Everything is Romantic

All writers do is write about love

A tortured artist creates nothing but misery for himself and everyone around him. I’ve written my way through certain wounds, but never a fresh one. I used to think some of the greatest works can be attributed to an artist’s ability to transfer their torment to pages—and maybe there’s some truth to that, but I also believe that time is the best editor. If I had published the handful of work I wrote over the last 3 years, I wouldn’t be able to stand by any of them now.

In 2024, I took a playwriting course to overcome my writer’s block. For a working creative, I was spending a lot of time just working, but not creating. When I submitted my pages, the instructor told me something I’ll never forget: “You have writers’ block because you’re not being honest in your writing, not because you don’t know how to write.” And he was right. You can lie to anyone, including yourself, but not to a blank page.

I wouldn’t have called myself unhappy in the most recent years, but I was in pain. I probably wouldn’t have called it that either. I just had a vague sense that something was off, but didn’t want to look closely to find out what. It’s taken the last eight months to get to a place where I could see exactly the choices I’ve made to keep the pain, not even away, but at bay.

I didn’t start writing again until a month ago. But where I used to stare at the keyboard, hoping the words will find me, it’s become like it was before. I know exactly what I want to say and constructing the sentences just feel like playing an instrument again. I can hear the note when its right.

I call myself a writer, but I’d be writing even if I didn’t. It’s the loving arms I come back to again and again, even if it’s been awhile. And like a lover, if there is no naked vulnerability, there is no relationship.

A few months ago, when I was in treatment, I told my doctor that I believe everything has meaning. Life has a small handful of coincidences, but life itself is not one. It can be a beautiful, but painful ailment: my magical thinking (OCD) and my romanticism love to play games on one another. Every experience and emotion is magnified. Like a little magpie, I hold onto everything until there’s no place in the nest, not even for me.

In the hospital, I talked to a Rabbi about the purpose of life. Halfway through the conversation, it occurred to me that no one ever approaches a Rabbi to ask for their opinions about the Knicks. But what a beautiful existence to be able to have these conversations about life and its equivalency without reservation. And what a beautiful choice it is to find someone just as receptive.

I told him that many of my loved ones believe that there is nothing special about our existence. That in the grand scheme of things, we’re all just tiny specks. But my mind refuses to wrap itself around the possibility that we’re here by happenstance. I’ll accept just about any answer but that one.

An elementary teacher once said (paraphrasing) that I can be immovable like a parked car and without a reason to go, I just won’t do it. She didn’t say it kindly, but she had a point. I can just be talked into anything if there’s a good reason. Curiosity alone is reason enough.

The Rabbi didn’t have a straightforward answer for me. I don’t know if I would have believed him even if he did. But in searching, I realized that I’ve been working backwards this entire time.

My whole life, I’ve believed all of this has to mean something. I just have to live long and big enough to find the why.

I’ve had a quote saved in my Notes app for the last 10 years, buried under a mountain of grocery lists and half scattered thoughts. It’s travelled with me like a compass; if I ever find myself too lost, it points me back to where I want to be.

Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate. Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met. “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll.

The little girl was comforted. When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: “my travels have changed me… “ Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary, it said: “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

It’s a running cosmic joke that I went to divinity school and got accredited as an expert in love theology, yet it’s as unknowable to me as outer space. When I presented my thesis to my panel, I told them that I don’t need to understand love, I just need proof that it’s the fabric of our existence. I’m not a religious woman, but I’m a woman of faith. I am choosing to believe that love, in all its forms, is fundamental to our existence.

I believe the lack of love is detrimental to our health and I believe that I have hurt myself, and others, the most when I’ve withheld it. I don’t care to write about anything that doesn’t have an explicit purpose and without love (not limited in the familial, platonic, or romantic sense), the pages stayed blank.

Love flows and ebbs and I have spent so much of my life treating it like a fixed object. Like water, it goes where it wants. I’ve tried to keep it and I’ve tried to conjure it and every time, all I needed was to wait for it to come back, changed.

I’m not in pain anymore, but I am still sore. I have betrayed myself so horribly for so many years that my muscles have atrophied. Every movement towards openness and authenticity feels like muscle being ripped from bone.

I write and study about how love is the center of our existence, but struggle to tell my friends how much they mean to me. I make art about desire and connection, but all of my relationships take a backseat to my work. I’ve closed the door on perhaps beautiful adventures because I’m running risk assessments over what’s real. Like religion, belief can be hollow. What does it matter that I can talk about all of this in the abstract, if I don’t move with it in me?

When I was a kid, heights had a fear of me. I jumped from tree branches and swing sets like gravity was a suggestion. I’ve taken big, stupid gambles on myself and hauled myself from city to city not even for promise, but for potential. I was the bravest girl in the entire world until I misstepped and landed wrong. Someone I loved blindsided me and I couldn’t accept it. Love might be everything, but just the feeling alone is not enough.

My friend Dylan called me earlier this week and reminded me that no life is worth living unless you are acting from your highest self, wounds and all. And thinking you’re bigger than heartbreak, is just being too small for love. I hope one day soon to be someone my 7-year-old self—who climbed everything she could find just because she could—could recognize again.