Monday, May 14, 2012

Heartbreak Warfare

It is one of those weird singularities of our species. A heart can break and still keep going, in perfect working condition. Because of the relative redundancy and impracticality of the phrase, one might wonder where it even came from and why it is even in use, however pondering about it for a few seconds you already know why. It's a common phenomenon that occurs to almost every single person born into this world, and sooner or later the experience itself denies even explanation.

Wikipedia defines: A broken heart (or heartbreak) is a common metaphor used to describe the intense emotional pain or suffering one feels after losing a loved one, whether through death, divorce, breakup, physical separation, or romantic rejection.

It's weird, isn't it? It's all about what goes on in your head and somehow it's the heart that breaks. And weirdly, even though all the heart does in essence is pump blood, when your heart breaks sometimes it strangely feels like it's hurting. A pain just spreads outward and seeps into every pore of your being; your heart hurts, your head hurts, your very bones hurt - to the very tips of every finger and in every breath that you take.

It is very fascinating, this connection between the mind and the body. And it makes you wonder, since it's all entangled with this idea called love, if perhaps it's all connected to the soul. Can the soul hurt? 


Even as I write this, I skim through Wikipedia's excerpt on the broken heart and I come across this piece:

For many people having a broken heart is something that may not be recognized at first, as it takes time for an emotional or physical loss to be fully acknowledged. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson states:

"Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This does not mean they have no feelings. Sigmund Freud once speculated that a man could be in love with a woman for six years and not know it until many years later. Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could not have verbalized what he did not know. He had the feelings, but he did not know about them. It may sound like a paradox — paradoxical because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are consciously aware of feeling. As Freud put it in his 1915 article The Unconscious: "It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it. Yet it is beyond question that we can 'have' feelings that we do not know about."

I have been of the opinion that certain things happen to us so that we may learn; and if we do not learn, they repeat until we do. I have approached hardships with the belief that if it hasn't been working for me thus far for whichever mode of operation I had been employing, perhaps it is time to change my approach. For all those young crushes gone unrequited and resulted in forlorn poems, or the times we've fooled ourselves that infatuation was love, or that we fell in love just for the sake of experiencing love itself without regard to the person it was applied to, or perhaps just those friendships that made you wish for more, or you end up fooling yourself that the something more is there, and in any case ended badly, perhaps all those little moments of heartbreak gear you up for the real thing. So that maybe one day when your heart really breaks, you won't shed a tear. But then again, would that be a true heartbreak?

And what a headache all this nonsense about heartbreak is. Makes you really wish we were all robots. Then you can't have feelings. "What feelings?" No feelings, no pain. No time wasted in sobbing your heart out, no time wasted in sleepless nights, no getting choked up with random thoughts or being depressed and unproductive.

I've been thinking that to be heartbroken is a form of self-pity. I mean, it's just because you wanted something and you didn't get it - so it's your own selfishness that's doing the crying, right? We could give ourselves the same pep-talk we'd give anyone else "Get up, move on, it'll all be better in no time, have faith!"  and yet we refuse to entertain such thoughts because we want to feel that pain.

If we didn't, we'd be letting go of that which we wanted all too easily and all too soon. We want to jump into the mud and cover ourselves so that it's obvious to anyone looking that we're distraught and maybe that someone we wanted to love us would have pity. "Oh, are you really unable to live without me? Geegollygosh. Okay then I shall grace you with my presence for ever lasting eternity, just so you're not in pain."

Then comes that issue of love being unconditional and selfless. That it's for the sake of their happiness, not yours. We so then "let go", but all the while listening to every sad song and thinking morbid thoughts, and sometimes even become micro-stalkers. "I've let go, but hey they've GOT to see my pain." I mean, they caused it after all.

Nuh uh. In most cases, our own stupid feelings pretty much did. If it were their fault it wouldn't even be half as hard to let go. They cheated on you? Good riddance! They lied to you? Good riddance! You never needed such rubbish in your life anyway. But when it's unbearable and your heart is breaking in 293141592653 pieces, usually its because you broke your own heart. You let yourself believe in more than  existed and you let yourself dream beyond what you ought to have.

But then again, if every single person has experienced this phenomenon, there ought to be various different accounts of it. Imagine the vast library that could be produced if every single person wrote about every heartbreak they experienced. That's just the beauty about feelings, they provide fuel for paintings, words, songs, poems, stories and - hey, whaddya know-  even blogs.