Crash Bloom: A Creative Guide for Growing Through Your Breakup

By Danette Relic

Crash Bloom is your empowered breakup comfort book. It curls up on the sofa with you. It guides your heart through tough decisions. It tells you everything is going to be okay without trying to change who you are.

Crash Bloom combines the lived wisdom and unique vision of artist and self-love coach Danette Relic. She invites you to imagine your breakup as a creative process. To treat your heart as a living thing, not something you need to hack. With personal stories, journal prompts, creative activities, playful humour and generous amounts of compassion, Crash Bloom encourages a gentle approach to powerful growth.

This book is permission to embrace your broken heart without judgment at every stage of healing, from the crash to the bloom. You get to fall apart. You get to write scathing emails you'll never send, and reinvent yourself. You get to be an imperfect human being with the courage to experience heartbreak, all while taking practical steps to help you cultivate the beautiful future you hope for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780228877547

Danette Relic

Danette Relic is a Canadian artist, author, and coach, married to herself since 2001.From a young age, Danette was inspired by reading, drawing, using her imagination, and falling in love. Her early art career evolved from gallery spaces into roundtables. Here, she guides others in exploring their own creative voices through personal reflection, visual art and writing. After a brain injury in 2018 challenged her capacity for reading and writing, she found the joy of using her voice to serve in new ways by launching the Soft Shoulder Podcast.Danette's multifaceted work continues to illuminate the relationship between self-love and creative expression, now with the Art of Self-Marriage.

Book preview

Crash Bloom

A Creative Guide for Growing Through Your Breakup

Danette Relic

Crash Bloom

Copyright © 2024 by Danette Relic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-7753-0 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-7752-3 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-7754-7 (eBook)

For the brave ones who let it break in the first place.

And the courageous ones who dare to grow through it.

Table of Contents

One: Surviving the Crash

The Love of a Good Witness

The Uniqueness of Loss

Why You Might Scare People

The Biggest Tiny Thing

Just Breathe

Waking Up Alone

Putting Your Heart to Bed

Two: Seeking Sanctuary

Calling in Heartbroken

Half-Healed Hearts

Broken Heart, Open Wound

A Heart-Cocoon Mindset

Deliberate Disengagement

The Deliberate Disengagement Guide

Letters in a Dangerous Time

Little Nests and Other Sanctuaries

Inventory for Your Heart

Three: Surfacing and Storytelling

Falling Out of Love with the World

The Year of First Withouts

Almost Family

A Story in Every Shard

Harvesting the Heartbreak

Reframing Failure

Between the Islands of I’m a Mess and I’m Okay

Four: Spilling Open

Shamelessly Messy

The Best Worst Questions

Good People Get Angry Too

Feel It All

Tools for Tears

Sex While Sobbing

Five: Starring in Your Breakup

Should You Have Your Eat, Pray, Love Year?

Metaphor Magic

Making a Change You Can Feel

Heartbreak Heroes and Muses of Misery

Creating Your Own Heartbreak Hero

The Power of Soundtracks

Burn, Hoard, or Curate

Little Funerals

Six: Surging and Staging

Can We Be Friends Yet?

Getting Over Someone by Getting Under Someone Else

So Your Ex Has a New Favourite

Dating While Train Wrecked

The Magical Mathematical Formula To Figure Out How Long It Will Take to Get Over Your Breakup

So, When Is It Over?

Seven: Surrendering to Bloom

What Do You Mean, There’s More?

Waiting, Patience, and the F Word

What Forgiveness is For

Love the One You’re With

There Will Be New Things

Your Champion Heart

No Really, Read This First

I confess I have read many personal growth books that include journal prompts without ever doing them. I’d look them over and think, yeah yeah I see what they’re getting at here and then just move on to consume the next chapter. This is silly because I am a life coach. I assign journal prompts to my clients, because I know how the right questions can change the direction of your life. That is, if you actually sit down with your journal and answer those questions.

When I read The Courage to Trust (Wall 2004), I decided to do all the writing exercises and - drumroll - I got so much more out of the book. I was changed by that book.

Writing is a powerful way to discover truths you may not realize you have. Don’t assume you already know the answers. The act of writing can help pull things out of you from a deeper place - sometimes the simplest prompts can be the most surprising. It doesn’t have to be poetic. It doesn’t have to be certain. It doesn’t even have to be legible. No one else needs to read it - it’s for you.

While I highly recommend you do Write Your Heart Out in the journaling segments, what’s more important is that you make this experience yours.

You don’t have to read the chapters in order. You don’t have to take my advice. Help yourself to the parts of this book that feel right, and by right I mean meaningful and useful - good for your future self. The bloom.

Anything else? Leave it.

You’ve got enough going on.

I began writing this book after many a sob fest on the carpeted floors of libraries and book stores, not finding what I was looking for. I righteously complained about the breakup book selection coming up short. I named exactly what was missing from their tables of contents. Eventually I did what we should all do instead of complain - go make something.

It takes a village of books sometimes. Different voices speaking to different parts of ourselves just as we are ready to hear them. Take these typed words on your tongue like medicine and absorb only those that promote healing. The rest will dissolve.

Make this book yours. Play with it. If you have a paper copy, take pencil crayons and (yes!) scribble, circle, underline. Draw your favourite quotes and doodle the parts you feel are speaking right to you. Make your own notes. Imagine Crash Bloom is casting a healing spell. To be creative with your healing is to find beauty and meaning in the process. Make it yours.

Even if you never read this book at all, I don’t mind. Sometimes just having a book on the nightstand reminding you of your healing is enough. You’re setting an intention.

You’ve planted the seed.

One: Surviving the Crash

Devastated. Disbelief. Dust. Life as you know it has changed dramatically. You are not sure how you are even functioning. This is the beginning of broken. In the chaos you might entertain delusions or denial as a form of relief. You are just taking in the scene as it unfolds. You need help but aren’t yet sure what that means. Is this really happening?

Healing priorities: getting through the day; witnessing your experience; remembering to breathe.

The Love of a Good Witness

This is the part where you might feel like a ghost, wandering through the burning ruins of your love life and looking around like it belongs to someone else. This is where it begins. This is the crash.

When I say crash, I’m referring to the space between when the breakup becomes real and when you begin to somewhat function again. This is the space where you can’t eat, sleep, or hold a conversation. You might just be going through the motions—if you can even muster the motions.

You might not even really feel the crash—not at first. You might be cushioned by shock. Instead of registering the core-shattering news, you might simply be surrounded by a numbness you don’t recognize. Did this really happen? There must be some kind of mistake, right? We are supposed to be together.

The good news is that if you are in shock that means you have survived. Breakup shock helps our hearts climb out of the wreckage so that we can find some distance from the crash—a safe distance to take in what has happened, to let it land. And from there you’ll be able to slowly gather the strength to begin to heal. You’ll get there. Don’t rush. Being here is an important part of your story.

Historically, my breakups went a little something like this: someone would say, I just can’t do this anymore. And then, the landscape around me would feel light-years away. My shock was usually doughy but short lived, like a local anesthetic. I could see the crash happening, but in super slow motion. Everything I believed in seemed to break like glass into tiny diamond stars. I stood still as the stars floated through my life, taking the walls down with them.

I would see my home and dreams fall to dust mid-creation. My lungs choked on the powder of ruin. My voice disappeared. I would feel my heart evaporating and taking me with it while somehow the shell of my body remained. Walking into the kitchen for no reason, I’d know that the real pain was on its way, any minute now.

So obviously I had a theatrical imagination and a capacity for drama. The point is, I was paying close attention to these experiences, almost as if I knew I was doing research for a book. Almost. I didn’t want to be any kind of expert on breakups, of course. Nobody does. And you didn’t want to be here reading a book about breakups but here we are.

I have wisdom to share with you because in each crash I’ve been in, I have also been the witness: the one who was at the scene, the one taking in the details, as much as her flawed human memory can. Sometimes I was the one who just couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t continue pretending that love was enough. I couldn’t keep trying to convince someone we had something worth fighting for. I used to think I was the one always being left, but looking back I see how some relationships ended in my heart long before I had the courage to speak the truth. I waited to be pushed before walking away. I have also witnessed the crashes of others—friends of course, and coaching clients. Both those who were left, those who did the leaving and those who still aren’t sure what really happened. We all move though the crash in our own ways. Some of us barely function, and others continue in a calm, efficient state of shock for weeks, or months, or even years after the official breakup.

But even an unreliable witness can be a gift when it comes to crashes of the heart, and let’s face it—we are all unreliable witnesses in one way or another. Emotional landscapes filter how we navigate physical experiences. My walls didn’t really shatter and burst into a night sky, my denial did. My home didn’t fall to ruin; my ex married someone else in the backyard a few years later and continued on with our renovation plans. The house is fine. And you know what? So am I. Was it dramatic? Absolutely. Did it feel true at the time? Yes.

Allowing the truth of your experience is the first way you can love yourself through this. Don’t worry—your truth can, and will, change in the arms of that love. Consider your first witnessing to be a rough draft. It’s best if you don’t edit. Get it all out. Use pencil. It is only the beginning.

Every crash deserves the love of a good witness—someone who says I was there. And yes, this happened. A witness is someone who knows you were not alone. You did not imagine this. I have heard it said that it’s the highest honour to witness a life. When we pause to gift our exclusive attention to something so profoundly human, witnessing is an act of love.

This is how you must love yourself now. You are the witness of your own crash. Right now. Be here. Take it in.

Witness This

In the very first moments of the crash, you don’t even know what you have lost yet. You can see only that everything has changed and that a mighty big cleanup will need to happen—the kind of cleanup that could take a long time.

Take this in. Just observe. Look around. Without judgment. Without panic. You don’t have to do anything—just bear witness. In these days ahead, make it your intention to bear witness to your crash. All you need to do is bring your attention to what is right here in front of you, right now. And keep on doing that.

A witness doesn’t make up stories. They don’t interpret or explain the things we can’t see. A witness is witnessing. They name what they see. Right now, you are reading a book, for example. How is the light? What are you wearing? Where are you? How does the air feel? What can you hear?

Imagine this is a scene from the movie of your life. Imagine you’ll need to describe it in detail to someone later on. What will you need to remember? Witness the details. Witness the lack of details. What can’t you see or feel right now?

Even in shock, you can still witness. That is all. Take it in. Witness your vulnerability, your indifference, your resistance. This is an act of love.

The Uniqueness of Loss

We don’t give eulogies that say you know, this is exactly like losing this other person I knew because that would be astonishingly disrespectful and untrue. Your breakup is special, damn it. Don’t let anyone tell you they’ve been exactly where you are (including me). When people tell you that they know exactly how you feel, what they are probably trying to say is they know what it’s like to hurt. And that is true. They do. Everybody hurts. They are trying to help you.

Sometimes people who try to help you end up talking about their own past breakups, drawing parallels from their experience to yours. Sometimes they even give you the answers because they have been heartbroken and now they are further along. This is usually motivated by them wanting you to feel less alone. They are trying to help you.

Although they mean well, sometimes this can leave you feeling irritated and, ironically, more alone than you felt in the first place because these are their answers, not yours—because their story might not be making room for your story. Your breakup is not the same as theirs. Even if there are striking similarities, they are different. They always are. Differences are where the sacredness of your story lives.

Your heartbreak deserves to have its sacredness acknowledged. It deserves pause. It deserves to be seen, felt, and released. It matters. Your heartbreak deserves a story. Telling stories is what we do when we lose people.

We may experience grief from having many loved ones die over our lifetime, but the grief we experience with each death is specific to the beauty and complexities of each particular individual. Each breakup too, is specific to the individual lives and chemistry that made up the relationship in the first place. Each loss is its own—no matter how common these experiences are to life on earth.

It is the little details that make each story sparkle with its own particular beauty. Your heartbreak is special. And your healing will be too.

Drawing parallels to another’s experience of heartbreak is not always bad. You might choose to compare your heartbreak to someone else’s as a means of comfort and understanding. Connecting over shared loss can be quite helpful at times. Notice when it is helpful, and when it isn’t. If you find comfort and hope, then the comparison may be helpful. If you are feeling edged into or trivialized, then the comparison is probably not what you need right now. You get to actively choose when you would like to bond and commiserate with other broken hearts, and when you need to claim a space for the tenderness of your own story.

Other people are not always going to know how to support you. That’s not their fault—so many of us navigate heartbreak alone. We don’t always know what we need. We don’t know how to tell others. You will read more about how to ask for the support you need in the next chapter’s section, Calling in Heartbroken, and more about who not to seek support from in Half-Healed Hearts (also in chapter 2).

Your heart deserves the very best personalized care as you heal because this is personal. The fact that your heart broke is not what makes it special—just about everyone gets their heart broken. What is special is your story, your experience, your details, your discovery: what you now know about love; what you are learning about you; what strength you will call on to move you through this; the beauty that only you can harvest, for the person you are becoming.