Troy P Zehnder

Heartbreak is something every person eventually encounters, but we rarely talk about what sits beneath it, the truth that quietly connects all of us:

Everyone who has ever experienced heartbreak has likely caused it for someone else.

That realization hit me harder than the pain itself.

It’s one thing to feel shattered by someone.
It’s another to look honestly at your own life and realize that, somewhere along the line, you’ve probably been the source of someone else’s hurt too. Not because you meant to. Not because you’re cruel. But because heartbreak is less like a clean, sharp wound and more like a chain reaction, passed from one person to another through fear, confusion, timing, and unhealed places inside us.

Most heartbreak isn’t intentional.
It happens the way storms happen, when pressure builds in places we never dealt with, when we run from what scares us, or when we collide with someone else’s wounds at the wrong moment in life.

And that’s why the whole thing feels even more painful:
We don’t just experience heartbreak.
We participate in its cycle.

We get abandoned… and one day we walk away from someone.
We fall for someone unavailable… and one day someone falls for us when our heart is somewhere else.
We live in confusion from someone’s mixed signals… and one day we send mixed signals without meaning to.
We suffer in silence… and one day someone else suffers because we didn’t know how to speak up.

No one escapes this cycle untouched.

It’s strange, almost tragic, to be both the person who is hurting and the person who has hurt.

But it’s part of being human.

People don’t usually break hearts out of malice.
They do it because they’re scared.
Because they’re overwhelmed.
Because they don’t know who they are yet.
Because they’re trying to survive their own emotional chaos.

Most heartbreak comes from people who don’t know how to hold their own hearts, let alone someone else’s.

So what do we do with this truth?

We break the cycle.

We choose to be the ones who:

• stop running
• stop ghosting
• stop confusing people
• stop using others as emotional shelters
• stop avoiding the conversations we know are needed

We heal so we don’t hand off the pain we received.
We grow so we don’t replicate what broke us.
We choose clarity so the next person doesn’t inherit our confusion.

We refuse to become the thing that hurt us.

Heartbreak, for all its weight, gives us a rare opportunity:
to love differently…
to love intentionally…
to love with wisdom instead of wounds.

Because the truth is, we are all both the wounded and the healing.
We are all both the broken and the ones who have broken others.

And when we finally accept that, we start moving through the world with a little more empathy, a little more patience, and a deeper understanding of the fragile, beautiful reality of being human.

We don’t get through life without hurting or being hurt.
But we can choose to rise from it…
and love better because of it.