In the morning, you wake up at three to the crushing, familiar weight in your chest. The person who was your safe harbor, the one who knew the cadence of your voice, your fears, and the exact way you took your coffee, is gone. You cry, sob until your breath hitches, consumed by a terrifying certainty: no one in the world has ever felt a devastation this precise, this deep, or this unendurable. You are entirely, irreducibly alone.
Yet, this conviction of our own unique, unshareable agony is the ultimate deception of a broken heart. It locks us behind an invisible wall, whispering that our pain is too strange or too severe for anyone else to ever truly grasp. But one of America’s most celebrated writers and an artist, James Baldwin, suggests you may be drowning in pain, but you are certainly not alone.
