Heather Demetrios - Dear Heartbreak YA Authors and Teens on the Dark Side of Love

Love is a beast.

There are plenty of books about how love is rainbows and roses and butterfly kisses, but this is not one of them.

Sorry.

This is a book about the dark side of love: the way it kicks your ass, tears out your heart, and then forces you to eat it, bite by bloody bite. If youve felt this way, you are not alone. And if you havent felt this way, we promise you will. Not to be a downer, but it kind of comes with the territory of being human. This is also a book about how you can survive love. How you can be broken and battered by a relationship (or lack of one) and still have the real deal, when the real deal is good and ready to show up. Better yet, its about how you dont even need someone to show up because the kind of love that will save you every time is the love you give yourself. Im not feeding you a sappy self-help platitude here. This is not a Hallmark card or an inspirational mug you can buy at the bookstore (although mugs, bookstores, and snail mail are all wonderful). Loving yourself is damn hard because it means accepting all the parts of you that you cant stand. It means knowing youre actually okay even though society wants you to believe that you arent. Its downright revolutionary.

Oscar Wilde said that the heart was made to be broken. I dont know if thats true, but I know that after hearts break, they can be put back together in new and startling ways, and youre forever different because of it. Our hearts are resilient. They can go a hundred rounds in the ring, get knocked out, and the next day be right back in there, fists up. But how do you keep from getting the shit beaten out of you by love? What do you do when youre against the ropes?

When youre in love or out of love or cant freaking find love, it can be hard to know which way is up. What are you supposed to say to someone whos stomped all over your heart? How can you possibly go on living and eating and brushing your hair when you lose someone you love, or when the person you love barely knows you exist? Love messes with your head. It can sometimes make you feel like you dont deserve it, and it definitely makes you feel like its the most important thing in the world. (Actually, it is. Love is what its all about.) The Beatles werent lying when they said, All you need is love. If we, as humans, need love as much as we need oxygen, then how the hell are we supposed to stay alive when it takes a hike or doesnt show up at all? No one tells you what to do when it turns into some creepy alien shit intent on sucking out your life force. No one explains that it can be agonizing, an exquisitely wretched pain wed give almost anything to never, ever feel again.

Thats where this book comes in. I asked young adults all over the world to write a letter to Heartbreakthey could say or ask whatever they wanted, as long as they kept it real. Of those letters, the authors featured in this anthology each chose one to answer. They picked the letter that spoke to their heart, the letter they had to respond to. Each author in these pages has suffered from a broken heart. Some are married; some are single. Some are gay; some are straight. Some have been dumped, and some have been the dumper. Some have cheated; some have been betrayed. None of us are perfect. And the advice we give in these pages is not because were licensed psychologists (although one of us is) or because we have it all figured out. Were being so bold as to give you our two cents because we spend a lot of time thinking about love and weve learned a couple of things along the way. When you write a storyany storyyoure trying to figure out what it means to be human. And a big part of being human is falling in and out of love. Storyteller, meet Reader. Reader, meet Storyteller.

Sylvia Plath said, Perhaps some day Ill crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow. These authors all talk about love in their books in one way or another. Sometimes its epic and star-crossed, or its confusion about whether they love a boy or girlor both. Sometimes its about being invisible and seemingly unloved, or feeling like they dont deserve love. Sometimes its about falling in love with your best friend, or someone youve just met, or a boy who hurts you but that you cant seem to shake. Theyre able to write about love so well because they have all loved and lost and yearned and hoped. Theyve all wondered if the One is really out there, or if the idea of a soul mate is a total myth. Many have doubted their own worthiness, wondering what was so wrong with them that they couldnt even get a date. Their bravery in telling their own storiesand the courage of the people who wrote letters to Heartbreakshows that no matter how awful love might seem, its worth the cost of the ride.

The world is batshit crazy right now: racism, homophobia, intolerance, sexism, terrorism, and fear seem to be in charge. But theyre not. Any good thing, any good person, is good because of love. Any time we see society change for the better, its because a few brave souls chose love over hate. To love people in the volatile times we live inromantically or otherwiseis an act of courage and defiance. We see this in how many people get married, even though the divorce rate is sky-high. Or in the boy who doesnt stop asking out the girl hes crushing on, even though she rejects him every damn time. We see it in the guy who forgives his boyfriend for cheating on him, but leaves anyway, because he loves himself, and knows he deserves better. (Im going to let you in on a little secret: Loving yourself is a Jedi-knight level of love.) Love can be a political act, a radical life choice, a refusal to submit to a world that tries to put a price tag on everything that matters. Opening up your heart to someone and letting them in will be the scariest thing youll ever doand the best thing. Heartbreak is a natural part of this process. When your heart breaks, it creates fertile soil for the next love. Maybe its a bit more tender; maybe it needs to be watered with a deluge of tears. I offer you these lyrics from U2s Beautiful Day: the heart is a bloom / shoots up from the stony ground. It can grow in the most unexpected places.

A note on the letters youre about to read:

In 2017, I visited some schools here in the US and, as I mentioned earlier in this rant introduction, put out a call online for teens to submit letters to Heartbreak about their bad times in the romance department. There was no guarantee that their letter would be chosen by one of the YA writers participating in this project, of course, but Im a firm believer in the power of the letter never sent, so it didnt really matter if their letter ended up in the book or not: The writing was going to work some magic on their hearts anyway. I received letters from people all over the world. The teens who wrote in left it all on the stageor, in our case, the page. They poured out their hearts, outed their haters, and confessed their deepest, darkest secrets and fears. I very lightly edited the letters for grammar and readability (my heart goes out to high school English teachers everywhere), and I omitted any details that could be identifying. More than anything, it was important to me that this was a book that holds space for the teens and YA writers brave enough to participate. In order to protect them, Ive kept the teens letters completely anonymous. We have letters here that come from various regions in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. (See? It doesnt matter where youre fromheartbreak will find you. No one is exempt. *cue ominous music*)