I got my heart broken recently.
Heartbreak, like a common cold or a thunderstorm, is a fairly universal phenomenon. Everyone experiences it at one point of time or another, for a variety of reasons—a job rejection, a death, or, in my case, the end of a relationship.
Films and books show us the myriad ways in which people cope with aches and pains of heartbreak. Dancing and drink, a trip to a different city(or country, if you have that kind of money), the works. Popular culture brings to mind the quintessential image of lovers ditching exes’ belongings in trash cans, or sobbing while eating tubs of ice cream.
While these were all fairly enticing prospects, I didn’t resort to any of them. Instead, I turned to existentialist literature. On a sunny August afternoon, when I was angry at the world and at myself, I picked up Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and devoured it in the matter of a few hours. I remember bursting into tears because barely a few thirty or forty pages into the book, the sheer triviality of my pain hit me. Vonnegut has a very distinctive style of writing such that even though he tackles topics like war, and mental illness, and writes of people escaping air raids in underground meatlockers, the dry, cynical style of comedy had me laughing. Yes, the universe is mind numbingly, unjustifiably unfair. It is chaos. It cares not for human beings and their petty politics, their wars, their civilizations. Should the realisation of this truth shackle us to despair? No, it sets us free, so to speak.
One of my favourite excerpts from Slaughterhouse Five, is a conversation between the main character, Billy Pilgrim, and the aliens, known as the Trafalmadorians who have kidnapped him.
So it goes.
– Why me?
– That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
– Yes.
– Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.
I read more works with absurdist, philosophical themes, like Camus and Sartre, and the more I read, the more I felt like someone pinched out my eyeballs from their sockets and slipped them back in differently, for now I could see things in a way I had never before. Existentialist literature helped me look straight into the gaping blackness of the void, and laugh while doing it.
I’m still struggling in my own way. Sometimes I take the conventional route, involving excessive carbohydrates and sad songs, and sometimes the text gets so dreary and monochrome that I ditch it for a Instagram doomscrolling, but the fact remains that philosophy can be a decent healer for heartbreak. I know now, that I’m small, my problems even smaller. Instead of being weighed under by them, I now understand their insignificance in the grander scheme of things.
This knowledge takes a load off my shoulders. There is a certain lightness in my being.
By Eshna Sharma, for the Trans Solidarity Fundraiser.