Polly Vernon
LAST WEEK, scientists confirmed that broken- heart syndrome is real.
They could have just asked me, proud survivor of a heartbreak or nine (writers, eh?), but instead, they followed 37 patients for two years, performing ultrasounds and MRI scans, before concluding the emotional trials of a break-up stun the heart and cause the left ventricle to change shape. Scientists call broken-heart syndrome ‘takotsubo’, which is Japanese for ‘octopus pot’ and intended as a reference to the form that altered left ventricle takes, although it could easily be a reference to heartbreak itself, no? To the thrashing and roiling of trapped emotions, to the emotional turmoil that won’t let you sleep or chill or do anything but beat yourself up over why you weren’t good enough for that person. To the way we reach out and clutch blindly, in the hope of connecting with something – anything! – that might make us feel better, only it’s usually the ex-before-last we wind up clutching, the one whose heart we broke as recklessly as ours just was.
Takotsubo researchers recommend that sufferers receive the same drugs as heart attack patients, saying, ‘ Takotsubo needs to be treated with the same urgency as any other heart problem.’ OK, but: that’s all of us, right? All of us that count, anyway. Never trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. Without that basic entry point on the human experience, who even are you? Until you’ve had someone you adore just not return those feelings, until you’ve stared deep into the abyss of rejection and understood, definitively, that you are Just. Not. Lovable… what do you know about being alive? Until you’ve wept, uncontrollably and alone, on a bus, shot evils at a couple in some coffee shop because they have the audacity to look happy when you are nothing but raw and dumped… Until you’ve drafted all the raging texts, bored friends with statements that begin ‘it’s not that he ended it, it’s the way he ended it?’ (By the way? It is totally that he ended it)… Until then: you don’t count.
It is a damned risky business, is heartbreak. Terrible for our mental health, and – according to these takotsubo scientists – pretty bad for physical health, too. If it were a course on a modern university syllabus, it would have multiple trigger warnings next to it. If it were a visiting lecturer, it’d be no-platformed to hell. But it is also the only way to fly. Until you’ve had your left ventricle battered into a different shape by the unutterable pain of an unceremonious ditching: don’t consider yourself a participating part of the human race. You’re not. Not yet.