Reporting to You Live from the Scene of Heartbreak
On pushing through suffering and pain
One of my favorite podcasts to date is “Start Up.” It was created by Alex Blumberg, who left a very secure position at NPR to form his own startup, what is now Gimlet Media. Of course, Gimlet Media became a very successful company, but there was great struggle in the beginning. Blumberg’s expressed goal of the podcast was to chronicle his journey in the early phases of founding his startup so that listeners could witness how messy and hard it was in real time. He wanted to tell the true story of founding a startup. He noted that so often, in the rearview mirror of someone who launches a startup into a successful major company (think Google, Uber, Amazon), exist only tall tales of how they got there. He called them the “in the garage” origin stories. When we succeed, we often forget to talk about the struggles we experienced along the way.
Success here, is meant to talk about any version of getting to the other side of struggle.
Blumberg’s devotion to letting listeners hear the struggle of his story is so valuable because struggle is a shared human experience that is almost universally kept silent. Collectively, as a society, we tend to hide our struggles. But the silence and hiddenness of our pain and suffering make us feel even more alone in our struggles. When we push back against this collective norm and share our pain and struggles, we find an opening up. We not only give life to ourselves by letting the fire of pain burn out, but we also give life to those in pain who realize they aren’t alone.
I used to listen to Alex’s podcast while training for the NYC marathon, where I lived at the time. I remember viscerally feeling the episodes where he shared recordings of him and his wife struggling to figure out how to balance the lack of money and time that came with founding a startup with the reality and responsibility of having small children. I remember them debating how long they could afford to live in Brooklyn while pursuing this dream. I remember the hits that kept coming his way, with little wins in between, and rooting for him the whole time.
But most of all, I remember relating deeply to his pain even though I’d never founded a startup. I had struggled to figure out how long I could survive to live in NYC. I also had dreams on my heart that felt maybe too risky to pursue. I saw my own struggles reflected in bits and shards of his struggle, though they were so very different in the outside.
His honest storytelling made me see him as human and thus more like me than I realized. And his struggle, strangely, made me feel hopeful. Like if he was struggling yet surviving, maybe I could too. Rooting for him felt easier than rooting for myself, but in rooting for him I gave myself hope.
We crave honest storytelling but rarely narrate the truth
As humans, we crave honest storytelling, to see ourselves reflected in real characters. But we rarely narrate the truth of our lives. It’s too painful or hidden or embarrassing or heavy, and so we hide it. It is often the artists and philosophers and theologians who touch the reality of truth. It is why art is always necessary, I believe, to humans thriving.
This thirst for honest storytelling about not only the good but especially the pain is why Taylor Swift’s recent album The Tortured Poets Department (and her and many other artists’ albums) is so wildly popular. Whether you love, hate, or feel indifferent toward Taylor Swift, you may have seen lyrics posted to her song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” A section I have seen many people posting online are the chorus lines of that song:
“'Cause I'm a real tough kid, I can handle my shit
They said, baby, gotta fake it 'til you make it and I did
Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die…
… I cry a lot but I am so productive, it's an art
You know you're good when you can even do it
With a broken heart.”
In this song, Taylor writes about our cultural norms around putting on a good face even when we are in immense pain. She writes about relational pain, but this could be about any pain or loss you are experiencing. Even Taylor herself, renowned for sharing honest and very vulnerable lyrics with her fans, admits to doing this in the song (suspected during her wildly popular Eras Tour). What makes her work hit a chord with so many people, whether you are one of them or not, is that she writes from and in the place of pain. People relate to it, and it gives voice for a side of being human often pushed to the sidelines in American culture.
Lest you think I’m only a Swiftie, this theme repeats among philosophers and great thinkers as well. One of the best-selling books of all time is Viktor Frankl’s “A Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it, Frankl recounts how he and others searched for meaning in even the most hostile and hopeless of places: the concentration camps of World War II. The most relatable parts of that book, even if you have never known such pain, are when Frankl expresses what it felt like to be in that suffering and feel both hope and hopelessness. It’s so very human. And, you realize if even he could find meaning in such a painful place, then maybe you can find it in your pain too.
My own heartbreak
March 6th was the last day I published my Substack after living up to my promise to myself to post every week for a year. Looking back, I now realize I quit just beyond the finish mark like a weary marathoner crawling across the finish line. When I embarked on this journey, I had so many hopes and dreams of where showing up consistently for a year would land me. Imagine! That was my great failing, as any artist will tell you, to hope for outcomes rather than merely enjoying the process. In that way, I’m still very much a scientist more than a writer. I’m learning.
A year into my consistent posts, and I saw almost no outward changes. The growth statistics of my Substack and online presence, the book proposal, the speaking and writing opportunities, all the amazing opportunities I thought it would open up for me were nowhere to be found. I was surprised at how wrecked I was at this reality. So much, that I had nothing to say.
And so, for the first time in a year, I stopped writing.
But I’m writing to you now, live from the scene of heartbreak. Not only of this tiny Substack but of many big dreams not realized over the past few years. I do this selfishly to write my way out of the pain and less selfishly in hopes that it’s in this place of pain we all acknowledge our humanness and find hope anyway.
When I think of an answer to “Why haven’t you written?” I think about how I was very sick for much of March, submitted three grants as Principal Investigator (in case you’re wondering, that’s two grants more than you should do in a given month), and had a lot of work travel. All of this is true, but it’s not true to say this is why I didn’t write.
I didn’t write because I had finally decided I didn’t want to keep seeing failed results. It hurt too much. I’m very resilient to failure and critical feedback; I have an uncanny ability to keep going even when I shouldn’t. It’s why I’m an excellent grant funded researcher, where the failure rate is blindly high.
What I hadn’t prepared myself for is years of silence and failed dreams. This new space of writing and speaking and moving to something new and outside of my normal academic self is hard. I still don’t know if it will work out or if I should even keep trying. This is my startup.
It begs me to try, and yet I have no promise it will work out. On top of this, rebuilding my life in a new city has often been relentlessly lonely, and I’ve been dealt a lot of other unexpected life stressors. Sometimes the pain of going nowhere despite pushing on the gas pedal as hard as you can is more painful than going nowhere by just getting out of the car. So I exited, just for a bit. The weight of too many failed dreams began to stack up on themselves. Holding so many dreams but having no roads paving to them is a strange form of heartbreak.
So, I’ve decided to what most good writers do and try to write my way out of this in hopes that it frees me and serves you, the reader. What strikes me most about Taylor Swift’s recent album is how many critiques of her work say it’s “too much” or “unedited.” I don’t agree or disagree yet; I think 24 hours is too little time to digest and properly analyze a 31-song album. But, it’s an interesting question to ask what an artist who has reached the peak of her career should or could write next. I think that maybe she finally writes what she wants to. She writes what she needs to write, without worrying where it lands her.
Swift has explicitly stated that her recent album is a collection of her pains on the page, so that she might be free of them. Maybe freedom is her newest form of success in creating her art. She notes, this time, that she is free from the words on the page. The process of writing the words frees her and the leftover words provide solace for those still in pain, asking them to do the same. (*I am, of course, not oblivious to the fact that it’s easier to be free and not hold back when you’re a billionaire.)
Maybe each of us can pick one thing that pains us today and speak it out loud in hopes that we might become free.
So live from the scene of heartbreak and loss and overwhelming disappointment, I write to you. And it isn’t all bad here. The sky was still astonishingly blue today. My son ran up to me just to tell me he wanted to hold my hand. And the sun is making its way back to the gray PNW. And on my best days, I feel all of it.
*It turns out, there’s research on this (from one of my favorite researchers Dr. James Pennebaker) to demonstrate that speaking our pain brings healing. Check out his book: “Opening Up; The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions.”