Perhaps we need to be broken first before we can finally become whole.

Painful love is the worst kind of heartbreak. It’s the one we had such high hopes for, the one we gambled everything for—only to find it was a bet that would never be won.

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So we break into a million small pieces of ourselves and wonder how we could have gotten it so wrong.

We make mistakes in love.

We choose people based on the lessons that our souls need to learn without realizing that it’s usually those difficult lessons we need to experience the most.

We can’t be changed by ease and we can’t have our minds broken open by the mundane—instead it can only happen when we are left with nothing but ourselves and our regrets.

Maybe there is no such thing as a mistake if we indeed needed it to learn more about who we are and how we love, but still there are those loves we wish we could rewind and just take back. The ones whose endings were too painful for us to want to permanently claim as part of our history.

The thing is, we need that big mistake to help propel us toward our ultimate life.

We need to be broken in order to find out how we want to put ourselves back together.

Often times the biggest mistake of our lives is a relationship that we should have walked away from the minute it began—or at the very least should have let go of long before we actually did, and way before it all went downhill.

But we didn’t, and it’s not because that love was meant to be, but because without it we might never have realized the life we were truly meant to live.

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We always have the choice to stay in a relationship that is a constant battle of wills and ideals. Yet, no matter how many times we hope it will end differently, or just maybe work this time around—it never does.

This is because it’s not meant to.

Our mistake is meant to end, usually bitterly, and often catastrophically. Its purpose is to rock us to our core and challenge our very self and our beliefs about love.

We are meant to question what went wrong, and to wonder what love really means to us. This isn’t an overnight process , but one that we need to take the time to immerse ourselves in until we no longer hide from the truth that our hearts whisper.

It’s a state of healing that lets us know that we can send someone our love, but we can also walk away with our heads high and our faith strong knowing that we haven’t messed up the best thing we ever had.

Because the best version of our life is out there waiting for us and when we meet there will be no question about why we needed to have our hearts broken in the way we did.

Because all along they were only leading us to this—a life that was created just for us, and somehow through the meandering paths that life takes, ended up not being perfect, but still being perfect for us.

The life we are waiting for only comes when we are ready for it. When we have broken apart who we thought we should be and instead embraced who we are. The things and people that will make up this life only appears when we have gained the ability to believe that we deserve what we want.

We will allow ourselves to gaze past the superficial and instead appreciate the energy that these people and things bring into our lives, reveling in the new-found depths of connection that we are experiencing.

The life we are meant to live won’t look or feel like anything we’ve ever experienced. The friends and love affairs we are supposed to experience might come softly, or it might even enter as a wrecking ball. It might be a city you never thought about moving to, a kid you never thought you wanted, or a partner that is the opposite of what you imagined and friends you would have never met if it wasnt for your mistake. But, it will all come together and present you with a life that is beyond what we ever imagined.

And that’s the thing about life—it may not end up being how we thought it was, and it may still not come without challenges, but somehow its still better.

Because finally we realize that our “great mistake” was really a north star all along, leading us to the life we are meant to live, with the people we are meant to have around.

“Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.”