[Note: This column first appeared at The Woodshed.] Making the most of romantic difficulty. By Paul Salamone 
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO RESPOND creatively to having your heart broken? Despite the success of Bright Eyes and emo, it's not always as easy as it sounds, because our emotions tend to cloud our ability to think beyond tired high school poetry cliches. A recent misfortune in my personal life was met with a blank wall of white silence by my usually vociferous muse, and it took me days to figure out a way to reconstruct the lost glory of what could have been. But when I did do something, BOOM, I ended up with one of the best things I've written in a while (not to brag). And with the five simple suggestions listed below, you can too. Let's get started...
1. Do something Don't worry if you'll be able to capture the perfect essence of everything that went down. If you failed to record a transcript of the final break-up phone call, it's alright: fragments of enraged memory will do just fine. The important thing is to get the pen, paintbrush, camera, needle, blowtorch, or ballet shoe moving. 2. Do what you're best at When someone dumps your ass out of the blue, your entire sense of being is called into question. It's at times like these that an artist must fall back on his/her strongest discipline, because you need to rebuild the self-esteem once experienced before that fateful phone call. If you're a writer who paints on weekends, write. If you're an abstract expressionist who dabbles in Legos, you'd best abstractly express yourself! 3. Mythologize the event There's no reason to adhere to trad realism if the mundane circumstances of your failed romance don't warrant them. Instead, recast yourself as a hero in some cosmic play, and your insensitive ex-lover as the straw(wo)man arch villain. It might not be true, but it's much more satisfying... 4. Don't dwell on your flaws Whatever the reason for your loss of love, don't dwell on the things you did to bring this state of affairs around. If you're too short, too tall, too old, too young, too handsome, too odd, it doesn't matter: direct your obsessions to the art itself. As long as the art is good, you needn't worry yourself with the neurotic details of your human imperfections. 5. Share it with others Unfortunately, heartbreak seems to be a nearly universal experience among human beings. Because of this, anything can you do to wrest a smidgen of beauty from the overwhelming ugliness of dissappointment is like a tiny victory for the human race. And though tiny, it should be passed on and given to others, if anything to serve as a reminder that even the most oppressive, skull-shaped clouds have a silverish lining to them. And if you can't do any of these, don't worry: there's always porn. —Paul Salamone is the author of Blog Book 1: Essays on Writing. NOT YET A SUBSCRIBER TO POLYSEMY? Make the choice to become one today — click here for POLYSEMY Print, or here for POLYSEMY Digital. ©2006 Polysemy. All rights reserved. |
