When Heartache Finds You
Heartache is the earthquake of the Soul
There are moments when heartache grows so large it edges out your breath. You find yourself standing at the doorway between what was and what will never be again.
Original photography by B. Littleton.
Heartache arrives when Death does what Death always promised. It takes someone we thought would stay. The partner who held your hand through sleepless nights. The old dog who watched you dissolve into tears when the world split open and loved you anyway. Your psyche cat who purred away stress, and let your dreams stay close in the morning with one paw on your heart. Their absence is not theoretical. It rearranges your body, your routines, the shape of your days. It hollows out the familiar.
For me, the heartache came quiet, and then all at once, when my three horses died. Twenty-two years they stood with me, carried me, let me lean my forehead to their belly when I was lost. They were my family, my compass, the reason my life had structure at all. I didn’t know who I was without them. I’m still not sure. Their absence made it clear. So much of my identity had been stitched together from outside devotion, from the rhythms of caretaking. I mistook that scaffolding for my Self.
And here’s the truth most people don’t expect. I have lived through loss. I have buried my parent’s parents, my parents, two brothers, two marriages, dear friends, trusted clients, and most recently, the last living elder from both sides of my family: my uncle, my touchstone since I was two years old. The one who saw me when I was small and never stopped believing I carried something worthy inside. Every one of those losses fractured me, uprooted my balance, and left me questioning my purpose.
But nothing, truly nothing, shattered me the way losing my three horses did.
Those animals were more than companions. They were breath, earth, and bone, woven into my life in a way no one else could touch. There were nights I would sit with them in the darkness, my knees pulled to my chest, unsure how to hold the ache of being human. And they would surround me.
One by one, each horse would lower their head and place their muzzle gently on my head, pressing down, as if to say, Stay here. Stay present. Stay in your body.
We would sit that way for hours, their warm breath mingling with mine, the rhythm of their lungs syncing with my own, until the silence stretched wide enough for all the sorrow to fit. We would sigh together, a long exhale, the kind only creatures who know grief can share.
When they were gone, it wasn’t just them I lost. It was my tether to the earth, my map of belonging, the quiet, wordless language that told me I still had a place in this world.
Heartache settles into the bones when we witness a grove of ancient trees fall, felled by human machinery in a fraction of the time it took them to root into this earth. We ache for what cannot be undone.
It slips in when our child, once the orbit of our world, pulls away, unwilling to linger in the places we still long for connection. Or when our partner’s eyes glaze over, not because they don't care, but because the intimacy we’ve constructed mimics an old wound, a blueprint laid down by parents who never quite saw us either.
Heartache sharpens when we realize we’ve closed the door on someone who once mattered, perhaps to protect ourselves, perhaps because we never learned another way.
It comes when we meet ourselves in the mirror, under layers of weight or under covers of bareness of time or unfamiliar eyes, unsure of the body we inhabit now.
Heartache sings softly when the dream we once built our life upon turns hollow. When success, or achievement, or whatever shiny thing Ego told us to chase, loses its meaning. Carl Jung wrote, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” But sometimes, the greatest burden is our own unlived life, the one sacrificed at the altar of pleasing, performing, belonging.
Heartache curls its fingers around your memories when that old song plays, the one from forty years ago, and you remember the raw, electric ache of who you were then. You realize how precious it was, even if you couldn’t see it at the time.
It lands hard when you replay the moment you silenced yourself, unable to stand up, not because you lacked conviction, but because the belief you were worthy had yet to sprout roots.
Heartache is not just an ache in the soul. It gets in the body too. Sometimes it steals your appetite, leaves food untouched because nothing tastes right anymore. Sometimes it robs your sleep. You lie awake at night staring at the ceiling, mind looping in tight circles of memory and loss. The body hums with restlessness, the chest tightens, the breath grows shallow.
And then there is the most unbearable symptom of all. The not knowing. The bottomless ache of wondering how long this will last. The silent dread of not knowing when or if you will feel whole again.
C.S. Lewis understood this terrain better than most. After losing the love of his life, Joy, he wrote, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” He spoke to the strange cruelty of time, how it stretches endlessly in grief, and to the helplessness that comes when love leaves but life keeps going.
Lewis also confessed the raw truth most are too polite to name. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The racing heart, the clenched stomach, the trembling uncertainty. It isn’t just emotion. It is physical, cellular, a full-body disorientation.
But here is the hidden mercy tucked inside these wrecked places. As John O'Donohue wrote, and I believe he was quoting Rumi, “When the heart is broken, the cracks are where the light enters.” Cracks do more than let the light in. They remind us to come back home. Back to the body, the breath, the raw and ungoverned territory of feeling.
Marion Woodman, who spent her life mapping the psyche’s forgotten landscapes, reminds us, “The pain was necessary to know the truth, but we don’t have to keep the pain alive to keep the truth alive.”
There is no neat closure in heartache, in longing, in the pain of becoming. But Rumi, ever the mystic, turns the ache on its head. “Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.” Jung echoes this idea when he reminds us the cure is found in the illness, the pathology, in this case, the heartache.
The heartache is a crossing. Mary Oliver whispers, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
But here’s the unpolished truth. The gift is not comfort, not resolution. It is the permission to feel. To stand barefoot in the ashes of the old life. To weep, to ache, to howl in ways our culture rarely allows. It is the reminder that beyond thought, beneath rational strategy, lives the pulse of Soul, the part that never forgets how to come home.
Heartache is the earthquake of the Soul. It fractures the foundation, cracks the veneer, shakes loose what cannot remain. It levels the familiar so that, over time, new territory of life can emerge.
And while the world wants you tidy, wants you clean, wants you stitched back together and “normal,” there is wisdom in not rushing that repair.
Here is something ancient and quiet you can do instead.
When the weight of heartache grows unbearable, go outside at night. Let the dark sky hold your grief. Stand beneath the stretch of stars, those infinite witnesses to all the sorrow and beauty that has ever lived.
And remember when you were small, before you were trained to overthink, before you carried so much of the world on your shoulders. Remember how you used to wish upon falling stars, how it made sense then, how it provided as much relief as anything else could. Maybe more.
Wish again now.
Not for the heartache to vanish, but for the courage to sit inside it. Wish to remember your worth when everything feels stripped away. Wish to be surprised by your own quiet resilience.
The cosmos is the infinite container. It does not flinch at sorrow. It does not tidy you up. It holds you as you unravel, as you ache, as you remember that new life rises from cracked earth. And, while both O’Donohue and Rumi say when we crack open the light can enter, I believe when we crack open, especially from heartache, our light can radiate out back into the cosmos, where we belong.
Feel all of it. Don’t get back to normal. Let heartache do what it came to do.
And from that honest ache, the roots of the rest of your life will begin.
Personal narrative essay written by Brenda Littleton.
Original photography by B. Littleton.
Tin Flea Press c. 2025