An Ode To The Broken Hearted

Let it hurt. Because the more you feel it now, the less you'll feel it later. Keep breathing. Keep air cycling through your lungs and let that breath reaffirm your life when you feel like you want to die. Care for yourself physically when your emotions are battered and exhausted. Drink water, nap, exercise out the pain and the anger. Keep breathing. Keep feeling. Care for yourself the way you would care for a wounded pet or a beloved child. Know that the shattering of something you wanted is clearing the way for something more, something better. Not a better person but a better fit, a better match.  Know that you are loved, even if it doesn't feel that way. Yes, your heart has been tossed onto the funeral pyre to go up in flames, but the old heart must disintegrate before a new heart can be born.

If you feel like your heart is a blackened, charred cinder of nothing in your chest - congratulations. You tried. You opened up. You exposed your tender bits and even though it feels like a tiger just ripped out your jugular - you won. Because you were brave. Because the only people who find victory are the ones who are also open to taking a beating. Letting someone near your tender, easily bruised heart is the ultimate act of courage.

So lick your wounds and keep letting those emotions rise to the surface because the power of that hurt, that anger, will keep walls from forming, will keep the arteries to your heart from hardening. That means that when the time is right and the person is right, you will get what you always wanted. 

Trust that whatever happens is leading you toward something better, something more suited, something more beautiful. The old and broken must dissolve before the new can sidle in. If you feel that you are the one who's old and broken, allow that to disintegrate too. Because you are as whole and perfect now as you were on the day you were born.

Yes, you loved that person, for their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Of course you did. But they were not the source of that love you felt, they were only its mirror. That love came from you, when you decided to focus it on them and their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Once you've grieved and felt all the painful things we'd prefer not to feel, once you've realized that feeling those feelings makes the feelings dissipate, even if it takes longer than you'd like - that's when you can open up again to the next gorgeous, foible-filled human who catches the strings of your heart.

Love is not limited to one person, one life, one source. Begin to feel love in everything that surrounds you - a home you love, a pet you adore, books that make you happy, the movement of the leaves in the trees. It's everywhere and the more you see it, the more it will find you. Because you were born to be loved and that love surrounds you, even now.

X = Me

Solving for x is astonishingly easy, as it happens. If I am the x factor, then the x factor is me.

Simple, right? Almost brutally so.

What's particularly brutal is that I've known this for years. My brain understood. People told me, books told me, my reasoning skills parsed it out. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you know it. Just because you know something is true doesn't mean your heart or your emotions have any idea what that big gray lump in your skull is prattling on about.

I am the x factor. Not because I'm the reason dating hasn't worked, but because I need to focus my attention on me.

If I am the x factor, that means I get to put all of my time and attention into things that make me happy, instead of going out on first date after first date in a time-consuming attempt to play the numbers and manipulate the system into giving me what I want. I get to put my energy into what feeds me on a deep level, rather than spending my time trying to create some safe, loving space for someone else because I thought that if I make them feel loved, they'll make me feel loved.

Pro tip: That doesn't work.

Trying to force people to feel something - even if it's something we all want to give and experience - is a really bad bet. Good intentions, poor execution. People can feel it when you're coming from a place of need, rather than a place of "here, I have so much that I would like to share it with you." I can't name that place because I haven't found it on the map yet. I'm still looking.

In my efforts to find me in this new map, I have claimed this month. All of it. All of it is mine, henceforth to be known as Be Nice To Amber month. You don't have to be nice to me, but I have to be nice to me. Being nice to me means no dating. No online suitors, no constant checking of the apps, no wondering when he's going to respond. Unless some epic romantic comedy kismet slams into me at the grocery store, I will go on not one single date. Instead, I will focus on what makes me happy, rather than on what someone else is thinking or feeling. A month of fixing up the hobbit hole and going to yoga and reading Harry Potter in the fairy garden that was recently discovered near my house. A month of less caffeine and no self-recrimination. A month of things I rarely allow myself, like manicures and chocolate bars* and afternoons at the beach.

* Lies. I always allow myself chocolate bars.

My month began on June 11 and will end on July 11, my 36th birthday. Everything feels better already. Lighter, clearer, like I'm more me than I have been in a long time.

Maybe the best way to date is not to date at all.

Solve for X

In five years, no one I've dated has lasted longer than six weeks. They slide out of my life like water down a windshield, droplets that leave shadows of themselves behind long after the liquid has evaporated. I am romantic teflon.  My brain looks for patterns, because that's what brains do. 

I sleep with them too soon and they disappear. I show too much emotion and they disappear. I ask for something and they disappear. I try to deepen what we have and they disappear. 

I am the x factor in all my relationships. Since I'm the only common denominator in my experience, I need to figure it out.

Solve for x.

But solving for x feels heavy, exhausting, full of self-recrimination. If not full-on existential despair than at least a solid dose of melodrama.

But when you want something enough, you will brave what you'd rather avoid. So I dig through the layers, sorting through my psyche and its tender bits like I sort through my books, hauling some to Goodwill but picking most of them up and then putting them back down again, not sure if I still need them. Maybe this book will help me some day. Maybe this book will be the answer to a problem. Maybe this was meant to be mine. So I continue to haul heavy boxes of books between apartments like I drag along the ghosts of past relationships.

Solve for x.

I'm scared of losing myself.

I'm afraid I can't have what I want.

I'm too much or not enough. Either way, I'm not right.

The specters of my past experiences continue to rise, lighter, gray like smoke instead of sticky black tar, but still rising: the idea that emotion will frighten people away, that communication will make everything go bad. The idea that I'm not enough. Or that I'm really just too much and who has time for that? Either way, I'm not right.

But then I begin to wonder if maybe I'm looking at the wrong piece of the equation. If I solve for x, I get a relationship with someone I adore. But maybe I need to be solving the equation that will lead me to myself, rather than to the idea of another.

Fork in the Road

My dad’s sister got a reading from a psychic in San Francisco a few months after he died. Because that’s what we do in my family.

Dad showed up, as a spirit or a ghost or whatever you get to be after you're dead, and the psychic said he was wearing jogging shorts. As far as I know, my father never owned a pair of jogging shorts in his life. He was fond of joking that running was the worst way to be healthy. “Sure you live longer,” he’d say, “but you have to spend all that extra time jogging.” Now that I spend a lot of time circling trails, I wonder how much longer he would have lived, and how much more peaceful he would have felt, if he had been a runner.

As she told me this, writing off dad's curious post-death jogging shorts as psychic dissonance, I remembered a thought I had months before he passed away. Dad lived in Swall Meadows, right next to Inyo National Park. After spending the day in the care center with him, I would run in the shadows of the sunset-tipped mountains. This thought came to me in the middle of one of my afternoon runs, feeling weirdly like a vision - an idea I’m really not comfortable with, minus Peyote and a Native American chieftain or two. So I wrote it off as the product of mild heat stroke and my new and strange obsession with running. At the time, Dad had already started to talk about dying, but we wouldn’t accept it for months yet. But as I was running through the desert, I saw two paths for my father.

One, the widest and bleakest, the path he eventually chose, was of him spiralling down into the worst the human experience can offer - a broken body and a mind that can’t heal because both are so separated from their own processes and emotions that they can’t find their way back.

The second path, much fainter, showed my father running. Conquering what ailed him until he was healthy enough to become one of those sun-leathered old dudes pounding the pavement in running shoes with wet bandanas tied around their grizzled heads.

Knowing now how badly off he was by the time he fell, I don’t know if that was possible. Maybe what I was seeing was a path that had forked off many years previous and was no longer an option. Maybe it was a path he could have chosen. I don’t know. But I saw him running. I saw him healthy. I saw him beating back the demons with sweat and salt and endless miles of asphalt.

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I'm writing a book about my father's death. I'll be sharing pieces of the Dead Dad Book as I work on it, because writing here and on Twitter led me to this book in the first place.

Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

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This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe.