In moments of heartbreak, I often have to ask myself. Is love worth it?

Because I’m going to be honest with you. Besides spiders and insomnia, there is nothing I fear more than love.

Because. It has often felt that the intensity and capacity with which I have to love equally matches the intensity and capacity I have, as a result, suffered.

I’ll start with my love of organizing. (Hah I’m not going where you think I’m going. But trust me, I’ll get there.) I started organizing in 2019 with Sunrise, a youth led climate movement fighting to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs.

Joining Sunrise transformed my life. I have never felt more agency as a human, more connected, more reflective, more vulnerable or more powerful. In a lot of ways, joining Sunrise felt a lot like falling in love for the first time.

But love can be a roller coaster, and I have had my heart broken many times by this movement. I could write whole novels about firings, Twitter drama and attacks on my character, organization layoffs, organization conflict, movement conflict, interpersonal conflict, Buzzfeed articles, etc.

How could this thing I love, so deeply, also become one of the core sources of my suffering? The core source of most of the burnout and depression I’ve experienced in my mid twenties?

So.

I have had my heartbroken many times by organizing. I’ve also had my heartbroken by love.

I have been heart FUCKING broken only once in my life. (Throw in some small L’s along the way, but nothing like this.) It was devastating. I have never experienced a pain more intense than heartbreak. An intensity of sadness and grieving that really does a number on you. To see. The insane amount of water that can come from a humans eyes while crying. To see. A person you felt so deeply for in every way, weeks and months later, choose someone else. To feel delusional, craving and desiring and wanting someone that does not want you.

It is really fucking hard and at the time, I did not think I was cut out for that shit.

And not only had I wrestled with my own challenges with love, but I saw heartbroken and hurt people EVERYWHERE. And I mean everywhere. In the saddest of ballads in R&B songs, in rappers spitting fuck bitches get money, in the emotional unavailability of men I’ve desired, and in my own parents.

And after all of these interactions, I keep coming back to this question. If I (or you or we) are to suffer this much, to avoid it this much, is love worth it?

Is love really worth it?

And there’s a quote that I heard once during a meditation retreat that has consistently steered me back to what I hope to be true.

“An open heart never breaks.”

This quote resonated so deeply with me because it felt incredibly antithetical to my own instincts. Instincts that pushed me to close myself out of fear, out of protection.

And in sitting with this quote, it inspired me to never give up on the beauty and power of what’s on the other side of love. To reframe my fear. To go against what felt natural. To open myself to new opportunities, work, to love, even if it might crush me in the end

And so. Is love worth if?

I get flashbacks. To the moments falling in love for the first time with organizing. Marching through the streets of Detroit during the 2019 DNC Debates, demanding to make Detroit the engine of the Green New Deal, and reeling from the high I felt for days after. Moments sitting at retreats with friends and teammates strategizing about what it was going to take to deliver a death blow to the fossil fuel industry and win massive climate legislation for this country. Moments deep in conversations, filled with the intimacy and the type of vulnerability that come with opening yourself, fully, to someone.