Happy Birthday, My Favorite Breakup 🎉
On one year of breakup stories.
Hi, friends. Welcome to a full year of My Favorite Breakup.
I had plans to write a sort of sweeping meta tale for this edition. It would describe what I remember to be this newsletter’s origin story, as well as scenes from my own post-big-breakup healing: a sad meander through an art museum, lipstick beneath masks, Bumble dates and European travel. It included the line “I don’t hate you anymore.”
Two things happened:
It was bad. Each version I drafted was too long and too detailed and I couldn’t tell if it was all real or if I just wanted it to sound poetic. In any case, the idea wasn’t working.
The line “I don’t hate you anymore” stopped being true. Grief is weird and winding. You can be happy in a new relationship and make peace with past betrayals and even be friendly with an ex from afar, but then suddenly, you learn something new about the situation and feel crushed with rage, again, even two years since the end. It will be true again, but now’s not then.
So, you’re getting this note from me instead.
Do you know how lonely it is to go through a world-shattering breakup during a pandemic? Plenty of you do. I’m so grateful that my weird idea for a weekly Substack sharing anonymous breakup stories in 100 words has brought you and 250+ other people here. Your stories have ranged from gut-wrenching to sweetly mundane, from teenage discovery to divorce. I’m happy to report there’s now a three-month backlog of stories waiting to be published — but send me more, always.
There’s a lovely line in a forthcoming edition that exemplifies my earlier struggle with finding truth among my discarded drafts: “It takes us years to tell these breakup stories and for most of them, we tell 'em wrong.”
Thanks for telling yours all the same.
-jz