We all have a voice. Some seem to just use it more than others. We all have opinions. This just happens to be mine. Heartbreak is the word. The definition—well, I guess that depends on who you ask. The dictionary’s definition says “great sorrow, grief, or anguish”. Urban dictionary, however, claims it is “What you suffer from after getting dumped in any way by your alleged ‘true love’”. My six-year-old sister would definitely give you a less descriptive version of this. When I asked her, she said “heartbreak is when someone breaks your heart and makes you sad” ant though I agree with her choice of words greatly, I also think the word is more complex than that. When the word ‘heartbreak’ is spoken, people’s minds seem to automatically dart to break-ups. Although break-ups can be hard and cause a great deal of heartbreak, there is way more to the word than that. When it occurs, it’s something terrifying to the mind, body, and soul of the person enduring it. Heartbreak may evoke great sadness but, it could also make us see things in a new light and feel things we never knew we could.

Washington Irving said, “There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief-- and unspeakable love.” This quote shows that the tears shed from heartbreak not only represent sadness but also reflect the love felt for what was lost. This occurrence leads to not just sadness, but an appreciable amount of other emotions as well. All the different feelings that follow are emotionally disturbing enough to even have the sanest person fearing their own diagnosis of bi-polar disorder. Anger, desperation, shame, despair, regret, embarrassment, these are all bi-products of heartbreak. Sometimes the bombardment of emotions is overwhelming. One thing leads to another and before you know it, you’re drowning in your own sick mentally unstable bile. Suicide, drugs, alcohol, self-abuse, and abuse towards others are all things that can result from this one little word… scary, huh?

Artists The Spill Canvas explore heartbreak in the song “Self Conclusion”: We all flirt with the tiniest notion/ of self conclusion in one simplified motion/ the trick is that you’re never supposed to act on it/ no matter how unbearable this misery gets. This song talks about the feelings that come along with experiencing heartbreak. Not many people like to admit it, but heartbreak is something that knocks us down breathless, and puts us in our most vulnerable states of mind. Feeling like giving up is natural, but in order to overcome the heartbreak, we are supposed to stay strong and never give in to the overwhelming desire to call it quits.


Heartbreak means to me what it means to everyone else—pain, a sense of losing something that you care so much about, and hopelessness. But contrary to what the masses automatically think of when hearing the word spoken aloud, it’s about everything around us. What breaks your heart depends on what means most to you. I believe that we’ve all been broken-hearted in our lives; we feel it but don’t recognize it as what it is. It can come in all forms and all sizes. To my three-year-old (spoiled rotten) little sister, not getting three different types of candy when adventuring out to the store is heart-breaking. The teenage years become more complex, however. The loss of a loved one, a friendship broken beyond repair, a good starting relationship gone wrong, parents divorcing, parents not caring, rejection, loneliness, pain, abuse, rape. These things happen every day and time will not change that. My mere seventeen years of existence may just be a speck on the time-line of life to someone who’s been around for about eighty years, but I have thus-far learned that the harder the things you go through, the worse something has to be to break your heart because you gain strength. I strongly trust that heartbreak is an opportunity for something great. However devastating it may be in the midst of the hardship, I feel that heartbreak is a lot like mistakes. It sucks when it happens and it may be hard to deal with at first, but there is a lesson within each one; lessons of strength, love, happiness, self-worth, and who even knows what else. There can be no improvement without a little downfall.


Heartbreak is one of the major themes in Stephen Chbosky’s book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The main character struggles with feelings of despair: “I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong because it's my responsibility, and I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big.” This quote is something I think everyone can relate to at some time or another. We all have times in our lives that feel like they are too bad to be able to see the better that may be coming on the other side. I have definitely learned that when this happens, we need to be able to have faith; faiths in love, happiness, caring people, your family, your friends, or maybe even a higher power. The point of what I’m saying is simply this; if you feel down and out and like you can’t go on, you have to have faith in something or things will seem to never get any better. I would love to be able to say something amazing and uplifting that would make every problem in everyone’s life seem okay again, but the truth is that nobody can do that. Nothing we do will ever be guaranteed happiness; we take the good with the bad and hope for the best outcome.