A Little Bit Broken

Ruminations on Not Being the Sad Boy Anymore

Welcome back, dear readers and writers.

Some of you know that I often write about loss and love. For years, I wrote about longing too (my three L’s, I guess). And this makes sense, since most of my adolescence was spent writing in journals about a great big loss. As a closeted teen stuck in the suburbs, I wrote my way through my mother’s illness and her eventual death. Writing kept me sane (mostly), and it certainly kept me alive.

This week’s quote addresses grief head on. It’s from Leonard Wieseltier, from his essay, “What We Affirm," published in The New Republic, September 10, 2011.

Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation … We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we have valued, and in this way mourning darkly refreshes our knowledge of the causes of our loves and the reasons for our values. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness to people and to principles.

It is the yes of a broken heart.

Writing through loss has truly been transformative for me, and it led me to lead Grief and Healing writing workshops with my dear friend Kaye Cleave, who has broken our hearts and opened our eyes with her own story of surviving a great loss. So it probably won’t surprise you that sometimes my prompts offer us the chance to process painful stories. And this week’s prompt is a solid tearjerker for sure.

The song in the YouTube video below is by the artist Josef, who was dubbed “the summer sad boy we didn’t know we needed,” by Vogue Magazine in 2019. He’s gone on to release a major album since then, but this track, from his 2020 EP, Does it Make You Feel Good?, will always be one of my favorites. (Likewise for the poem at the end of this post, by Aaron Smith.)

Listen to Josef’s song, and write anything that comes to mind. Sometimes, a line from a song can work as a prompt too, so you can access the song lyrics here. What I wrote is below the video.