Heartbreak in a world obsessed with good vibes

How are you? I saw the brain of a man out on the road, bizarre looking, like tomatoes splattered across the pavement. An arm across the street, a foot under the rubble. Fine.

How are you?

How are you? The violence of life under Capitalism. Selling time, body and resources in exchange for food and a roof. Exploitation cutting off your breath. Wrapped unmerciful around your throat. Fine.

How are you?

How are you? The dead pigeon by the side of the road. Fine.

How are you?

”You’ve been too sad for too long” she said to me, I will never forget her words. Crushing me with the weight of years filled with fight. Years filled with trying. Only to hear the ugliness I saw in myself seeped in her words.
She saw it too. ”Snap out of it. I can’t be near your sadness anymore” is what she meant. The action that followed made it clear. She never replied. A text left on read.
People think depression makes you miserable. In some ways, that’s true. It swallows everything around you with greed. Some days, all you can see is grief. But if you live with depression it means you have a sensitivity for the full spectrum of life. You feel grief as deeply as you feel joy. Depression makes you so much more aware of the good around you too. People who are threatened by a display of emotions will find anything too much and too sad.

I see beauty everywhere. I seek joy out on purpose. It’s because I see the joy that I cannot ignore the grief. You can only see the light because of the shadow. How can you ignore the very thing that makes your joy more visible?

You say, how can you always speak about the grief?
I say, how can you not always speak about the grief? But the opposite of depression is not positive thinking or happiness.

We are so concerned with balance. With a neat way to grief. With a right way to be sad. But the Heartbroken are feral. They have given up on decorum. The heartbroken are feared. They are avoided. People keep their distance. Oh there she is again, with the same old sadness. They don’t want to hear it. People keep talking, so they don’t have to listen to you, some will try to fix your sadness and ‘cheer’ you up, others will go distant, even up to the point of leaving entirely.

Nothing makes that more clear than when people upgrade in some area of their life. The taste of more, the taste of a new found joy will make the stark difference between the new shiny thing and the heartbreak so visible. Light and shadow. It’s grotesque. It’s ugly. So we turn away. We excuse the turning away with therapy language. Try to ‘protect our peace’, try to be ‘who we hang out with’. We treat it like it’s contagious. Shut people out, don’t mix with the heartbroken. Don’t say its name. The heartbreak might catch you otherwise. If we can’t avoid looking at it, we try to make the contrast look softer. As if there is away around the heartbreak. If the grief doesn’t catch us, the guilt most definitely will. The guilt of living our lives at the expense of another’s. The guilt of not having ‘anything to feel guilty about’. The guilt of trying to hold on to the image of being a ‘good person.’ Don’t you see, avoiding heartbreak will break your heart.

Grief isn’t sexy. It’s not attractive. it’s scary, no matter how much therapy we do, how much ‘work’, it will always always feel like this annoying life appendix we never quite know what to do with.

But everything that isn’t named has more power over us. When we ignore it, hush, don't face it, it hurts us more. The hidden rot causes so much damage. When we speak something out loud, it looses its power. It may even connect us. It makes the hard thing change its shape. I don’t need to explain away my heartbreak, and I can’t. It doesn’t have to be meaningful. Heartbreak enters your world as soon as your heart wakes up from its slumber, when you open your eyes to reality, there is no more ignoring it. Heartbreak will always always be a companion, for the rest of my life.
Not even Jesus healed the heartbroken, Jesus was always just a bandaid. A way to bypass the real guttural pain of being alive. When I was a Christian, joy was superficial, joy was plastic and pain was abstract, was always explained away, prayed away.

I won’t clean up heartbreak, I won’t package my grief neatly, make it palatable to myself or others. It’s murky and disgusting by nature. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what others think of me when they see the gory, gutted version of me. When I talk about heartbreak they turn away. When I wail and they tell me to ‘look on the bright side’ I won’t hide who I am, the depth and breadth of my grief. What is the point? Who am I performing for?

Grief is greedy and it swallows us whole. It oozes into the cracks and into spaces you try to clean. It is sticky, relentless and foul in its weight. It is almost clownish and ridiculous in its stubbornness. The way it grins at you, waiting in the small moments. It claws at you while the world moves on. It turns joy into guilt. It smears itself across memory. It sits on your chest when you try to breathe. It is always there.

I am done packaging heartbreak, trying to make it look instagrammable. Heartbreak is raw, murky, merciless. It follows me into rooms I thought were private. It makes me ugly. It makes me rage. It makes me small. It also makes me immense.

I carry it anyway. Not because it makes sense. Not because it ends. Because it is proof of life. Proof of love. Because living with heartbreak is the only way to live at all.

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