Dear Heartbreak Read online

  If I like that person, and they don’t like me back, and they’re not the love of my life after all, I will die.

  I did not die in any of these cases, and you won’t, either. But you already know that. And besides, even if there is a steep cliff on the other side of that wall, it doesn’t mean that you have to jump. Step back. Breathe. That wall is gone, so enjoy the scenery.

  Love of Your Life is staring at the back of your head, enjoying the scenery. You can feel it, and in that moment, you feel even more exposed, naked.

  Words are the first thing to knock those last few remaining walls. They’re not your words, thank goodness. Love of Your Life shares words with you. They’re about school. This is a great entry point. The words are questioning, so you answer each one with confidence. Biology. Mr. Turner. Third floor. AP English. Swim team.

  This doesn’t hurt. Not yet. You know heartbreak might be around the corner. You’ve been here before, that time when you knew nothing about walls around hearts. You were born bare, trusting and loving deeply. And with each small heartbreak—a checked-off “I don’t like you,” a casual “This isn’t working out,” or the harshest of them all, “No”—walls were put up.

  Still, you make small talk and it all feels brand-new like September, or clothing tags, or laundry fresh from the dryer. All of these are fleeting.

  But, again, the thing about walls is that they block your view. Your heart needs to see first in order to feel. Even if this moment passes, those eyes, that smile, the cold wind on your cheeks, the small talk will be stamped in your memory.

  Good memories keep the heart from growing cold, keep walls from going up. Don’t give too much power to bad memories—walls, falls, and breaks. They will cloud everything, even this moment when you are so free—naked, exposed—that your heart is like the beaming sun melting every cold, beautiful thing around the both of you.

  The small talk turns into big talk with longer questions. These words make you think about yourself, the universe, and your place in it. These are things you’ve never talked about before.

  This Love of Your Life has stepped into your side where these walls used to be, slowly taking space in your heart. And you have stepped into that heart, too. And it’s okay. Stay there for a while. Sit back, chill, and enjoy the view.

  Whenever you do step back into your own space, for whatever reason, you will not be the same person. You’ll have grown an inch or two, not in size, but in love. Love expands you. Honest, fearless love stretches you to the limits you didn’t even know were there. There won’t be any walls. You can run freely and love freely. Your heart will not only beat, it will make music.

  With love,

  I want to know if we are the same, in the moments when we’re stripped bare.

  —The Careful Undressing of Love, Corey Ann Haydu

  Dear Heartbreak,

  People tell me that I’m too self-deprecating. They’re right. The problem is that I just can’t stop. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to see any redeeming qualities that I may possess. Not when there are so many people who are so much smarter, prettier, more athletic, more social, and all-around better than me. I guess my lack of confidence is the reason why I’ve never been able to find a guy that pays me even the slightest bit of attention. It must be impossible for a guy to love a girl who can’t even love herself. Honestly, though, I barely even notice or care about my lacking love life. There are simply too many other problems to worry about.

  Maybe I chose the wrong friends. No, I’m not in with the drug dealers, or the social outcasts. My “friends” are the overachievers. The ones who get straight A’s, play two sports, and are active members of the stupid National Honor Society. Every day I sit at our lunch table and listen to talk about college, boyfriends, and fun weekend plans, which I am rarely invited to. Every day I sit there silently and absorb the happy chatter with disdain. The people who are supposed to be my biggest supporters make me feel like a complete failure. They don’t do it on purpose. To an outsider, I probably look like I belong. I probably look happy, but the truth is, I’ve never really fit in. Probably because I’ve never really been able to like myself.

  When I was a little kid, only two or three years old, I started literally pulling my hair out. My worried parents ordered me to stop with constant reminders, so I did. For a while. When the stress of middle school hit me, I started pulling again, and I couldn’t stop. I hid my shameful behavior from parents and friends, but was old enough to understand that what I was doing was abnormal. I did some research. Turns out that hair-pulling is actually a fairly common impulse-control disorder called trichotillomania. It may affect up to four percent of the population, but people don’t talk about it. It holds the same stigma as mental illness and is closely linked to anxiety. For me, it certainly is a coping mechanism for stressful situations. Still, it feels shameful, so I do my best to hide it from everybody. I spend every day trying to blend into the crowd. The last thing I need is one more thing to identify me as weird, and possibly slightly crazy. Everything’s connected—my concealed secrets, painful shyness, and intense self-deprecation. No wonder I can’t seem to find romance.

  Sorry, Heartbreak. That was a bit of a rant.

  —A Secretly Unhappy Teenager

  OPEN THE DOOR AND WALK THROUGH IT

  Dear Secretly Unhappy Teenager,

  Sometime around the beginning of high school, I developed a strange habit. When I was upset I would dig my fingernails into the skin at the base of the palm of my hand. If I was extremely upset, I would bite that same patch of skin. There wasn’t a why for the behavior, just an instinct that the feelings of depression and anxiety and fear and loneliness were too much for the insides of my heart and had to travel to other expanses of my body. The habit never turned into something more serious. I didn’t go toward razors or matches or anything else to hurt myself. Only once did I manage to draw blood. But it was a secret.

  There were other secrets, too. An ongoing experiment to see how long I could go without eating before someone noticed. When I realized the answer was, more or less, forever, I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I coaxed out a lackluster relationship with cheese sandwiches and called it a day. There was a sick parent on the sofa. There was a nightly cry in my bed, where I wondered at the depth of loneliness, how vast and strange it was, how relentless. I’m the only person I can trust, I would whisper to myself, and it felt more than true. It felt real.

  There was the group of girls who turned from best friends to enemies seemingly overnight. They were the overachievers, too. They were the smart ones, with good grades and big collections of books in their bedrooms and sharp wits and photographs of their parents at fancy colleges hanging in their living rooms. With them, I felt I belonged. I wasn’t quite an overachiever—I never mastered the art of getting A’s—but I loved books and I didn’t think I’d be able to pull off partying and I loved our weekly Friday-night sleepover where we watched movies and talked about everything we hated and loved about being twelve and thirteen and fourteen. They were a safe space, away from the sometimes confusing dynamics of my family life and the strange weight of depression hanging in my home.

  One night, at a ninth-grade dance at a nearby school for boys, I met a cute boy. He was a hockey player, short and stocky. He smelled like he’d chewed about forty sticks of gum before grinding with me on the dance floor. He grabbed my butt. No one had grabbed my butt before, and I didn’t hate it. Other guys had tried before, but it was the sort of thing I didn’t want to have just anyone do. I’d always told them no before. This time I pulled closer to him to let him know it was okay. I was excited to tell my friends. None of them were really dancing with anyone, but I was sure they would, soon. And when the time came, I would pick out cute guys or girls for each of them. I would happily giggle over their butts getting grabbed.

  After a few dances, Jane, my red-haired best friend, tapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s step outside for a minute,” she said. Russ, the cute hock
ey player/butt-grabber, teased me about not wanting me to go anywhere, about wanting another dance, and I was flushed with excitement and nerves and Best Night of My Life-ness. I told Russ I’d be right back, and I followed Jane to the hallway outside the cafeteria where the dance was going on. All my best friends were already sitting on the floor in that hallway, waiting for me. They’d saved me a space in the circle. As soon as I sat down they started a conversation that had clearly been planned for weeks without my knowing it. They told me they were disappointed in me. That I wasn’t the person they used to know. That I was superficial and boy-crazy and changing too much, too fast. They told me I wasn’t really their friend anymore; I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted to be friends with. I wasn’t the kind of person they thought I was.

  The night moved so quickly from wonderful to terrible, I could barely process what they were saying. There was a sleepover scheduled at my home for after the dance, and I still wanted to spend more time with Russ and I didn’t understand what I was doing in that hallway of that school, listening to the last few songs drifting out from the cafeteria. I cried my eyeshadow off. It was fine—I didn’t really know what I was doing with eyeshadow anyway.

  The girls stayed over at my house that night. We pretended everything hadn’t shifted. We took pictures that I still have in an album somewhere. All of us being silly, lighthearted, together, best friends. I was a little broken and a little relieved. Maybe this happened in friendships. Maybe I had imagined how bad it was. Maybe, just maybe, nothing really had to change.

  Come Monday, it was over. I was frozen out. I was done.

  No apologies came. No further conversations occurred. I went from being a girl with friends to a girl without.

  Is this when the nail digging began? Is this when I lost my appetite, when I started wondering if anyone cared? Maybe.

  Did anyone notice? No.

  When I spoke to adults about it—parents, guidance counselors, anyone who I thought might tell me how I was going to survive the next week, month, year without friends—they sided with the other girls. The smart, accomplished ones who didn’t wear much makeup and weren’t hooking up with any boys. They asked me to think about my actions, about what I might have done to deserve their treatment of me. This was before the days of slut-shaming, before that term meant something that made people’s heads nod with understanding. But that’s what it was.

  They dismissed the girls’ cruelty and expected me to apologize.

  Later, there would be other adults. I would tell them the story and they would get it. They would see the way the words had shaken me, had even maybe destroyed some essential part of me. Those adults knew I wasn’t just a blond girl with big boobs and short skirts. Those adults saw the Something Else that all of us have beneath the way we wear our hair and the shade of lipstick we choose and the exact size and shape of our bodies.

  I wish I had known to go to those adults.

  I wish I had learned more quickly how to tell the difference between people who saw my outside and people who saw something further in. Something Else.

  I wasn’t sure what I would apologize for. I didn’t know quite what I’d done wrong. Or, rather, I’d decided that what was wrong was simply me. I was wrong. They didn’t approve of me. Because the things I’d done—worn makeup, flirted with a hockey player, blabbered on a little too much about boys, cared a little too much about what those boys thought of me—seemed so normal, the only thing that made sense was that it wasn’t my actions that these girls hated so much as some intangible but vital part of my being. I was pretty sure lots of girls all over the world liked boys and experimented with blush and showed skin. So the thing that was awful and insurmountable and unworthy about me must be … just me.

  How could I apologize for being myself?

  I never got those friends back. I never made many friends at all for the rest of high school. I dated boys. Serious, long-term relationships that practically drowned me.

  One of them shook me, sometimes, when I was especially annoying. He called me slutty when he didn’t like what I was wearing. He made sure I knew the sacrifice he was making being with someone as damaged and bad as me.

  He sounded a lot like those long-ago friends.

  At the time, I thought that if more than one person thinks something about you, maybe it’s true. That’s what it’s easy to tell yourself, late at night, in a twin bed in Massachusetts, in a nice house on a nice block that is so quiet all you could ever hear are crickets. Because I knew for sure I wasn’t a person who could be trusted, I wasn’t worthy or good or special or smart. My opinion about who I was didn’t matter. Because I didn’t matter. And because of how little I felt like I mattered, whoever entered the room, whoever had an opinion on me—well, they must be right. They must know more than me.

  I was still trying to untangle who I actually was. Was I the girl at that dance, disappointing her friends? Was I the girl before that, whose friends seemed to love her? Was I the girl with the nice boyfriend everyone knew, or the girl with the boyfriend who treated her like crap? Was I the girl who smiled when someone told me to smile, or was I the girl who dug her fingernails into her hands and wished those stupid crickets would just shut the hell up?

  To this day, the sound of crickets makes me lonely.

  Here’s what it looked like on the outside:

  I was pretty. Pretty in the easy way. Blond-haired and blue-eyed and petite with huge boobs and teeth made perfect by braces. I had a dimple. I liked short skirts and high heels. I got auditions for commercials outside of school. I was a textbook model, laughing at a math worksheet in a stock photo in your geometry textbook. I did a commercial for a local mattress store. Everyone thought I would make it, someday, as an actress. I was set. I lived in a big house in a nice town and had my own phone line in the days before cell phones. I learned how to do my hair (sort of) and I bought sweaters from the right stores.

  I had a series of boyfriends starting right at the beginning of ninth grade. During the Valentine’s Day rose drive, one of the more serious of my boyfriends got me a dozen red roses instead of just one. Even the senior girls were talking about how romantic it was.

  And it was romantic. But so much of romance at fourteen is being able to tell your friends about it. And I had no friends to tell.

  Boys talked about my boobs, my butt, sometimes maybe even my face. I was cast as the lead in the high school musical even though I was only a freshman.

  I’m sure it looked easy. I made it look easy. Or at least I made it look fine. I made it look like a life I had chosen.

  But that exterior life, the one everyone saw, meant nothing to me. It wasn’t real. My real life, the one I was living and suffering through and trying to survive, was the only life I could feel. It was the only life I had an actual connection to. My life, my world, was the secret one, the one I was working hard to hide. The biggest thing I felt, the most impressive feeling, the one bowling me over every day, was shame.

  Like your shame, it was a secret shame. Invisible to anyone giving me a passing glance. I was hiding so much from so many people, it’s hard to say how I ever managed to get through a single hour without passing out from the pressure of that shame and those secrets. Above all else, I hated myself. I hated what a bad job I was doing at being happy, I hated how impossible it was for me to feel anything remotely close to okay, and I hated how easy being alive looked for everyone else. I even hated the way those sweaters looked on me, and I was sure they looked better, more effortless, on the other girls wearing them.

  Everything looked effortless on other people. I was jealous of them. And lonely. So, so lonely in how hard being normal was. In the effort it took to pull off Normal Teen Girl.

  Years later—last year, in fact—I was listening to the radio. A classmate that I didn’t know well had a show on a popular radio station. She was speaking about how high school was for her and her family. She described pain I knew well—mental health struggles within her family, shame,
secrets, complicated things that no one could know about.

  The now-woman used to be one of the girls I dreamed about being. She had long, straight hair and an easy way of wearing clothes that made her look chill and pretty and fun and at ease with herself and the world. I remember her laugh and how beloved she was. One of the popular girls that even the unpopular girls liked. One of those special, charismatic people who get everything handed to them so easily, who didn’t struggle or falter or find themselves embarrassed or alone.

  Except, of course, that wasn’t the whole picture.

  I imagined, listening to her story on the radio, an alternate timeline of high school, another version of events. In this alternate universe, she and I both got tired of secrets around mental health issues and complicated family lives, and spoke openly about what was going on behind the pretty surface of the lives we presented. In this alternate reality, we named the things going on inside us and inside our family members. We called anxiety anxiety and depression depression. We found comfort in the ways our lives had shared secrets and shared pains, and we found a way to talk about those things so much, so often, with so much clarity, that they stopped having power over us.

  In this alternate reality, we are two teen girls having a really hard time, who have a space to talk about it with someone else who gets it. In this alternate reality, those things—those terrible, secret, shameful things—seem a lot less terrible, because someone who looks good in sweaters and has a great laugh and seems one hundred percent “normal” has the same problems.

  In this alternate reality, things are just a little bit easier, and I am just a little less likely to dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand, a little less likely to skip dinner, a little less likely to cry myself to sleep at night.