I used to write an advice column for the San Francisco Examiner in the nineties, called Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain (hence the title of the Substack.) The photograph of my head next to the byline featured my hair on fire. The conceit was that I was a Psychic Psupergenius, here to solve your various earthly woes. I was the Oracle. Sometimes I gave terrible advice. Sometimes the advice was good. Sometimes I waxed philosophical about relationships, since I was usually failing at them. I was usually an emotional wreck, and unintentionally wrote about depression a lot, without calling it what it was, since I didn’t know. Anyway, a kind person on Twitter brought this particular article to my attention this week, and I never would have remembered I wrote it if not for them. This piece is from 1999.
In any case, this is for all the broken hearts out there. You live with it, eh?
DEAREST Young and Restless Love-Stomped Readers: After the sudden, blood-and-hair-all-over-the-walls demise of several seemingly happy relationships in my youthful social network, I was seized with sharp, shooting pangs of outrageous empathy. I figured I'd try to write down anything useful I'd learned after having my heart broasted, filleted and macerated a cripplingly large number of times, in the hopes that you, those under 35 whom Eros hath chain-whipped, may find something comforting in this tidy collection (aside from my general solidarity). I have no authority, unfortunately, to provide heartache solace for those significantly older until somewhere around 2012.
Here are several rules that, unlikely as it may seem, have held to be 100 percent true for every love lost, no matter how ghastly the circumstances:
1. Having one's heart mangled shoots one, cannon-like, out into the world and makes a soul discover itself in a way that nothing else does, and often great things come of it. The worse the heart in question is broken, the farther the sad owner of it will be jettisoned. Almost instantly, old pieces of the former pre-relationship self that were locked away like appalling pantsuits because they didn’t "fit" into the relationship, re-arrive and are miraculously in style again. One becomes galvanized; one lands at a brave new sadder-but-wiser departure point, and because one is so fitful and restless and upset, one is propelled outwards into unforeseen realms of new experience.
2. According to glossy women's magazines, the general applied rule for heartbreak is that it will take you half as long to get totally over a relationship as the length of the relationship itself. What they do not tell you is that eventually, you WILL BE AWFULLY GLAD.
As implausible as that seems shortly after the breakup has taken place, it is invariably true. Pining and torch-keeping until one is old and geriatric for "the one that got away" is strictly for yellowed books that take place in villages with 16 or fewer overly religious inhabitants. You learn things about yourself, as time goes on, and you realize big important things about your ex that make your past unions appear in their true light as laughably impossible.
3. It is generally held to be true among people of my generation that it would have been tragic to meet The One they were going to spend their lives with any time before the age of 29 or 30. The evolving that a person does between the ages of 21-30 is perhaps the most important to the development of one's personality. It is an all-important growing and testing and romping field for the exploration of self, and it is imperative that nothing thwart or otherwise alter the ballsy, willful experimentations that need to happen for one to truly know who one is and what they desire. One should dip one's toes into all of the excitements, if compelled: bisexuality! alcohol abuse! disorganized road-trips!
It is sad but true - pretty much all of the people that I know who were hooked up and / or married at 25 or earlier, are very dissatisfied and have had a lot of problems with their relationships or marriages. That young adult growth spurt is just too volatile.
4. Almost any big relationship you have before the age of 30, or if you're precocious maybe 28, is going to be a re-enactment of the tragic lamenesses of your parents' relationship, or your relationship with one or more of your parents. This is nature's way of showing you a mirror of the otherwise invisible glitches in your psyche. The patterns will eventually look completely obvious, at which point you can run screaming to the nearest psychotherapist or merely avoid picking out the same routine in the future.
It is most important to believe that you will eventually be glad. More than glad - you will be absolutely relieved that it didn't work out, and sooner than you expect. I give you all my word as one who foists worldly assistance, on my honor as a Psychic Psupergenius. Thou shalt heal, and fall in love again, and be broken again, and heal again and again, ad astra, forever.
IF
IF IT ISN’T, EMAIL ME AT CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM and we’ll sort it out.
Artwork: “The Supremes Holding An Albino Burmese Python,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2019.
YOU EARN IT THE HARD WAY