon was my best friend. Then something happened. Someone who had gone through a heartbreak walked into my darkness. He reached his hand down. His name is Enio. He told me we were going to take this pain, and use it. It leads me to a studio, away from the bad decisions, making an album. I had put music on the backburner for so long that I had forgotten how much I loved it. How much it made ME love ME. I put it down to give who I thought was my future wife a life that wasn't hectic. Again with the behavior that becomes selflessly selfish. Now a lot of times, people consider a catalyst as something bad. The beginning of a change. At first, it was. Now I want to be my own catalyst. I want to love myself fully before I ever try to love someone again.

The reason my relationship didn't work was because of a vicious cycle of anxiety and complacency due to ME NOT LOVING ME. If I couldn't love me, how could anyone else? It probably felt selfish to her. After the dust cleared, I'm glad it happened now. I picked up the habit of not loving myself, but you can stop bad habits. Now I will never forget to love me again. In turn, I will never love anyone else incorrectly again. I hope if you're in that stage where shattering your life feels like the right thing to do, you read this and understand something. Even though you're scared, you're stronger than you'll ever know. When you sit alone, remember how to love you; remember you matter. Remember your goals, dreams, and feelings are just as important as everyone else's. You're human for a reason. Act like it.