69 Tips for Healing a Broken Heart

1. Start a new hobby. The weirder, the better.

2. Get bored of said hobby. Sell the expensive equipment you bought. Repeat until you've run out of money and things to try.

3. Bleach your hair at home. Screw it up. Bleach your hair again. Repeat until you have no hair left.

4. Attend a party. Dance until you're dizzy. Tell your friends you're okay. Take an expensive cab to to another party. Dance until you're dizzy. Tell strangers you're okay. Repeat until you can't remember your date of birth or your mother's maiden name.

Tell your friends you're okay. Tell strangers you're okay.

5. Buy a thick notebook and start a diary for the twentieth time. Buy a new one every time you make a spelling mistake. 

6. Cry at work. You get bonus points for telling a long-winded story about your heartbreak to a colleague of your choice in the hallway. You deserve a star if you manage to crack an awkward joke about the situation.

7. Get angry. Scream and swear, punch walls and throw expensive dinnerware as dramatically as possible. Any target will do, except the elderly and very small babies.

8. Cry on the tram. Cry on the tube. Cry on the bus. Hide it poorly.

9. Start an idiotic habit, like walking 15 kilometres a day even when it's raining. Try to convince everyone it's because you're trying to be healthier.

Take up something insanely difficult like oil painting. Tell everyone your bad paintings are interpretations of 19th century naïve art.

10. Start making art again. Take up something insanely difficult like oil painting. Tell everyone your bad paintings are interpretations of 19th century naïve art.

11. Try to write a book. Keep going until you remember why you haven't finished writing a book yet.

12. Go on dates and refer to your ex-lover as your boyfriend or girlfriend. You get bonus points for repeating your mistake and not seeming apologetic.

13. Read an insane amount books and pretend you've thus grown as a person. Learn about Hitler’s art collection, faraway cities, forgotten art movements, anthropological discoveries and the intricacies of glass-blowing. Impress and bore people at dinner parties with your new knowledge.

14. Flirt with inappropriate people in inappropriate places when you're tipsy. Try to keep written records of these incidents as limited as possible. You won't want anyone to remember any of this the next day.

15. Pretend you're Joan Didion. Keep the charade going for as long as you can.

Pretend you're Joan Didion.

16. Wear clothes that make people look twice. Unabashedly fish for compliments. Remember that "Wow, those shoes are very red" or "Oh, interesting trousers" aren't necessarily compliments.

Remember that

"Those shoes are very red."

isn't necessarily a compliment.

17. Try to rekindle an old flame to feel alive again. Fail spectacularly.

18. Plan a new life in a city you've never visited. Make elaborate blueprints of how you'd schedule the big move, browse apartments on Craigslist and imagine a new life in which you're hotter, trendier and brainier. Forget said plans when you wake up the next morning.

19. Waltz around the city like a bad-ass heart-breaker babe. Realise that you're only breaking your own heart in the process. Go back to being a crybaby.

20. Buy flights to an ostentatious destination. If you're skint, off-season French Riviera will do. Remember that you've already spent all your money on weird hobbies and unnecessary art supplies. Proceed to book cheap hotels.

Remember that you've already spent all your money on weird hobbies and unnecessary art supplies. Proceed to book the cheapest hotels you can find.

21. Start writing poetry. When people accuse you of plagiarising Maya Angelou, tell them that they're utterly mistaken. Review your pieces in half a year and realise that everyone was, in fact, completely right.

22. Get back to a hobby you had decades ago. If it's a sport, go at it like an Olympic athlete. Pull a few muscles, get hurt in a swimming pool and stop after a month.

23. Throw yourself into a new relationship and convince yourself it's the best modus operandi. When it all goes wrong, make sure to run fast enough to avoid the inevitable dire consequences.

24. Buy three new perfumes to try out what kind of a person you should become next. End up wearing them all at the same time to make sure that you stop smelling like sadness.

25. Visit your ex-lover. Make sure you both forget why you broke up in the first place. Burst the bubble when the weekend comes to a close. Pick up the pieces and go back to square one.

26. Start taking your vitamins. Put them in a jar next to your bed to make sure you don't forget. Forget anyway.

Feel graceful and lonely.

27. Lose lots of weight. Gain it all back. Oscillate between feeling like a powerful amazon and a disproportionate goblin. 

28. Find music to serve as the background track to your shiny, new life. Make sure to choose something you've never listened to before. The more impressively obscure, the better.

29. Spend a week dressed in a fancy bathrobe. Only exit your apartment to buy pineapples and organic sodas. Feel graceful and desperately lonely. 

30. Sit down with the overwhelming feelings you've been running away from for months now. Make friends with them. Let them sleep next to you. Wake up in the morning and do it again.

31. Go to places you’ve never been before. Convince yourself that being in a relationship prevented you from going there. Secretly know that it was your own fault all along.

32. Become the impulsive you that’s been in hibernation for months now. Tell strangers secrets when you drink too much wine. Spend your salary in one go and regret it for the remainder of the year. Make ceramics. Grow tired of yourself. Change everything on a whim. 

33. Revert to being a teenager. Feel everything and nothing at the same time. 

Revert to being a teenager.

34. Make grandiose plans that you're not sure you ever want to come true. Hope that this time the universe will be too busy with other things to listen to you.

35. Start a list of 69 tips for healing a broken heart and realise halfway through that you don't actually have any idea what you're talking about.