Breaking up with People I've Loved

Alchemy 12-04-2022

Joy is Now listeners will remember an illuminating conversation I had last March with artist, writer, and founder of People I’ve Loved Carissa Potter Carlson about Schadenfreude (you can listen to the episode here. Carissa speaks so beautifully to thorny and often overlooked topics of all kinds, facing them head on in a beautiful and loving way. She is so gifted in this process of illuminating the difficult to decipher. It's magical. 

While Carissa approaches a variety of often messy topics regarding the human condition in her art and Substack newsletter , her newest musings HOW TO HEAL FROM HEARTBREAK (or at least feel less broken), explored with writer Vera Kachouh, take us on a new and deeply empathic exploration of heartbreak. 

Heartbreak is rough. And inevitable. I’m guessing when I mention the word heartbreak I am not alone in my ability to immediately conjure up a face, date, time, place and just awful details of the multiple times my heart was beat to shit by someone who didn't feel for me what I felt for them in the same kind of way. Love is grief and grief is love, but heartbreak often arrives with very specific emotional partners so to speak, that other types of grief may lack. Rejection, questions of self-worth, surprise, a tortured wondering and words unspoken when things end suddenly. Oftentimes closure is not an option. 

Personally, these badly behaving emotional buddies to heartbreak have split me open. In my young teenage years I remember actually thinking a boyfriend broke up with me because I must have been too tall. Because changing my height would have been possible?! 

So often I turned heartbreak on myself, as though I was lacking. And in my own psychology that inevitably meant I was not enough of or too much of something to be loved.  Whether it was height, looks, humor, smarts, any and all the things, I imagine that those same old shadows would come creeping up again now. I still live through them at times.  

Out of all my breakups, only once did I think it had anything to do with the other person. And this thought only arrived when he tried to sleep with me at a party when the woman he broke up with me to be with was running late. By two hours. Only then did I think perhaps our breakup was not because of me being too much or too little of anything. He was who he was and he was not for me. Still it took me moving 3,000 miles away, starting an entirely new life and being happily alone for 8 months to be able to open my heart to someone else. Wild.

Moving in a sense saved me from the complexities of heartbreak. The running into him at other parties, the friends who were lost when we broke up. The surprise of the ones who stuck around. Heartbreak can be so isolating because it is seldom we grieve the loss of a singular person. There are friends, family, and pets who disappear from our lives overnight. What do we do with this grief? It is hardly ever addressed. 

I wish I had this book to work through not only after breakups, but also after hoping, wishing for and feeling for someone who just didn’t feel it back. Those are heartbreaks too, yet we seldom provide space to process the incongruency of emotions. Unrequited love sucks too.

Like all things Carissa explores, heartbreak offers no easy answer, has many different answers, and the process of healing may be forever incomplete. Carissa’s genius is so often found in the places where closure is elusive. Grief, illness, love, and now of course heartbreak. 

This book is so damn good. 

xxx

LAS