The privilege of heartbreak
As I read another chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, or see another reel about the atrocities occurring in the world, or listen to another stranger’s story about the racial violence and abuse they’ve endured, about loved ones killed by military authorities, my heart breaks and breaks and breaks.
Recently I told a friend that what he was going through also broke my heart. He replied, “No need for your heart to break for me.”
I understood that he was going to be fine even if he wasn’t. You know? But it made me wonder about my heart. Do I have a choice in whether it breaks or not? Does it take effort to feel for someone, to grieve, to empathise with them? I had assumed not. I don’t choose whether something moves me to tears or strikes daggers into my heart.
But when I think about it, I remember.
I did not always have a heart that could break. I did not always cry when I encountered something distressing or joyous or powerful. In hindsight, I did not have a heart that could afford to break. Afford to break even once, let alone again and again. It took me the better part of ten years to grow a heart that could. Little by little, first for myself, and then for my loved ones. Sometimes it was too much. I forget how hard it was. I’d been numbed by apathy for so much of my life that a little knock to my heart would pierce me with excruciating pain, pain that needed to be numbed again for weeks.
Apathy is a protective strategy against the pain of reality, of the world. I’ve thought much about my relationship with apathy, and its stepmother, nihilism.
I grew up in blissful ignorance for the first twenty years of my life. Not because of the absence of suffering, but because it would have been too much for my little heart. A heart which wanted to see so much good in the world and knew deep down that this is not what it would find. So instead, I chose to be numbed by the painkiller of ignorance and let it be mistaken for innocence. I kept choosing it and choosing it until I knew my heart was strong enough. Not strong enough to withstand breaking, but strong enough to break and still repair itself.
Finally, one day, I chose to let the pain in. I chose to let my heart be broken. It did not feel like a choice, to be honest. I just know that at some point, when I thought about what’s happening in the world and on this land of so-called Australia, when I thought about the hatred being borne out of the abandonment of love in every single moment in this fucked up civilisation, my heart shattered into a million pieces and yet still more, because to even have a heart that can break again and again is such a damn privilege.
So it doesn’t feel like a choice. That’s what’s scary about letting go of a strategy as effective as apathy—you can no longer control what moves you. And yes, it is effortful. So, so effortful. But it is the effort that a gardener puts into tending to a beautiful garden, a mother to a newborn, an artist into mixing just the right shade of paint. Apathy is effort borne from fear. But heartbreak? Heartbreak is borne from love.