Schopenhauer would say heartbreak hurts because the illusion collapses, but he never warned how physical it feels. Lately, there are these tiny, ambush moments; small triggers, stray thoughts that remind me heartbreak isn’t abstract at all. It feels as if someone reaches straight into my chest and crushes my heart over and over, slow and deliberate. What an odd thing, kan, that something happening entirely inside my mind can manifest like a bodily injury. How powerful thoughts are, how unforgiving.
What unsettles me most is how the pain arrives in waves I never invited. I can be working, reading, washing a cup, eating my third piece of chocolate and suddenly a thought slips in, harmless at first, then sharp, then crushing. Schopenhauer would probably say this is the Will asserting itself again, reminding me that suffering follows wherever desire once lived. But living through it feels less philosophical and more like being ambushed by my own nervous system. Thoughts shouldn’t have this kind of power, yet here they are, turning memory into muscle ache, disappointment into something that feels carved into bone.
I told my brother last week that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. Healing, in that sense, isn’t gentle work, it requires walking straight into the fire. There’s no shortcut, no numbness that won’t eventually wear off. You go through the hell, you feel every degree of the heat, and only then do you reach the other side. You arrive at the door burned and crisp, but alive. And maybe the bitterness follows you for years, maybe forever, but it’s the bitterness of someone who survived the flames, not someone consumed by them. I hope.
Schopenhauer might insist that suffering is the backbone of existence, that heartbreak in any form is simply the Will reminding us of our place. Maybe he’s right. But standing here in the middle of my own wreckage, I’m reminding myself that the point isn’t to avoid the hurt. It’s to learn the shape of it, to understand how it moves through the body, how it teaches, how it burns without fully destroying. The illusion collapses, the pain arrives, the waves come and go and somehow, we are still here.
I can close my eyes and pretend it doesn’t feel like I’m slowly dying inside, but honestly, we’re all dying anyway. That part isn’t new. Pain just makes the whole thing louder. Still, it has its uses. Pain writes better than I do. Pain paints. Pain gives me one more day where I get to say something almost beautiful about being alive.
How very human of us, to hurt this much and call it art ❤︎
Let’s rejoice, I guess.
