Hi Steve

This is my first post on here. I’ve been searching for some advice on how to recover from a break-up and came across this site. I’ve read quite a few of your posts today and although our situations differ, our goal (I think) is similar. So a little background which I appreciate is off-topic but I will get back to that. I broke-up with my girlfriend last weekend after a 6 year relationship. We split up mainly because of the pressures of having a long distance relationship. There is more to it than that but this is about rediscovering yourself so I won’t go into details here. I think it is important to say that this is the second time we have split up. That was about a year ago and then we got back together, but it didn’t work out and here I am again.

I thought it was important to mention that because a year ago I was in a position where I needed to rediscover myself. I never actually got there because when we got back together again I forgot all about doing that and concentrated on the relationship again. Now I find myself in the same situation and there will be no going back this time. I now need to concentrate on rediscovering myself and most importantly being happy with myself. Before I met my ex (online by the way) I was in a really good place emotionally and loved my life. I was happily single and in a great frame of mind. Although I didn’t realize it at the time it gave me a huge amount of confidence and that made meeting new people easier. Simply because of my positive state of mind.

My main goal now is to redisover that same person. He’s in there somewhere! I do have some smaller goals though surrounding things that interest me. I bought a keyboard a year ago but have never really bothered with it but I am going to start taking lessons soon and hopefully become a rock god! Actually I think it’s probably too late for that. I am also into photography and have been sharing photos on Instagram with other like minded people. Last week I was ready to delete my account because so many of the photos remind me of my ex. A friend told me not to as I would probably end up regretting it and she was right. I have set myself a goal to learn more about photography and continue to share my experiences through photos. I appreciate that none of this may be relevant to you but I just wanted to share a couple of examples of my small goals in my pursuit of finding the old me again. Something else that hit home that I read elsewhere on this forum was that it is ok to be a bit selfish, to do the things you want to do. I intend to do quite a bit of that.

A very close of friend of mine gave me some really good advice the other day and I intend to try and follow it. The advice was simply this; don’t try and look too far into the future, just concentrate on the next 24 hours. That’s exactly what I intend to do, to just try and achieve small things as I go along and hopefully rediscover myself and be happy on my own again. When I do I may try online dating again.

Thank you for being so open and sharing your experiences, a lot of what you have said I can relate to and just reading through them and other posts have helped me turn my thoughts into positive ones. Even though I know negatives thoughts will come back. If I come across as sounding quite positive I really don’t right now. Waves of sadness come over me without warning and I know I have long way to go. But I do believe I will get there and I hope you do too.