There is a particular kind of heartbreak that doesn’t just leave you missing someone.
It leaves you questioning yourself.
I Wasn’t Enough came from that place—the aftermath of loving someone deeply, giving them everything you had, and still being left wondering why your love wasn’t enough to make them stay.
The poem opens simply:
“I wasn’t enough for you,
You were my heart’s desire.”
Those words carry something many people experience after the end of a relationship. We don’t always ask whether the relationship was right for us, whether our needs were being met, or whether the other person was capable of loving us in the way we needed.
Sometimes the first question we ask is:
What was wrong with me?
That question can be brutal.
When you have built someone a home inside your heart, their absence doesn’t immediately disappear when the relationship ends. They remain in ordinary things—the rain, a familiar song, a memory that arrives without warning.
That is why I wrote:
“I see you in every raindrop,
I hear you in every song.”
Grief after love can be strange like that.
You can remove photographs.
Delete messages.
Stop saying their name.
But you cannot control when a memory decides to walk back into the room.
When Love Becomes Part of Your Identity
One of the most painful parts of heartbreak is realising how much of yourself you placed into another person.
“I built you a home
In the center of my heart,
You twisted it,
Tore it apart.”
For me, those lines are at the centre of the poem.
They describe what happens when you don’t simply love someone—you make emotional space for them. You imagine futures. You create memories. You allow them into places inside yourself that aren’t open to everybody.
When that relationship ends, you aren’t only grieving the person.
You can also be grieving the future you imagined with them.
The plans.
The conversations.
The version of yourself that existed when they were beside you.
And sometimes, underneath all of that grief, sits one painful belief:
I just wasn’t enough.
The Words We Say When Our Hearts Are Broken
The final lines deliberately don’t offer a neat resolution:
“Fuck babes…
I just wasn’t enough.”
There is no inspirational speech.
No sudden moment where everything makes sense.
Because heartbreak doesn’t always arrive with wisdom attached to it.
Sometimes you are simply hurt.
Sometimes you still love the person who hurt you.
Sometimes you know something has ended and your heart hasn’t caught up with that reality yet.
And sometimes the only words you have are the messy, angry, vulnerable ones.
That is what I Wasn’t Enough captures for me.
Not the healed version of heartbreak.
The moment before that.
The place where someone is standing amongst the ashes, of what they thought love was going to become. Still trying to understand why giving everything they had wasn’t enough to save it.
Perhaps that is why heartbreak can cut so deeply.
Because losing somebody is painful.
But believing their leaving proves something about your worth can leave an entirely different wound.
I Wasn’t Enough lives inside that wound.
Not to solve it.
Not to dress it up.
Just to tell the truth about how it feels.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤
Poetry in a Northern Kitchen
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