A Facebook post healed my broken heart

My refrigerator door was once covered in satirical cartoons—the kind that skewered politicians over some hypocrisy or recent mistake.

But after my husband suddenly left me, I started dealing with a different kind of disconnection. Kinder and gentler ones. Short and sweet quotes like “You are enough”. The kind that I, as a cynical child of the ’80s, used to mock the slogan “no pain, no gain”, and have mocked in the past.

Why switch? After my husband announced that we were “better off as friends” and that he was moving on to “find” himself, I suddenly wanted to sympathize with Snark.

I came across my first motivational quote while scrolling through social media, trying to get distracted.

“Know your worth,” was a phrase vague enough to target anyone feeling desperate — including me.

Simple, powerful words plastered on a neutral background pale in comparison to their power.

Soon I was browsing Facebook every morning and every night before bed. Thanks to Meta’s powerful algorithm, the more you “like” quotes about self-love, breakup, and healing, the more they appear.

Some of it was vulgar. Some of it was novel. They were all a balm to my broken self.

“It’s okay to feel broken. It’s okay to feel exhausted,” soothes RM Drake, one of my favorite creators.

“He’s not running from you, honey, he’s running from himself. Let him go,” wrote Stephanie Bennett Henry, another source.

These two- to four-line snippets became my lifeline of support, especially as the months passed and I felt embarrassed to keep telling my friends that I still felt devastated and raw. They appeared to me like an army protecting a crumbling castle, but even with their love, I still hurt. I was crying every day. I still don’t know how to live my life without the person who has been by my side my entire adult life.

Was my marriage perfect? No, but as a wife, mother, and human being, the feelings I cling to now remind me that I deserve better than what I went through.

Those daily doses fueled me at a time when I could barely eat — when acid was sloshing around inside my stomach and my overactive brain was keeping me awake at night. I looked through them like the index cards I once crammed while studying for college exams decades ago.

They have been more supportive of me than the divorce support group I joined, which at one point warned “suckers” like me to abstain from sex, drugs and alcohol in our “vulnerable” states.

“It was God for me “Man rebounded,” a divorcee testified in one video, which left me less than inspired. (I eventually left the group, which I should have realized was too religious for me from the beginning.)

These words of comfort helped me refocus my sadness during my morning swim when my mind was diving into the past, salty tears mixing with the strong chlorine.

“You can’t make them love you by loving them harder. And you can’t save the relationship if the other person isn’t willing to save it too,” RM Drake said comfortingly.

I’m starting to think of these nuggets of wisdom as an internal healer, but they’re much cheaper and more available. They held my hand as I grieved the loss of a part of me – “we” – while I still had to function “normally”, go to work and interact with my children.

When I was feeling guilty about crying while folding laundry in front of my kids who were home on college vacation, a Facebook page called “Joker: Motivational Quotes” (yes, weird name) helped me.

“If you don’t leave your past to the past, your future will be ruined. You have to live for what you give today. Not for what yesterday took from you,” read one post. But “yesterday” gave me my children too. I found it difficult to separate my everlasting love for them About my failed marriage I kept trying.