Human emotions lie on a spectrum. They’re complex, add depth to our lives and at times, are painful too. One of the most acknowledged and powerful emotions that we’ve all experienced or will experience is heartbreak. In fact, heartbreak holds so much power. It’s inspired by songs, movies, books and so many other creative pursuits. Think about it for a moment, without heartbreak we wouldn’t have had any Taylor Swift songs and we wouldn’t have felt heard and understood by our favourite rom-coms. So, what is it about the heartbreak that makes it such a deep and vivid emotion? Why does it hurt us in the way that it does?
For the most part, we’re all familiar with the feeling we get when the person we’re seeing says they’re not ready for a relationship. The pit in your stomach, the tears that physically cannot stop flowing out from your eyes and the few days that follow where you keep checking your phone, hoping and praying that they change their mind and that it was all a joke—a cruel one—but a joke nonetheless. But they never do, of course, and one day you stop hoping that they will. You may find yourself asking why you were so beat up over it in the first place when it doesn’t really hurt that much currently. Here’s the thing though—we forget that we were once vulnerable with this person. We forged a relationship with someone we didn’t know and shared things about ourselves and our lives with each other. It will be inevitably hard to let that all go. It’s easy to think about the heartbreak in hindsight, but at the moment it’s a different kind of pain inflicted on you by someone else. You may even feel like you can’t be mad about it because they may not even be actively trying to hurt you—this is just the way they feel. But then again, emotions aren’t particularly known for being rational, are they?
Heartbreak is so vulnerable because we are completely in the hands of another person. They know everything about us and have seen us at our worst. Unlike our friends, they know our softer, romantic sides and they know how we are when logic is out the window. And unfortunately, nothing hurts more than when they decide they don’t want us anymore. Sure, our logical self knows that it isn’t a reflection of us—after all, we’re all entitled to having different feelings, but it’s a blow to our emotional self. It’s hard to have your heart broken by someone you felt so deeply for; Someone who took time to learn about you, someone who held you close after being intimate, suddenly feels like a stranger—that will never be an easy thing to digest. This is also why creativity is such a good conduit for heartbreak as it involves so many emotions. Sometimes the best way to process is to channel the pain into a form of art.
Heartbreak is an emotion felt by billions of people. You’ve left yourself open and vulnerable to another person and being rejected by them will always hurt. Even though in hindsight, we’re more at ease and have made our peace, heartbreak leaves room for creativity and allows us to grow for our future relationships.