It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart it being much more sensitive.

The first damage often lands somewhere other than where the pain gets reported. Before you feel the loss itself, something quieter goes: the picture of how it was going to be, the future you had already partly moved into. People describe a broken heart when what broke first was an expectation, and the two mend on different schedules.

After a disappointment, try naming what you have actually lost. Sometimes it is a person or a job. Sometimes it is a version of the years ahead that you had grown attached to, and that is a real loss worth grieving rather than dismissing as only something you made up.