Back Around The Other Way
It is such an absurd concept to me that we are all just walking around, hearts ready to be broken. That no amount of inner work or self awareness, no amount of wonderful people in our lives or healthy choices will hand us unbreakable hearts. This feels like a wild conclusion we have just accepted. Or maybe, more accurately, a wild premise we have been given without a return policy.
I am only 34, and my heart feels exhaustingly familiar with heartbreak. This too seems absurd. Statistically, I have decades left walking around with this breakable heart, where no amount of proper planning can keep it fully safe. What the actual fuck.
This feels like one of those “I did not consent to this” moments. A time where I want to look at my precious parents and say, “Did you even consider that this might be too much for me? That you may have raised a strong woman but that this world does not give out strong hearts?”
I’m here again. Soaking in a steaming bath with a bone-deep heartache, a friend I have not missed but I guess I should have expected. Like the great aunt with the high-pitched voice and the bad politics, the one who can’t catch the hint that it would be preferable if she didn’t come visit twice a year yet you still hold hope each time you bid her farewell that maybe, this time, she will stay home come March.
It’s nonsensical this relative lack of control we have. Are the choices really fortressed beings or ripped open chests?
Today, no amount of “what is causing you to hurt so deeply is also what allows you to experience deep joy and beauty” will satisfy the absolute shock of this news that we will forever be broken open. No—broken open is too poetic, too cleaned up and pretty.
Ripped open.
That is what I am trying to get my head around. That if I am going to live here (and it certainly seems that is where I find myself), I should prepare my chest, sewn up and finally scarring over, to be ripped apart again every so often.
Is no one else appalled by this setup? Have we just made a pact to not speak of this unspeakable truth because we are helpless to it—do we not talk about the elephant in the room because we can’t figure out how to make it leave? It sits on our scarred chests, and no amount of acknowledgement will budge this unbearable beast.
Is this why I am drawn to a resurrection narrative? Not because I deeply believe but rather desperately plead? My god, I need there to be something after the ripping open, if only to survive another moment of flesh torn from my just healed heart. Do I believe in the resurrection not because I feel confident a man rose from the dead, but rather I know I cannot survive another inner death if there is not hope that life is coming again?
And I hate even my own words on this. I reject this heartbreak. I find so little comfort in past resurrections while I am in the thick of this death. Maybe I can get my brain on board with the truths of past survival and the sweet mixed in with current bitter, but good freaking luck getting my body on board.
There’s a reason that, out of all the ways we could describe excruciating pain, we choose heartbreak—because if we connect with our bodies in the middle of death for even the smallest moment, we find our actual physical chest hollowed out. There is a reason that “my bones ache” means so much more than “I have arthritis”—for when our worlds fall apart every inch of our insides feels physically, literally crushed.
So it’s not that I don’t believe, “First the pain, then the rising.” (Glennon Doyle) It’s simply that, tonight, the knowledge of my prior pains and resurrections seem to be very little comfort to my splayed open chest and buckling bones.
And, at least for the moment, the fact that we are all just shaking our heads in agreement with a six-word truth like this instead of being like, “Hey! How the heck do we address this whole ‘The pain is going to keep coming’ part?” is deeply unsettling to this heartbroken human. Can someone not pick this up for their dissertation and give us something more than a historical figure emptying a grave and a brilliant leader reminding us that we have survived and we will survive again? I don’t want to survive.
I have done my surviving and I would like to move on and instead we are on this damn spiral staircase moving upward but in the most backward way. And now I am back around to the shadowed side of the staircase, where dying creatures hide in untidy corners and the smell is the worst kind of familiar and the effort and time it takes to climb back around to where the sun shines makes me want to curl up in my own untidy corner and let death overtake me. And I am so glad that my people are over and above me, one flight up in the sun saying “Keep walking.” And also I want them to tell me how I could have avoided the dark side of this journey and they are telling me this wasn’t my fault and now I want to jump off the staircase all together because what do you mean I am back around to the heartbreak even though I am healthy and choosing my best self. This is completely unfair and unreasonable and if you will just tell me what I did wrong I can do it right next time and then I won’t end up here again.
So now my bones aren’t just aching; they are on fire because this is utter bullshit that you can do the right things and get cracked open.
No no no.
I fought too hard to get to the sunny side. I dragged broken legs up flights and flights of stairs to find the rising, and I did, and it was beautiful. But everyone forgot to tell me that if I was going to keep going I would eventually have to round the shadow corners again. That if I wanted to keep looking up and into the sun I would have to keep moving and that moving is inherently risky and so my legs might get broken again and today I am certainly wondering if the landing I was on was enough and if I could have found what I was looking for without risking stumbling into the stench-filled crevices again.
It is such an absurd concept to me that we are all just walking around, hearts ready to be broken.