Enjoy the heartbreak while you can ❤️‍🩹

nuggets of sweet, sad love

Today at the gym, my trainer told me that his daughter got dumped by her boyfriend. Her first breakup. He was gearing up to offer fatherly wisdom and comfort. Trying to be helpful, I chimed in with, “Tell her that what’s meant for her can’t miss her.” He nodded knowingly, affirming that it’s a belief he also shares, but was doubtful that it’s a lesson his daughter can internalize at this stage of life.

That small interaction got me thinking about the role of pain in our lives. How being young actually kind of sucks, because you haven’t existed enough to acquire the wisdom that brings about more ease in life. 

I revisited a journal I kept in 2013, when I went through my first devastating breakup. Of course, I documented it in excruciating detail. I moved through that portal so haphazardly, exacerbating my own suffering along the way through the harmful stories I was telling myself. My hyperbolic, scorched words demonstrated so clearly to me how suffering - if we merge with it, let ourselves be defined by it - can steer the course of our lives. 

It makes a lot of sense to me now why fear is such a pervasive, potent force in our lives. Suffering begets fear. Suffering makes you scared of more suffering, so we orient our lives around avoiding it. It leads us to close off our hearts, forego risks, and leave so much unsaid. 

You may know by now that I’m deeply fascinated by the mysterious, meandering path of healing. I am endlessly pursuing new ways to give language to the magic of healing, so that I can more fully understand and access it, and hopefully pass it onwards. A new definition of healing is crystallizing in my mind as I write this essay. It goes something like: healing lives within the shift from avoiding suffering to befriending it.

What I’m getting at can probably be best summed up by these 3 minutes of dialogue from the show Louie. (I know Louis C.K. got canceled or whatever, but just go with it):

Enjoy the heartbreak while you can. What a mantra. Love doesn’t complete its turn around the spiral at the last kiss, but at the other side of heartache’s pain. When we allow love to contain suffering along with joy, we let it be a more expansive force. And who’s mad at the expansion of love?

Life’s potency gets diluted by fear. I wonder how many great loves, deep connections, and adventures never bloomed because of an avoidance of discomfort or pain. 

What happens when we re-orient our lives away from seeing joy and suffering, or love and heartbreak, as binaries in polar opposition to each other, but rather as dual, interdependent, intertwined forces? 

Everyone’s favorite representation of opposing, interconnected forces

I invite you to look back on your life’s pain points. Not to dwell, but to assess. Sometimes looking back is the best way forward. Looking back at the struggle, the heartache, the doubt, the failures. That’s what perspective is all about. To see today’s struggle, heartache, and failure not as constants, but points of relativity. Do I struggle more meaningfully today? Does my heart ache more wisely? Do I embrace failure as a domino waiting to fall, revealing the next swath of my life’s map? Measuring growth, I theorize, dwells among the answers to these questions.

I’m a sucker for coming full circle, so I’ll end this essay where it started: the gym. Strength training is all about breaking down muscle so it can grow back stronger. The heart is like that too. It is a muscle after all. Our hearts need to take a beating once in a while to reach their fullest expression. So chase nuggets of love for all they contain, their sweetness and sadness. And when heartbreak strikes, enjoy it while you can.