It’s your big day. You’ve been waiting for so long. It happened to all of your friends first, at least all of the cool ones. Your mother comforts you (even though she’s secretly very excited about it.) Weird, you always felt like this was something other people had to deal with, you never thought of yourself like this. You have become … an ex.

     I had you for a second with that first-period stuff- you thought this article was going to be about reclaiming womanhood or tax-free tampons or an analysis of why your first menstrual experience dictates the way you’re able to accept love from others-no. A relationship changed and you’ve gotten a rebrand that you didn’t ask for. You own a label that you don’t want to identify with.  You’re not dating anymore, you used to date. The timeline is demarcated with a beginning and end. So obsessed with time and so addicted to categorization, the human mind had a field day developing the concept of an ex-lover. 

     A study* by cognitive neuroscientists at Columbia University took brain scans of people who had experienced an unwanted breakup in the previous six months. Participants looked at pictures of their ex-partners while thinking about shared experiences. The researchers compared the scans to when participants looked at pictures of a friend, or when they were exposed to pain. The scientists found that the same parts of the brain lit up when individuals looked at the ex-partner pictures or experienced physical pain. “Ex” is painful. 

      It has an essence and connotation that dehumanizes and often makes a villain out of the wearer of the name. It is a strange practice in which we accept such a label and give it out to another person. This way we can neatly squeeze them into a compartment of the past so as not to let them interrupt the future. That will make it easier to explain at family dinners. That keeps one from having to reckon with the idea that relationships have no beginning or end, that the present is ephemeral and we are never truly without anyone. This of course can be dangerous, an ex who deserves the title and is unkind to you may linger, disrupting your growth or ruining your day. This is when it is unfair to be “from” someone else. 

    In Latin, “ex” translates to “from.” This is worth considering. Another person that you are from, someone who in turn is from you too. As if they go hand in hand with your mother, or your hometown, or your first job, or your university.  Part of you, maybe a wonderful part of you, maybe a painful and sore part of you, is from someone else. That reminds you that you are alive. You have related to another person in a deep way, a way that inspires poetry, war, pregnancy, music. You are an ex. Maybe you are glad to be, maybe not, regardless, to have been vulnerable with another person, an ex-friend or an ex-lover, is bold. It bottles the essence of being. A far kinder way to regard a fellow traveler who may have made you feel very at peace with your place in the world, even if for a few fleeting weeks or months, years or minutes.