There's a Name for This Feeling

Heartbreak, Happy Lights, Hammacher Schlemmer

Good morning, pals.

I’m writing to you this morning from the armchair in my living room in Iowa—in front of me is the glowing warmth of the fireplace and the twinkling 8 foot Northern Lights Christmas Tree. (I purchased this off Instagram one night from Hammacher Schlemmer, scrolling in a state of depressive insomnia, and it cost too much, but, dear reader, it’s worth it! It’s a miracle of lights.)

Speaking of miracles of light, behind me is the HappyLight by Verilux. (No, this isn’t going to become a newsletter about light products you can purchase online, but this time of year, when I am not in Los Angeles, and I am in the remarkably gray prairies of Iowa, I spend a lot of my time curating sources of light to keep me and my kids afloat.). I do light therapy 15-20 minutes twice a day during December, to keep the SAD (and the sad) away.

What I wanted to write about today was heartbreak. It’s a subject I’ve written about a lot, in books and scripts and essays and short stories. I’m currently adapting a story into a feature script; it’s called “The Dog” and I wrote it as an homage to Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog,” which is a story about a certain kind of heartbreak—the one that comes with finding love when you didn’t want to find it. It is a very sad story, I think, but I am currently adapting it for an actor/comedian that’s very funny (Amy Schumer) and it’s been a challenge and a pleasure to revisit a sad story and make it funny and sad at the same time.

Currently, I’m not heartbroken, though I’ve certainly been before. Currently, somebody I care about a great deal is heartbroken though, and like any good empath (co-dependent?), I feel other people’s heartbreak acutely. I would like the people I love, especially my children, to go through life never feeling heartbreak, but of course, I’ve read enough Buddhist writing to understand that to try and protect your children from heartbreak is also an attempt to prevent them from feeling fully human. And heartbreak has formed a lot of who I am, and who I’ve become, and how I express myself. It’s forced me to make hard choices and define what I really believe and desire. And I can’t deny my kids that experience, as uncomfortable as it is to witness sometimes.

I’ve always marveled at the way empathy is handled in The Book of Job, when Job, in a web of unimaginable grief, has some friends drop by--Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who show up and then “began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads.”

Then they sit with Job in silence for seven days, just witnessing his heartbreak. (When they begin to offer intellectual reasoning and “friendly” advice, things go awry. I often struggle with trying to “fix” and “intellectualize” other people’s pain, because I don’t want to be feeling it. But that’s another essay. Or another therapy session.)

Lo, it’s a time of year of great joy and celebration, but so many people I know are also hurting, and, in some cases, suffering. (It’s also a great time of year to use the word Lo at the beginning of a sentence.) From physical ailments (like Long COVID) and car accidents, or from the emotional upheaval of a break-up or the death of a loved one. From financial stress or professional disappointment. From irresolvable loneliness or clinical depression. From the relentless logistics of being alive in precarious times.

Maybe it’s always been like this—maybe this season has always embraced the “both/and” of life: the light in the darkness is a recurring motif in nearly every spiritual tradition that takes place in the brief, dark days of December, and so I am hardly coming to you with a “hot take” here. But something feels different to me this year, something that solidifies every time I connect with another human on a meaningful level in the past few weeks. Every time, this feeling comes up.

Earlier this year, The New York Times published a great article by Elizabeth Weil, in which she quotes Alex Steffen, a climate futurist and podcast host,  who tells Weil that: we’re living through a discontinuity. This is Steffen’s core point. “Discontinuity is a moment where the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work,” he said. “It is extremely stressful, emotionally, to go through a process of understanding the world as we thought it was, is no longer there…There’s real grief and loss. There’s the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened.”

While this article focuses on climate change, especially the way it is remaking the state of California at every level, I found “discontinuity” to be the perfect way to describe how so many people are feeling right now, whether they’re worried about climate change, or something more immediate, like heartbreak, or a layoff, or any rejection of some key part of themselves by a force they cannot control. There’s the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened.

The truth of that matter is, that anyone who has read this far in my newsletter, is probably experiencing some kind of discontinuity right now. The world we once knew is no longer there. I know I don’t have to rehash the forces and entities responsible for this, because you already know that, but I will say we’ve entered a phase of predatory capitalism that feels harrowingly new. The systems are breaking down. Loneliness feels lonelier. Heartbreak feels heart-breakier.

Even the war in Ukraine, which slogs on through the cold, often heatless winter for Ukrainians, feels strangely more surreal to me than other wars, an inexplicable slow wave of destruction instigated by one man, a billionaire who wants more power, more wealth, more attention, more adoration, fought off by a group of people who refuse to yield, even if they are largely alone in their fight (I wrote more about the war earlier this year for Harper’s Bazaar, ICYMI.)

We are entering a time when our resistance to these kind of men will determine the way we can live our lives in the future. But I digress.

I am working on a lecture for the Warren Wilson MFA Program right now on this very subject, of discontinuity, and I’ll share it with you all in mid-January, when the winter residency is over.  For now, I just want to say that if you feel that the world has stopped making sense, if you feel like you don’t really understand how to move through a world that feels re-made in some ambiguous way, you’re not alone. You’re experiencing discontinuity.

Embracing that—naming it—can provide short term help. Knowing you’re not the only one losing the thread. Knowing the feeling has meaning. As the somewhat prophetic Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “Everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.”

One of my favorite short stories of all time is Donald Barthelme’s “The School”, which chronicles life inside of an elementary school classroom during a time of harrowingly escalating loss and grief. One of the funniest lines in the story comes when the narrator tells the reader that the students in his classroom named a class puppy Edgar, after him. (Edgar’s story doesn’t end well.) Remarking on the way the students chased the puppy around, calling the puppy by their teacher’s first name, he says, “They enjoyed the ambiguity.”

I think about this line a lot. I say it often, though very few people get the reference. To me, this moment in the story feels like a profound admission that amid heartbreak and uncertainty, we can delight in the weird strangeness of the feeling, the indescribable feelings of joy and amusement that can come while things feel destined towards doom.

If you can look to the immediate warmth and light in the present moment, however you find it and create it, it can help get you through. Can you enjoy the discontinuity this season?

The future, what’s to come, is unimaginable, and I think it will be for a long time. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and always will be.

Understanding the future will always allude us, since the future is a story, something imagined and not real, and what is real, at least this morning, is this fire and this tree and this HappyLight by Verilux and this coffee and my body typing in this chair, and some of the people I love, currently asleep in this house, and other people I love, currently far away, and the simple fact that the light and the darkness will always exist at once, together.

And if turn off the HappyLight and you squint at that Hammacher Schlemmer tree in the darkness, it feels like you’re experiencing something magical, and entering a world where everything feels new. In a good way.

Even if we have no idea of what’s going on.

Happy Holidays.

Your pal,

DB