It was a Saturday in late October, the kind of slow, grey afternoon where the sky can't decide between rain and sun and settles for a humid, restless in-between. Maame, twenty-three years old and three weeks out of a relationship she had genuinely believed was going somewhere, had spent most of those three weeks being impressively fine.
She'd gone to work every day at the media agency in Osu where she was a content associate. She'd laughed at her colleagues' jokes. She'd eaten, slept, responded to messages, and performed the complete appearance of a person who was handling things.
Then, on that Saturday afternoon, she found an old voice note on her phone, just a silly, 40-second clip of her ex, Nana Yaw, doing a bad impression of their landlord, and something in her chest simply gave way.
She slid down the side of her bed, sat on the cool tiles, and cried for 45 minutes straight. The kind of crying that involves hiccups and a blocked nose and the genuine, full-body release of grief that had been waiting patiently behind three weeks of fine.
Her younger brother Kojo knocked on the door at some point, heard the silence that had replaced the crying, and quietly slid a packet of Tom Tom sweets under the door.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. And Maame, sitting on the floor with Tom Toms and puffy eyes, felt something shift — not healed, not fixed, but fractionally lighter.
That moment on the floor, uncomfortable and undignified as it was, was the real beginning of her healing. Not because she'd broken down, but because she had, for the first time in three weeks, stopped pretending she hadn't.
Why We Perform Okay When We Are Very Much Not Okay
After a breakup, the first instinct for a lot of young people is to manage how they appear to the world before they've managed how they actually feel.
Partly this is pride, which is human and understandable. Partly it is the social reality of family life, where being emotionally undone is often interpreted by well-meaning relatives as weakness, which is somehow treated as a flaw rather than a natural consequence of having been fully present in a relationship.
Partly it is simply the busyness of life which fills the hours and makes it easy to defer the emotional reckoning indefinitely.
But deferred grief doesn't disappear. It accumulates. It shows up as irritability about things that have nothing to do with the breakup, as a low-grade flatness that makes everything feel slightly muted, as an inability to concentrate, or as a sudden, unpredictable wave of sadness.
Maame's three weeks of being impressively fine were not wasted, but they were also a postponement of the actual work of healing, which could only begin once she let herself fully acknowledge that she was, in fact, hurting.
What Letting Go Actually Means
The phrase "let go" has been so overused in wellness spaces that it's started to lose its meaning, so let's be precise about what it actually describes, because it is not what most people think it is.
Letting go is not the same as forgetting. It is not pretending the relationship didn't matter or that the person didn't mean something to you. It is not a sudden decision you make one morning, and then you're done. And it is absolutely not something you owe anyone on a particular timeline.
Letting go, as Maame slowly came to understand it through conversations with her closest friend Akosua and through a lot of late-night journalling, is the practice of releasing your grip on the version of the future you had imagined.
It's accepting that the story you thought you were in has changed, not because you did something wrong, not because you weren't enough, but because life is genuinely unpredictable, and people and relationships are more complex than the neat narratives we build around them.
Letting go is choosing, repeatedly and imperfectly, to stop investing your emotional energy in something that has ended, and redirecting that energy back toward yourself and the life still ahead of you.
The People Around You Matter Enormously
Kojo Agyemang was 20 years old, studying engineering at Legon, and by his own admission not particularly skilled at emotional conversations. He didn't know what to say to his sister after her breakup, so mostly he said nothing — but he showed up, consistently, in small physical ways.
He made sure there was always water in her room. He sent her funny memes at odd hours. He watched three episodes of a series he had absolutely no interest in because she wanted company on the couch.
He slid Tom Toms under the door. These things sound small because they are small, and they were also exactly what Maame needed — a simple, warm, reliable presence of someone who cared about her and was comfortable sitting in the discomfort with her.
This is something worth saying directly to anyone reading this who is currently watching someone they love go through heartbreak: you do not need to fix it.
You cannot fix it, and attempting to do so often makes the person feel more alone rather than less, because it signals that their grief is inconvenient and should be resolved quickly.
What helps is presence. What helps is the Tom Tom under the door. What helps is staying, and not making the person explain or justify or perform recovery on your schedule.
The Emotional Stages Nobody Draws As A Clean Diagram
Healing from heartbreak is not linear, and anyone who tells you it follows a predictable sequence of stages that resolve neatly in order hasn't actually been through it recently.
Maame had days in the weeks after the floor-crying episode where she felt genuinely good, energised, clear-headed, like herself again, and then a day later she'd hear a song or walk past a restaurant they used to visit and the whole thing would fold back in on her.
This is not a setback. This is just how emotional processing works.
The brain, particularly when it has formed strong emotional attachments, doesn't simply update itself the moment a relationship ends. It keeps reaching for the familiar. The reaching is involuntary. It lessens over time, not because you force it to stop, but because you gradually, through living and healing and filling your life with new experiences and meaning, build new neural pathways that don't run through that particular person.
What helped Maame most during the non-linear, frustrating, occasionally funny process of her healing was an honest conversation she had with Akosua one evening over jollof rice in Akosua's kitchen.
Akosua, 24 and someone who had navigated her own significant heartbreak two years earlier, said something that stayed with Maame for a long time: "The days when you feel okay are not fake. They're real. And the days when you feel terrible are also real. Both of them are true at the same time, and you don't have to choose one to be the honest version."
That reframe was one of the most genuinely useful things anyone said to Maame during that entire period.
Practical Things that Actually Move the Needle
Since we believe that emotional healing and practical action work together rather than separately, here are the things that Maame found genuinely useful — not as prescriptions, but as options worth considering.
She started journalling, not because anyone told her to, but because she found that writing things down got them out of the loop in her head where they'd been running on repeat.
She didn't write beautifully or consistently — some entries were three sentences, some were rambling and misspelled — but the act of externalising her thoughts gave her a relationship with them that felt more manageable than just living inside them.
She also made a deliberate decision, after about six weeks, to reintroduce the things that had made her feel like herself before the relationship: the Saturday morning dance fitness class she'd quietly stopped attending, the design hobby she'd put down, the friendships she'd let go a little quiet.
This wasn't about staying busy for the sake of avoiding feelings — she'd already learned that didn't work — but about actively reconstructing her sense of self outside of the identity she'd partially built around being someone's partner.
Reconnecting with your own independent interests and friendships after a breakup is one of the most quietly powerful things you can do, because it reminds you, in the most tangible possible way, that you were a whole and interesting person before, and you remain one now.
What Moving Forward Actually Is
Moving forward does not look like never thinking about it again. It does not look like replacing one relationship immediately with another. It does not look like having a breakthrough moment in a café where everything suddenly makes sense and the sun hits your face just right, and you know you're healed.
Moving forward looks like Maame, four months after that Saturday on the floor, attending her colleague's birthday gathering in Cantonments and realising halfway through the evening that she hadn't thought about Nana Yaw once since she arrived.
Not because she'd suppressed it — but because something genuinely new and engaging was happening right in front of her, and she was present for it.
Moving forward looks like Kojo noticing, one morning, that his sister was laughing at the breakfast table and feeling quietly relieved.
It looks like Akosua and Maame sitting in that same kitchen in Adabraka six months later, and Maame being the one now with something solid to offer when Akosua needed to talk through her own hard season.
Moving forward is how you become someone who can hold space for others, because you've held it for yourself first.
Letting Go Is Not the Loss
The loss already happened. The letting go is the recovery — the slow, imperfect, genuinely brave act of choosing to release what has ended and turn toward what is still possible.
It requires honesty about your feelings, patience with the process, the right people around you, and the willingness to show up for your own life even on the days when it feels like too much effort.
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not too sensitive for having felt something deeply, and you are not weak for needing time to heal from it.
What you are is human, and healing is the most human thing you can do. Let yourself do it fully, in your own time, with all the grace and self-compassion you would offer without hesitation to someone you love.
Comments (0)
Please sign in to join the conversation.
Loading comments...