Tune in to Your Creativity

After a “lost weekend” where she didn’t emerge from her apartment except to walk the dog, Sara poured herself into a long-neglected hobby: song-writing.

“At first the songs were all ‘He done me wrong, poor, poor pitiful me’—super wallowing numbers,” she recalls. Gradually her work moved away from broken hearts and crushed roses to embrace more idiosyncratic topics like lazy summer days at the beach, how much she hates cell phones and rush-hour traffic. “I got so caught up in doing something I loved. There were longer and longer periods when I forgot I’d lost someone I loved.”

Finding something that sparked her passion and gave her a reason to get up in the morning helped her realize she was a lot more than a person who suffered a breakup.

Find out how other break-up survivors found inspiration in our feature, "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do."