The Bad Feminist's Guide to Dealing with Break-Ups- By Mia Santos- Part 1

How to deal with a break-up, Santos style, is what you're going to read in the next few posts.

Dealing with a break-up, like dealing with the grief inside you on losing a loved one, has several stages. Only grief has five stages but break-ups have more than that. Seven? Eight? Nine? Twenty? Endless?

I dunno. The horror of NEVER getting recovering from a break-up. Time freezing and space warping around you like there's nothing else except the fact that you're broken up with that special someone you love. Or you thought you loved. And you don't know and you didn't have a chance to find out and now you're not just broken up but broken inside too. Something's broken inside, and you can't glue it back together with Fevistick.

All I know that the first stage is disbelief.

Who broke up with whom? Who started it? Who ended it? Who dumped whom? Is this really happening? Is this a fucking nightmare? Am I high? Is he high? Are both of us high?

Did I just tell him it's over? Did I?

Did I really find him screwing another woman in the bed we shared for over five years? Or was it a jet lag induced hallucination? Some kind of undiscovered psychosis? You had just come home after a seventeen hour flight from New York. Some kind of mix-up? Perhaps I ended up in someone else's house and found a strange man fucking a strange woman and somehow the man's face morphed into that of my boyfriend Dev. Sorry...EX-boyfriend Dev. Or maybe I stepped into some parallel dimension and by some cruel twist of fate found the man I thought I loved in bed with another woman, the subtle machinations of an evil witch as keeps happening in those fantasy novels...

Wait. Come on, Mia. You know it was true. Going by the shocked expression on his face. This was no parallel dimension. This was the home you shared with him for five years, the bed you slept in with him.

Stop trying to excuse his infidelity. Stop trying to blame yourself for what happened. Just stop trying to deny it. It's true. It's happening, Get real. This probably isn't the first time. No wait. don't think about that or your blood pressure will shoot through the roof.

It's over. You and Dev are over. Get used to it.

Ok. Ok. Ok. I'm single again. Okay.

Disbelief has been dealt with,

Then comes the craziness. Mind-boggling craziness, hair-raising craziness, slasher movie craziness.

We'll talk about that in the next post.

Adios.