Everyone has their own special way of trying to cope with a breakup. It’s a long, fruitless process of trying to find some way, any way to break the pain into manageable bites until it’s small enough to swallow. And naturally, each individual’s method is as unique as a snowflake. These little mechanisms we employ for ourselves may seem crazy to outsiders, but make perfect sense to us in our raw, recently broken up state. Say, for instance, deciding to time yourself each night, giving yourself a 4 minute limit to be sad about being dumped by a man you thought you were going to marry in your 20’s. This seemed like the only manageable solution to me at the time, but in retrospect, maybe it was odd. Who cares though, it worked eventually (although not in the mandatory 90 day time table I set forth).

One divorced woman is managing the pain of her recent divorce by literally quantifying the effects with a series of charts, graphs and spreadsheets –sleepless nights, sad songs listened to, impulse purchases made and public displays of emotion (ugh, the worst!). She describes the method to her post-breakup madness on her site, aptly named Quantified Breakup:

“Divorce is hard. Putting this process into numbers, images and data visualizations is helpful. It yanks me out of these all-consuming moments of sadness and helps me understand how, perhaps as time passes, things are going to be ok in the long run (looking for positive trends within the data!) I hope these web things can help you, too.”

We’ve all been there. Some of us are there right now. It does get better. It really does, keep making your graphs or timing your sadness for 90 days or whatever wacky thing lifts you up and out and onward.

[Quantified Breakup via Gizmodo]

Original by Ami Angelowicz