If there’s one thing about me you should know, it’s that I’m obsessed with John Green. Somehow, I mentally bonded myself to him for life because his book, The Fault in Our Stars, was the first book to ever make me cry. As a 10-year-old book fanatic, this experience was ethereal in that I felt I achieved a whole new dimension of readership: I had my heart strings truly tugged at by fiction for the first time.
Throughout the years, I have come back to John Green's content—from other books, to his podcast, to his YouTube channel—and found it tugs at my heart in the same way. In particular, I was struck by a quote of his: “It hurts because it mattered.” That’s stuck with me since I heard it for the first time in middle school while doing a Google inventory of John Green quotes. At the time, it stood out to me as powerful, but I never really understood what it meant until I learned the truth of it for myself.
For most of my life, I’ve approached negative emotions as if they were problems to be solved. They feel less like a part of my being and more like another nagging responsibility added to my to-do list after laundry and homework. When I feel anxiety, fear, anger, or sadness, my instinct is to rid myself of them as quickly as possible. So I intellectualize them; I think them away.
Why be anxious about what new people might think of the outfit you're starting to have seconds thoughts on when they’re probably more focused on how you might perceive them? Why cry over spilled milk when there’s more in the fridge?
But going through my first heartbreak, I discovered this same method of intellectualizing hard feelings away is not a universal fix. Knowing that someone you love is gone, not from this planet but from your life, feels suffocating in a way that mental gymnastics cannot fix.
In the early stages of this experience, I couldn’t understand why these feelings wouldn’t subside. “There’s a reason why the relationship ended. It was for the best.” “He didn’t deserve me anyway.” “There’re plenty of other fish in the sea.” I had run through all these thoughts trying to stop the stirring in my heart and chest. But true or not, these sentiments were unsuccessful in making me feel even a little better.
What I’ve learned is that despite my best efforts, I can never truly think away my feelings. Of course there’s some merit in being rational, in ensuring that small inconveniences don’t ruin your day. But the things that truly matter—the things that truly hurt—can’t just exist in the mind, they must be felt with the entire being.
This is not to say that the pain should last forever. In fact, it gets a little better every day—though that’s only because I’ve allowed myself to sit with it, to appreciate it even. I know this loss hurts because it mattered. The pain is the last gift I received from the relationship. It is a memory that the love was real, perhaps even more so than I thought it was in the midst of it.