There are some people for whom high school really is easy. I believe that to be true. (I also know, with the certainty that time provides, that other times will be less easy for them.) But there are so many people—even perfect-looking ones, even easygoing ones, even admired and envied ones—for whom high school is filled with secret shames and terrible truths. And the only way to find your way to those people is to start opening up about yourself.
I will never forget sitting in the car with my husband, listening to the radio and hearing the story of a girl who was at the same tiny school as me for an entire six years talk about a life so much like mine. I will never forget the feeling of loss I had, that I could have been less lonely, had one of us broken through the shame and owned our stories. If I could change anything about high school, it would not be grinding with Russ and enjoying him grabbing my butt. It wouldn’t even be dating that terrible guy or biting the palm of my hand. If I could change anything, I would change that it was all a secret. I would have owned my story. I would have taken the things that scared me most, and found safe people to be honest with them about. I would have said, “I am struggling with anxiety. I am struggling with some self-harm. I have a boyfriend who isn’t safe. I have a parent who isn’t well.” I would have tried harder to own those things, and to take comfort in the moments of connection that inevitably come from opening up and sharing the most vulnerable bits of yourself.
In my life now, I speak about my problems openly. It happened slowly. I wrote a book about OCD, and I got asked questions about my own mental health. It became easier to say “I struggle with anxiety” than to pretend it away. At some point, it simply gets easier to be honest.
And with that honesty comes power. When it’s something you own instead of something you fear, it’s less shameful. And strangely, the more I talk about my own mental health struggles, or the struggles within my family, the more people come forward with their own. Once that door opens, people walk through it. Once that door opens, everyone can breathe a little easier. Once that door opens, it’s a little less lonely.
I urge you to walk through the door.
I urge you to walk through the door as soon as you can, because as far as I know, it’s the only way out.
Walking right there beside you,
Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.
—If I Stay, Gayle Forman
Dear Heartbreak,
I have never felt your abuse as others have. Given that I am seventeen years old and have not yet liked someone in a romantic way or even had a crush on anyone, I’ve never been tormented by you, nor felt your pain. I’ve never cried my eyes out or eaten my feelings away because someone I loved didn’t love me back. I’ve never gone through weeks of depression to get over a breakup, and I’ve never felt that horrendous ache in my chest at knowing that my love had been wasted, used up on someone who couldn’t even return the favor. In all my years, I’ve never felt your fiery hand upon my cheek, or collapsed beneath your harsh words. But I’ve also never gotten that fluttery feeling in my stomach that I’ve been told people get when they fall in love. I’ve never had any kind of romantic relationship with anyone, I’ve never heard the words “I love you” in a romantic way. I’ve never had one smell, one jacket, that I’ve loved more than all the rest, nor have I stayed up all night thinking about a special someone. I’ve never had a single person in my life that I could share a special, unique love with. I haven’t even had my first kiss. This is all because you’re like a clingy, abusive boyfriend who refuses to let me get close with anyone of the opposite gender, and you control me with threats of violence. It’s what you do to everyone.
Our relationship, Heartbreak, is toxic. You threaten me with pain and depression, and I bow down to your wishes and allow you to retain your control over me. You raise your hand, and I cower—too scared to risk confronting you or your sick ways. I’m so afraid that something bad might happen that I give up experiencing the best feelings that this world has to offer. Even now, I walk down the hallways at my school with my nose stuck in a book because the realities in the pages are much better than the ones in real life. In these fictional stories, the characters, more often than not, have these perfect relationships based on love at first sight, then they spend the rest of their days living happily ever after together. These realities are the ones that I grew up learning about, the ones that I fell in love with. Everyone in these fictional worlds has perfect love lives, because you do not exist there. It’s all love and almost no heartbreak, and even when you do rear your ugly head, love still prevails. The pair work out their problems and banish you from their world. It’s the way it should be.
However, in the real world, you plague most people with insecurity, self-doubt, and fear. In the real world, you control the girl who rants about all the bad things her boyfriend does every day, the boy who takes his own life because his girlfriend broke up with him, and even the one who won’t open up to anyone because she was violated. I see you in more places than I want to and I can see the knife that you have placed right above everyone’s heart, threatening to plunge deep if they get too close to another. I know that you make love not nearly as pleasant as it seems to be. There are ups and downs, guys who use girls, and girls who tear out guys’ hearts. I am terrified of being caught in the middle of that. I am terrified that, because of you, the first guy I fall in love with isn’t going to love me back because I don’t have a tiny waist, a flat stomach, or perfect hair like the media says girls need to have. I’m scared that I’m going to reach out, make myself vulnerable for the first time ever, and he’ll just look at me like I’m crazy, like there’s no way that he could ever like me. I am afraid that any guy I have a crush on is going to shove you in my face faster than anyone around me can warn me about the jerk I decided to love. I am scared of you because you exist, and so I want to protect myself and my fragile heart from the abuse that you threaten if I step out of line.
Yet at the same time, I want to fall in love, and I want to experience that fluttering feeling. I want to have someone special in my life, someone who’s more than just a friend. Nevertheless, you’re determined to keep me away from love. Your abusive ways continue to scare me, Heartbreak. I want to experience romance, but you hold me back. You have held onto me for my entire life, and I don’t know when you’re going to let me go. But no more, Heartbreak. Here I say, No more. I am done sacrificing one of the best things in the world to avoid your anger. Living in fear of you is not living. Life requires risk, and I am ready to risk my heart to be able to love. I will no longer allow myself to be scared of your threats, and the chance that I might feel your abuse. If you decide to lay it on me, then so be it. I can take it. I am tired of being afraid of you. I am tired of living in the prison that you have created for me. Therefore, I’m breaking up with you. No longer will you be my abusive, controlling boyfriend. No longer will you keep me from reaching out and taking a chance. I am not yours. You, Heartbreak, do not have any control over me anymore. I am breaking up with you. And there is nothing that you can do about it.
Love,
Confident, 17
THE TEACHER OF ALL THINGS
Dear Confident,
I must inform you that I think your letter got lost in the mail. The letter you have written is to Heartbreak, but really, the entity to which you are speaking is Experience.
Everything you write in your wrongly-addressed-to-heartbreak letter is really a beckoning call for experience. Even the fears before which you tremble—pain and rejection and heartbreak—are actually further proof of your deep desire for experience. Confusing, I know. Who wants pain and rejection and heartbreak? But I suspect you already know, Confident, that the good and the bad, the joy and the pain, are buy-one-get-one-free, like it or not. So the thing you crave and the thing you fear are one and the same. You want experience. You want life. You want more.
You are seventeen years old. I don’t say this to you to minimize your wisdom. Ther
e’s an adage that as babies, we are born knowing everything, and then we spend our lives forgetting. So at seventeen, you are so much closer to knowing everything than I am, so much more in touch with wisdom.
What I mean by you being seventeen is that your days in this world are relatively brief. You are a puppy. A spring pea. A cherry blossom. Your time on this planet is still so fresh. I know it might not seem like that, particularly on those lonely weekend nights when you feel the whole world is doing something amazing while you binge episodes of Dance Moms, or those dreary afternoons when you’re dying for the final bell to ring. But trust me as someone who has been seventeen and is now no longer seventeen, you’re still a relative newbie.
And you crave experience. You ache for it. You are practically turning yourself inside out with hunger for it. This fluttering you talk about, that’s your inchoate desire for experience, beating its wings to get out of the cocoon. Right on time, I might add. Some of the milestones we impose on life are pretty arbitrary (Twenty-one to drink? Twenty-five to rent a car? Why, exactly?). But there is a reason that, at eighteen, you legally become an adult. It’s because in body, mind, and spirit, you are evolving and changing. You are preparing to leave childhood behind.
Forgive me if the word childhood chafes or feels condescending. I don’t mean it as such. I know at seventeen you’ve long since stopped feeling like some little kid. But those butterfly wings beating inside you, they prove my point. That’s the adult in you, raring to go, right at the time the world is ready to open up to you in ways you maybe can’t even imagine.
You are preparing yourself, not for what you don’t want, but for what you do.
How am I so confident that you really meant to send your letter to Experience? Because you told me so. You told me by recounting the experiences you have not yet had—first kiss—and the experiences you are terrified of—broken heart. And the experiences you have enjoyed, sometimes frustratingly secondhand, through books. (Though I would beg to differ with your assertion that “everyone in these fictional worlds has perfect love lives, because you [heartbreak] do not exist there.” As a creator of many of these fictional worlds, let me point out that heartbreak is always there, lying in wait, stalking like a deadly leopard. As authors, our job is to beat our characters with a misery stick until they bleed and our readers bleed for them.)
But I think what you’re seeing in these fictional worlds, what you’re perhaps envious of, is not the perfect love lives or absence of heartbreak, but the presence of such profound and intense experience.
And here I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Some of the books you read, some of the books I write, are kind of full of shit. Not that the emotions or characters or circumstances are untrue but that the likelihood of such intense and pure experience happening at the age of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen is small. And thank God for that. Great fiction seldom makes happy living. You have your whole life to experience immense joy and immense pain, the highs of love, the lows of heartbreak. It will happen. Take that as a promise or a threat.
Outside of books, there is little romance to having your initiation to loss and grief and tragedy come early. That you have not experienced tragedy yet—and perhaps you have, but since you didn’t mention it, I’m going to assume you haven’t—might make you feel dull or normal or unexceptional, but I’m grateful on your behalf. Maybe one day, you’ll be grateful on your behalf, too.
I am not so old and unwise that I can’t remember how it felt to be thirteen, walking around the mall, because, in suburbia, this is what we did, and I’d look around at the shops and the Valley Girls (I grew up in that valley) and the houses and feel a tug. The tug whispered: There has to be more than this. More than tract houses and swimming pools and Contempo Casuals and football games. My world felt small then and I was already beginning to outgrow it.
I started taking tiny explorations, spending hours each weekend at the local record store, where the music geeks took me in as some sort of mascot (a lucrative one; I spent all my money on rare vinyl Eyeless in Gaza imports no one else cared to buy). The record store was across the street from the mall, not two miles from my house, but it was a portal of sorts. I went through that portal and on to the next one, taking two-hour bus trips to Melrose Avenue, which back then was a haven of punk subculture, and from there to dark, smoky clubs, where I found further escape, more more, in music. I’d watch bands and come away ears ringing, heart bursting, desire about to breach its dam. Once after a Waterboys show, I took my mom’s sewing shears and chopped off my hair because that desire for experience and truth and things I could not name was thrumming so powerfully inside of me, I needed some way to let it out.
I am not so old and unwise that I can’t remember how it felt to be fifteen and desperate to fall in love. My friends had been doing this for years now, it seemed. I’d watched them fall into what we all decided were Forever Loves only to see those Forever Loves implode so dramatically and, my God, I coveted it all. I wanted all that emotion, all that devotion, all that feeling, even if it came with the shit. Or especially if it came with the shit. Pain was romantic, too. People wrote songs about pain.
I wanted love and, later, sex and the melding of the human heart, and in pursuit of that I fell in love, hopelessly, endlessly, dramatically, with a series of boys who did not know I existed. They did not know I existed because they were either rock stars (oh, that Bono was already married, such heartbreak) or fictional (Rochester was my first bad boyfriend) or friends of my older sister, guys who treated me like the kid that I was, and guys who likely had no idea that I was the one mailing them song lyrics. (I may be young but I’m a whole lotta fun. Seriously. I did that. You are the first person I have ever admitted that to.) Now that I cop to this publicly, it looks a bit like stalker behavior and in retrospect I don’t know what I would’ve done had they responded—I was like a dog that chases cars; I had no clue what to do if I caught one, and luckily I didn’t. But I wrote these letters and did these silly-in-retrospect things because my feelings were so big, so intense, I needed to pin them somewhere. I needed to imagine what it would feel like to catch a car so that when I did one day, I’d be ready to do whatever it is dogs do when they catch cars.
I am not so old and unwise that I can’t remember how it felt to be nineteen, getting my first tattoo inked onto me by a beautiful Dutch man with perfect bone structure (maybe that’s redundant; all Dutch men have good bone structure) who went by the name of Igor Mortis. I remember relishing the pain and being giddy afterward because that tiny tragedy-comedy mask on the outside of my right ankle felt like an insurance policy. At that age, I had begun to glimpse, even to touch and taste, the more I so desired, and I knew I never wanted to go back. The tattoo was tiny, big enough to horrify my parents but too small for anyone else to notice. But in 1988, when tattoos were still mostly the domain of bikers and rockers, it felt like a radical demarcation on my skin, a no-backsies before/after, a contract with myself that I would always pursue experience.
All of which is to say I fully understand your longing for more. It is an elusive thing to catch, particularly at seventeen when annoying adults are telling you to just slow down and enjoy your youth and be patient, but that’s easy for them to say because they are not bursting out of their very skin, quivering like a racehorse at the gate, needing to break out of the safety of childhood and into the more perilous waters of adult life.
It’s coming, Confident. It’s coming. I promise you. Take that as a threat or a promise.
It’s both, actually. Which is why it makes sense that you’re scared. Of falling for the wrong person who will dump you. Of having your ego wounded because someone doesn’t find you desirable. Of having your heart broken. And more scared of not having any of these experiences. I totally understand all those fears. Let me try to assuage some of them.
You will get your heart broken. You will be rejected. You will feel lonely and alone. You will experience pain.
Now, if this letter
were really meant for Heartbreak, telling you that would be cruel and sadistic. But because I am fairly sure you’re actually writing to Experience, I’m hoping it won’t.
If you never felt hunger, Confident, you would never know the precise pleasure of satisfying your appetite with delicious food. If you never experienced rainy days, you would not relish the feel of the spring sun on your face.
Joy and pain are not unrelated. They are not opposites or mortal enemies. They are conjoined twins. If you know joy, you will invariably know pain. You will break up with someone you loved. You will be dumped by a dear friend. You will sit at the bedside of sick loved ones. You will attend funerals, some of them for people who died before their time.
This is the price of admission, my friend. If you want experience, you must accept it. And I know that’s scary. Nobody wants to feel loss and hurt, and I’m not ever going to tell you that hurt is noble. Hurt is hurt. And it can hurt like a motherfucker.
But there’s a mitigation to the pain. Once again, it comes in the thing you want: experience.
Experience will teach you that life is a wheel: Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. And wherever you are, it won’t last.
Experience will prove to you that you are resilient. You can survive what might seem unimaginable. Experience will teach you that sometimes the worst things have unexpected grace.
Experience will show you that often we are strongest in our broken places.
It can also teach you about the person you want to be, the life you want to lead. How many times do you touch a hot stove before you realize it’s not a good idea? How many times will you date a jerk before you decide you deserve better? How many times will you be dumped by a friend before you decide to find a different kind of friend? How many times will you second-guess your instincts before you learn to trust yourself?
Dear Heartbreak Page 16
