#25 Hey Siri, Play My Feelings
I used to think that tuning into your pain would amplify it. Then I discovered something else.
I’ve always liked getting over things quickly. But then I’ve always assumed: Doesn’t everybody?
Enter my MOVE ALONG playlist. I began curating it while I was in Europe, traveling alone and reeling from heartbreak. I know, it’s giving Eat, Pray, Love. Sadly, I have to tell you it was the opposite: Instead of flying far away from the source of my heartache, I was taking a train toward it.
The European perpetrator was my writer crush. I discovered him on the platform where we were both writing — and I was insatiably drawn to his work. Our writer friendship began over e-mail when I asked him for feedback on a draft. I was a complete stranger to him, and still, he gave me notes.
E-mail turned into Twitter turned into Whatsapp, and our writer friendship graduated to normal friendship. I sent him my vacation photos. He sent me his birthday photos. We matched each other’s energy, fed each other’s curiosity effortlessly. Then at one point, it hit me: I wasn’t crushing on him just as a writer anymore.
We’d been talking for over a year when I planned my first solo trip. And while I didn’t choose Europe because of him, it was a pretty sweet bonus to realize he was a train away from one of the cities in my itinerary. Route-wise, I could make him my last stop and then fly home from there. I asked if he was up to meet me for a day.
“Yeah, of course, that’d be cool!”
From that moment, our conversations began to ramp up. He eagerly planned my day trip. We juggled other threads of conversation, replying to each other with fleshed-out, screen-long responses. (Did I mention we were writers?) It was as if he couldn’t wait to get to know me. I, of course, relished every bit of it.
Then, a week later, he sent me a 2,000-word letter-essay. He explained how he realized he had feelings for me all along.
I was in raptures. And I was so deep into it that I set aside the reason I hadn’t bothered telling him how I felt: He was already with someone.
So I admitted that I liked him, too.
What followed was delirium. Messages laced with thrill and confusion. We’d never met in person, but it was hard to believe we wouldn’t connect on the same cellular level face to face. We talked about seeing where this could go even if it meant starting it as a long-distance relationship.
A few days later, he told his girlfriend about us.
The morning after, which was a week before my flight, I woke up to his message that began with: “I’m sorry, Ria. But I can’t do this.” He was on his way to his girlfriend to salvage their relationship.
Shocked, I only mustered to respond: “This really hurts.”
That morning, I texted my friend: “I need you. Can you come over?” Things turned so precipitously that I felt like I had just been thrown off a cliff, but I was still in disbelief that I was falling. I needed to talk to someone to validate my reality–but more importantly, to hold myself together.
I thought about taking a leave, but I didn’t see how that would help. So I logged in at work. Slogged through my deliverables. Dialed in on meetings where people’s words went in one ear, then out the other. I don’t remember eating. But I remember scrolling through Twitter and—wanting to feel some semblance of power amidst my helplessness—posting: “I’ve been through this shit before and I can get through it again.”
My friend arrived after work. I filled her in. And when she left, I cried in bed.
Light-headed and puffy-eyed, I texted her upon waking up —heartbreak day two — “I can’t keep waking up like this. Or rather, not being able to sleep like this.”
“Sadly, this part where you just wanna lie down is something you gotta go through.”
Sure, whatever. But the idea of being a wallowing, unproductive thing never did appeal to me. So I got up, dressed up, and reported back to her: “I’m in the office. I feel like a person.” Despite the work-from-home setup, I went to the office for the rest of the week.
Then I flew to Europe. Thankfully, I felt like a perfectly normal tourist. For two weeks I moseyed around beautiful art, perfectly-manicured gardens, and classical European architecture. Or I was scurrying to catch the correct tram or bus. Either way, I hardly had the headspace to tend to my pain.
The next thing I know it’s my last day. And I’m on that godforsaken train.
I texted my friend: “Oh god. Suddenly feeling the weight of it.”
“You’ll carry it well.”
36,000 steps. That’s how much I walked around my crush’s town on my own. Unlike the previous cities, I had no agenda and refused to use public transportation. I sported my two-inch-high booties as if to make a statement: “I’m not going to let this place get to me.”
I imagined shedding off my yearning with every step, as if my feelings were a ball of yarn I could unwind simply by hand.
I thought, if I could immerse myself in the place that would trigger me the most and come out unscathed, that meant I carried it well, right?
Back in Manila, I resumed my regular programming. I perked myself up with my MOVE ALONG playlist. I focused on work, on my writing, and soon enough, I felt an all-too-familiar high.
“You know”, I told a friend, “I realized I’m a high-functioning sad person.”
I’ve always been an expert compartmentalizer. As a once-type A student who always had to juggle multiple things, I’d learned early on that the way to survive and thrive is to box up each of your duties. Pick one box at a time. Channel all your energy into that. Wall off everything else.
Case in point: My last breakup. I was with my ex for almost four years. And when we broke up right before our senior year of college, I flew to Paris for the summer. (What can I say? Europe wants my broken heart) Then when school began, I shuffled frantically between school projects, org activities, and college socials. Save for one night of alcohol-induced tears, I don’t remember having other spells of ugly-crying. Or grieving what I had. Now it’s hard to say when I finally got over him or how long it took. I’m not sure if the box of my broken heart ever saw the light of day.
One day fresh from Europe, I went to a bookstore and saw this beautiful, blue hardbound book titled Bittersweet. The subtitle read: “How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole”
Hmm, I thought. Do they?
In the book, author Susan Cain explores her affinity for melancholy. She’s always been drawn to sad songs, so now she wondered: “Why did I find yearning music so strangely uplifting?”
This question was beyond me. To me, what was uplifting was Beyoncé singing, Thank God you blew it / Thank God I dodged a bullet / I’m so over you / You turned out to be the best thing I never had. It was Ariande Grande liberating every girl from their exes with these three magic words: thank u, next!
I mean, why listen to sad songs especially while you’re in pain? Isn’t that like, twisting the knife further — but with your own two hands?
But Cain sees it differently. To be completely, deeply in your feelings, she believes, is one of the richest places you can be in. She quotes social psychologist Dr. Hooria Jazaieri: “We often notice suffering (our own and that of others) but quickly dismiss it and thus do not allow ourselves to be emotionally touched or moved by the suffering.”
That sounded alarmingly familiar to me.
So one morning, when I woke up and felt my eyes welling up, I thought I’d do something different. Instead of shrugging off the tears, I just gave in.
I had what you might call a “good cry”. When it was over, I thought about Cameron Diaz’s alpha female character in the movie The Holiday. Her parents broke up when she was fifteen, and on the night her dad moved out, she cried for an inordinately long time— and she hasn’t been able to cry since.
I really felt like that was what happened to me. It seemed impossible that I had any more tears to shed.
Maybe it was reading Bittersweet. Maybe it was hearing a friend echo Cain’s take when he told me: “Sometimes I just like to sit with the sadness.” Maybe it was me noticing how I couldn’t listen to The 1 by Taylor Swift because I didn’t want to hear more about lost loves.
Maybe it was all of these things that woke me up to my pattern of dealing. And I became suspicious of it.
So I decided I’d pull a Susan Cain. I would make a sad-girl playlist.
The title? “PAIN DEMANDS TO BE FELT”.
For this, I wasn’t going to choose any sad song. I was going to choose those that talked about what I went through. Like Gotten by Adam Levine. The song captured how my crush made me feel: He just got me, like I’ve never been gotten before. There’s Say It by Maggie Rogers, a track that resurrected the struggle of catching feelings for him (I cannot fall in love with you / I cannot feel this way so soon). A happy-but-sad-for-me song, Every Summertime by NIKI brought me back to the moment he told me he liked me, and I ended up singing and dancing to the song like a lovestruck teenager.
One song should’ve been obvious to me but wasn’t.
Early into my heartbreak, I explained the incident by saying: “I fell for someone I wasn’t supposed to.” Which isn’t wrong. But because I was so busy wishing I could’ve canceled my feelings, I couldn’t see it for what it also was – and, ultimately, why it hurt so bad. That is, until my friends heard my story and sang to me in chorus: “Goodbye, my Almost Lover”
Add to playlist.
The first time I dared to listen to the set, it was right before the crack of dawn. I was on my bed. AirPods in. The blinds were half-shut, and the dim sky gently lit my room. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and hit play, not knowing what to expect. Was I going to break down? Would listening to these songs swallow me whole?
Even as I write this, a year since everything happened, it’s difficult for me to describe the moment. It was tender, pensive. More full than heavy. And surprisingly… safe.
I suppose, for now, that’s the best description I have of melancholy.
Through all this, I’ve felt the hurt surface in different ways. As expected, it sometimes did feel like a knife. Or whatever tool that can metaphorically tighten your chest and yank your heart. Other times it came in like a huge, far-off wave, taking its own damn sweet time to crash. On some days it hit me like a gut punch, leaving a hollowness that lingered in its wake. And sometimes, in less hostile but still palpable ways, it hovered over my head like a cloud. Like my own overcast sky.
Another thing that kept resurfacing? The tears. It turns out there was more of where that came from. And they always caught me off guard. In Filipino, I would describe these sudden bursts of tears as di oras, which translates to “not the time for it.”
But there’s no such thing as the perfect time to feel your emotions. Pain demands to be felt.
I see now that this sort of music understood something that I didn’t. What if the most vulnerable of us are actually the toughest of us? What if refusing to mourn a thing is what keeps us from moving on from it? What if all emotions aren’t merely valid — but valuable?
I might’ve caught a hunch sooner had I paid attention to HONNE. A friend added their song Crying Over You to my MOVE ALONG playlist, but as I had no interest in being sad then, I deleted it. Now it’s in my PAIN DEMANDS TO BE FELT playlist. And now I sing along with every fiber of my being, especially when they say: “We’re gonna feel broken for a bit / And it’s gonna be a little bit shit / But you’ll find the strength when you’re weak.”
hi Ria, thank you for writing this. As someone recovering from an almost relationship, the playlist the words everything hits home. apparently somethings just don't work out. but your 'bittersweet' blog managed to make me feel warm (I hope you get the pun) :)