I let him break my heart for the third time and it was like I’d swallowed poison. It began as a knot in my stomach and rapidly took my entire body hostage. It was a pain that made an excruciating task out of lifting my eyelids, even when afternoon sun pierced the blinds, and it quietly trickled outward to infect every part of my life.

My mood was the first to go. Soon I stopped showing up for meetings around campus; classes were out of the question. My grades plummeted. I quit my on-campus job as a tour guide because I felt like a fraud promoting a place in which I was miserable. My friends ran around in circles, clearly concerned but not equipped to help—they met regularly, asking each other what to do about my “condition.” In the rooms around mine, I caught snippets of their conversations. They spoke of me in the most pitiful way, as if I were a sick family pet that needed to be euthanized.

By April, the only activity I was capable of doing on a daily basis was swallowing half a dozen shots of vodka before 5 p.m. It worked to numb the heartache and helped me forget the subsequent implosion of everything I cared about. What began as a small pile of dirty laundry in the bottom of my closet (I’d deal with it later) rapidly multiplied until it became a monstrous mess that I couldn’t imagine dealing with… ever.

He was the trigger. He was two whole years of college. He was my universe, the person I saw myself next to for the rest of my life, the partner I would always be content being miserable with. He was the most self-centered, cookie-cutter, corporate-eyed Ivy League boy I’d ever met, and our relationship was volatile, wrought with disappointment and contradiction. There was nothing particularly interesting or unique about him, but he mesmerized me. I loved him in a way that made me believe in everlasting, unconditional devotion.

He dumped me and I fell apart. The moment I was back on my feet and ready to take on the world, after months of hard work, he came back – only to leave again. I eventually bounced back from that too, bruised but not broken, in time for him to give it one last shot and shatter me for the final time. But this one was different. This time my spirit was no longer capable of pulling it together, and I allowed myself to freefall into complete and utter meltdown, the kind of collapse a college student with a dozen different commitments simply cannot afford.

I was paralyzed. I was in an Ivy League school where I was expected to perform, and I simply could not. In a community of the best and brightest, the most talented young minds in the country who seemed poised to handle anything, I was the exception. The failure. The girl who threw in the towel and stood idly by as the world she had built for herself crumbled in front of her.

I had to get out. I climbed into my car and drove South, planning to drive until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. It was raining and I rolled the windows down, letting the raindrops hit my face. Once I reached the highway, a Brand New song came on my stereo. Is it in you now / to watch the things you gave your life to broken… stoop and build them up / with worn-out tools.

God. That was it. It wasn’t in me now. I could feel my heart fall into an abyss of self-pity, and I steered onto the side of the highway. For the first time in months, I allowed myself to cry. I sobbed there in the dark pouring rain, the lone stationary vehicle in a sea of speeding passersby.

The song ended. As quickly as it had started, the crying fit stopped and I realized I had nowhere to go but up. It was bizarre, as if that song alone had given me the final push down to reach rock bottom, a place I needed to go in order to will myself upward again.