I got dumped in January and I’m still not over it.

Everyone keeps saying that the year goes by so quickly, ‘can you believe it’s May already?’ But I feel like we’ve been saying that all year every year ever since we all got smartphones. There’s no lazy days anymore, no more boredom, no more dial tones. My voicemail is always full because spam callers leave half-second messages that accrue by the hundreds and ain’t that just a symbol of how life is right now, the ratio of bullshit to sustenance is so imbalanced I hear more half-seconds of silence followed by clicks than messages in my mom’s voice.

I got dumped in January and staggered onto a plane and across the world determined to use the time to disassemble my broken heart and repair it. It didn’t work, but it was a distraction, and when I got back there was a blizzard to clean up after and a baby lamb to bottle feed and then a baby goat sleeping in a cat carrier and then two more and then another lamb and now it’s about ten weeks later and we have five baby animals living in the house with us, drinking ten bottles of formula and two gallons of water and eating a huge scoop of grain every day, romping in the backyard in a playpen, screaming every time they see me and running up to me with their big flappy ears and bouncing imperious stots, calling me MAAAAAA.

It’s good to be busy on the micro. It’s good to have babies to feed and books to edit and jobs to do and sheets to change. We’re all busy on the macro too, though, and I think that’s less good. Everything is so much all the time, and the only remedy to the thick layer of slop laid over us seems to be an equally gross and destructive substance: individualism. Because how do we make art and talk about it and connect about it when most of our relationships are on the internet and the internet is being smoothed over like spackle? We individuate, we connect one-to-one, we live radically as ourselves in a way that algorithms can’t power wash into sameness.

But it’s hard to say you’re individuating when the social internet is largely just the comfort nursing of visiting the same people and same sites and same channels and thinking you’re getting new inputs when really you’re just hearing the thoughts and feelings you already wanted to have. You can’t trust the internet at scale anymore, and maybe this was how it was always going to get, because the internet is made by people and it’s not like you can trust people at scale either.

I got dumped in January and I’ve had to learn a lot about myself because of it and fuck, I’m so tired of learning new things about myself. I want the comfort nursing. I want the familiar stories. I want to believe the things about myself that got me through so much of my adolescence and young adulthood—that I’m bad, that I’m unloveable, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me that can never be erased, only disguised, that in order to be accepted I have to be disguised, be smaller, be easier, be more consumable, be understanding, be available without being needy, be funny and smart and sexy without ever being independent, self-directed, or threatening (somehow).

And god, on top of all the regular grief feelings you have about a breakup, getting dumped is so humiliating. It’s easy to renew the terrible stories about yourself when you’re broken up with by someone who said they wanted to be with you until they were dead. Those are the people who are supposed to know you best, who you let see the deepest core of you. I would like so much to fall back on the bad familiar stories for myself now, but I walk out on them and wobble like I’m on peg legs. They won’t take me anywhere anymore. They don’t fit the shape of this breakup, and furthermore, they don’t fit me. I’ve outgrown them. But I don’t have other stories yet, so all I can do is monitor the feelings as they come up and try to give them the space they need when they need it. It’s hard. My heart is tired. It’s gone through a lot lately.

I don’t get close with people very often. I’m polyamorous but where some people do nonmonogamy to see the relational world, I do it because I feel connections with new people so rarely that I always want the opportunity to explore them, see where they go. In the last ten years, I’ve seriously dated four people and married two of them. It’s like that.

Some people would say that that kind of exclusivity is a problem, that I should distribute my interests more broadly, build redundancy, make more connections more shallowly. But my relationships aren’t marshes. They’re cenotes. This is the only way I know how to be, even though getting yanked out of this one gave me the bends. Deep loves end in deep heartbreak. You don’t smooth that over.