worry stone.
Relational grief and break ups.
My worry stone is back.
After my first true love breakup, I sat cradling my legs, sobbing to my mum. The situation clawed at my mind and I kept asking her what to do, over and over. She looked away from me and folded laundry with fury, the smell of bleach and her distress separating us. That was an aloneness I’d never felt before.
Or maybe I had? I’m not sure.
I hadn’t made this decision myself. My body had. I felt a somatic exhaustion and a confusion and a dreading buzz that got to a frequency I just couldn’t ignore anymore. Something foundational had corroded and my mind didn’t know what.
What I felt and what I told myself to maintain my attachment were different.
I deeply mistrusted myself but I just knew something really bad had happened to me.
For the next eight months while I agonised over what to do, I felt this deep ache right in the centre of my chest. It was heavy and ancient, some ancestral thorn in the breastbone. I referred to it in therapy as my worry stone. I don’t think that pain really had a name and certainly not just one, it was older than my language.
At night, I would run my fingers up and down it to look for breaks and I’d notice the concave of it, something inside me had sunk.
Everything around my heart had tightened and everything precious was at stake again.
The sternum is where you put someone’s ear when you want them to hear your heart, where we hold babies to sleep, the universal place we point when we identify ourselves. When it aches, it is relational, developmental pain.
In this period of grief, my worry stone is back. I do chest openers and deep breathing and show it patience, but it is heavy, often heavier than me. The lonely is back. When I focus on how dense the stone is, I sink through the couch. Text messages go unread, plants droop, the ceiling is diagonal.
It is a weight that can only come from overriding the self with extraordinary precision, bit by bit.
It digests emotional aloneness in the way language and cognition cannot. Or would not.
The heart knows when it is straining to hold itself and someone else. It knows when the relationship is asymmetrical. The sternum just hurts harder to protect the private suffering of a shared problem.
The stone asks for pause while the mind waits to integrate what the body knows.
It is an embodied refusal to disappear, to remain silent, to stray from self. A retaliation against self-erasure. I am here.
What does it mean if the things we hold can’t hold us?
I can’t rush it, I can’t outrun it, it desperately wants me to notice how alone I felt. It has dutifully recorded every atom of relational loneliness in a way only a loving heart knows how.
I’m not sure what’s next, my worry stone is back.
All my love, C x
The only way out is through. With you. 💙