Lingering in Doorways

In December, I purchased a notebook. A red Moleskine, the standard size with lined pages. I bought it because I was going through heartbreak, and though I wanted to talk about the heartbreak, there was no one I could conceivably talk about it with — at least no one I thought knew enough about the situation to understand. Because I was so tight-lipped about my past relationship, even to my friends, I couldn’t bring myself to announce that it had officially run its course — and the idea of having to cycle through the events that led to this, over and over again, was exhausting. So I sucked it up. I learned to suffer the crash-outs in private. And I bought a new notebook, on the day I realized it was well and truly over, for the sole purpose of freezing this feeling and suspending the moment somehow on paper. One should never waste a good crisis. And yet I poured my heart out — thinking, as writers do, that the least I could do was get some good material out of the situation — to find that everything I produced was embarrassing, far too intimate to be shared, and that to do so would be like stripping myself naked. I knew that I could never allow myself to be so vulnerable, and that I was only able to endure it this time because I was certain the only eyes it would ever reach were my own. It’s a shame, I remember thinking. That was probably some of the best writing I’ve ever done.

Honesty is a trait we prize in artists. We adore those who can submit to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known. Some of my favorite artists — here I’m thinking of Lizzy McAlpine with “Pushing It Down and Praying” and Leith Ross with “I’d Have To Think About It” — earned their spots for this precise reason: We recognize courage when we see it. And speaking your truth, allowing yourself to be seen and scrutinized by others, requires a lethal amount. I want to be a fearless writer, the kind that wears their heart on their sleeve; I too want to be able to divulge it all, the good and the bad and the ugly. That’s the kind of nerve that turns your good into great. But I imagine it would not be unlike pinning myself to a biology table, to surrender to being poked and prodded by alien hands, and to bring the most secret parts of me out into the light. The truth is that I’m terrified of being stripped bare. I balk at the thought of being perceived. Which, at least from a writing perspective, is really the only thing that matters — it’s quite literally the job. It’s what you sign up for.

I’m not opposed to interiority. I can write about personal things. In fact, I only ever write about personal things. I write about depression and healing, about loneliness and friendship. But I don’t touch romantic love. There are reasons for this, the first being that romantic love, the very nature of it, is humiliating. It’s a state of real vulnerability, an admission of sorts: Your mind and body and soul are exposed, your center of gravity has shifted. You submit to being consumed by a feeling, and by extension a person, and by publicizing this you reveal that you are capable of such primitivity. The second is that everything I want to say about love and heartbreak, someone else has already said, and probably said better — in lovelier, more elegant words. I know my pining pales in comparison to Richard Siken. And why attempt to write about the complexities of a break-up when “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” exists? It’s already been done. I’ve consumed so much romantic media that at one point, writing about love felt fraudulent — like I was a child playing dress-up, pretending I knew the first thing about an exclusively grown-up matter. I didn’t know which feelings were regurgitated ideas, my concept of love rather than the thing itself, and which were real.

The third thing is that, when a relationship is so private, and when a majority of it transpired on the phone and behind closed doors, there’s a certain reluctance to lay it bare. It feels like a betrayal. What was once just yours and just mine becomes yet another thing for other people to speculate about. It’s more convenient, for all parties involved, to go on as though it never happened in the first place. But on the other hand, to not talk about it, as someone who talks about everything, feels like a disservice — to exile two whole years of my life to a graveyard of memories. Those two years are a substantial part of who I am. I can wipe every trace of it off the Internet, and fill my mind with enough distractions to keep it from wandering all I like, but the lump in my throat will still be there even when the source of it has long gone. Unless I permit myself to accept the discomfort of reliving the past, and to sit with my emotions and unfold them in silence, then the grief will grow and grow until it inevitably implodes.

In English class today we read and discussed “Courage” from “Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words” by David Whyte. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences, he writes. The French Philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. To have courage, then, is to love. To love in spite of and despite, to see that love through, to walk hand-in-hand with it even to its end. To be courageous is to persist. It’s easier said than done, but it’s a nobler undertaking than we give ourselves credit for.

So this is my truth. Or a digestible part of it, at least. I loved, and I loved deeply and maybe even a little irresponsibly, but after all the time that has passed I’ve decided that I have no regrets about it. I don’t mind that my heart got broken in the process. I try not to mourn the parts of me I gave away. I still, despite everything, have gratitude — I know it was a privilege to have been able to experience the madness so young, and to have known what it was like to fight for something, even for a little while. It was an even greater gift to realize when it was time to walk away. To know when something has served its purpose and move forward with grace. I like to think that one day, in some distant future, I will be able to think of the bad days without flinching, that I will see something that should stir my gut and not have my first instinct be to run. But in the mean time, I will resolve to keeping my heart breakable, to allow myself to feel deeply enough for it to bleed into my work. I will remain soft and kind. And I will allow myself to be vulnerable, to be seen, and to revel in what a uniquely human pleasure it is to finally be stripped bare.