She had been my person for seven years.
When it ended, I did not cry for weeks. I just went numb. I went to work. I came home. I stared at the wall. I ate the same sad pasta every night because cooking for one felt pointless. I would buy a bag of apples and watch half of them rot because I kept forgetting to eat them.
Everyone kept asking if I was okay. I said yes. I was not.
The worst part was not the loneliness. It was the feeling that I had lost my center. For seven years, I had built my life around someone else. Our routines. Our inside jokes. The way she would steal the blanket in her sleep. The restaurants we always went to. The shows we watched together — I could not bring myself to watch any of them alone. When she left, there was nothing left of me. I did not know what I liked anymore. I did not know who I was without her.
I spent a lot of time just sitting in my apartment, not doing anything. Not thinking, even. Just existing. It felt like I was waiting for something, but I did not know what.
## The thing I tried that surprised me
A colleague noticed I was not myself. I had stopped making jokes in meetings. I ate lunch alone at my desk, scrolling through my phone without really seeing anything. She did not ask questions — she just handed me a small folded paper one day after a meeting.
“Keep this somewhere you will see every morning,” she said. “It helped me after my divorce.”
It was a [Peace Protection Talisman](https://gentlwish.com/product/peace-protection-talismans/) from Gentlwish. Hand-drawn in red ink on yellow paper. Small. Unassuming. I thanked her and shoved it in my desk drawer.
A week later, I was cleaning my desk and found it again. I was about to throw it away — I was not a talisman person, I was not a ritual person, I did not believe in any of this. But something stopped me. Maybe it was the fact that my colleague had kept hers for years. Maybe I was just desperate enough to try anything, no matter how silly it seemed.
I put it on my nightstand instead.
## How a tiny ritual started forming
I did not believe it would do anything. I still do not know if it did anything in a supernatural sense.
But every morning, before my feet touched the floor, I saw that talisman. And every morning, it reminded me that I was still here. That my life was not over. That healing does not happen in big dramatic moments — it happens in the small ones.
I started a tiny ritual. Nothing Instagram-worthy. Before getting out of bed, I would hold the talisman for thirty seconds. I would let myself feel whatever I was feeling. Sad. Angry. Empty. Lonely. All of it. I stopped trying to push it down or pretend I was fine.
No candles. No incense. No meditation music. Just me and a small piece of paper and permission to be a mess.
Slowly, the heaviness started lifting. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But I stopped waking up with that immediate pit in my stomach. I stopped reaching for my phone to text her before remembering I could not anymore. The talisman interrupted that habit — gave me a new morning anchor to replace the old one.
## What I learned about grief
Grief is not a straight line. You do not wake up one day and feel better. You wake up one day and realize you went an entire morning without thinking about her. Then you feel guilty about that. Then you do it again. Then one day you notice the guilt is gone too.
The talisman did not take the pain away. Nothing can do that. Grief is not something you fix — it is something you move through. Like weather. Like a long winter.
But it gave me something to hold onto. A physical anchor in a time when everything felt like it was floating away. A reminder that healing was happening even when I could not feel it. I would hold it and think: I am not the same person I was yesterday. I am a little further along. Even if I cannot tell.
A few months later, I ordered a [Health & Healing Talisman](https://gentlwish.com/product/health-healing-talismans/) too. I kept it in my jacket pocket. Whenever I felt that wave of sadness coming — on the subway, at the grocery store, in the middle of a meeting — I would reach in and touch it. Just for a second. Just to ground myself. Nobody noticed. I did not need them to.
## Where I am now
It has been two years. I am okay now. Not fixed — okay. There is a difference.
I still have both talismans. The Peace one is on my nightstand. The Healing one is in my bag. They are worn and faded from being handled so much. The red ink has bled a little along the folds. They look their age.
People ask if they worked. I think they did, but not in the way people expect. They did not heal me. They did not bring her back. They did not make the pain stop. What they did was help me remember that I could heal myself. That I already had everything I needed inside me — I just needed something external to remind me it was there.
If you are going through something right now — a breakup, a loss, a hard season — I am sorry. I know how much it hurts. I know the mornings are the worst. I know you are tired of hearing “it gets better.”
You do not need to believe in anything magical. You just need one small thing that reminds you that you are still here. That you are still moving forward. Even when it does not feel like it.
[Browse Gentlwish Healing & Peace Talismans](https://gentlwish.com/product/peace-protection-talismans/) — hand-drawn, quietly blessed, and small enough to carry through the hard days.