What Broken Hearts Can Learn from Broken Noses

The pain of the initial impact is blinding: a baseball slams into your face and shatters the sensitive bones of your nose. Reeling and bleeding, you have two choices. You can either go to the emergency room, where you will likely have to endure the pain of having your nose re-broken by the doctor to ensure it is properly set for healing. Or, you can quickly mute the pain with ice, tell yourself it's not that bad, and stay in the game.

However, when a nose is first broken, it is, medically speaking, more efficient to right then and there reset to its original position and allow it to heal correctly the first time -- whereas if a broken nose goes untreated, deformity of the nose occurs, usually resulting in a crooked bridge, a bumpy bridge, or a combination of the two. When this is the case, at some later date, when you have trouble breathing, or just can't look at yourself in the mirror any longer, a doctor or cosmetic surgeon will need to reset it, which involves re-breaking the nose.

With the heart, there seems to be a parallel. After the initial blinding pain, the shattering of your heart, you have two choices. You can either spend some time immediately re-breaking your heart - resisting the urge to fall back into familiar arms, ignoring phone calls, doing the difficult work of dealing with yourself. Or, you can "stay in the game:" you can choose to sidestep that immediate re-breaking, understandably wanting to save yourself more simultaneous pain - and you "heal" by seeking immediate comfort in those familiar arms, that familiar voice. Though your heart was shattered, you quickly erase all memory of the injury

... and thus untreated, some deformity of the heart occurs... and later, when you finally realize that you are having difficulty breathing, or you can no longer look at yourself in the mirror... your heart must be re-broken, only then to have some hope of healing and restoring itself to full functionality.

There are some differences between broken hearts and broken noses, of course. For noses, there is anesthesia. For hearts, there is only time.

As Claire Danes' character, Mirabelle, said in Shopgirl: "Hurt now, or hurt later? .... Hurt now." Tears were in her eyes, as she slowly nodded her way through her wrenching choice. Biting her lip, she made the most difficult but most healthy call, and walked away from the person who might give her a few more good moments, but would undoubtedly hurt her again in the end.

The fictitious Mirabelle had the wisdom to know that delaying payment of pain owed is a finite layaway plan - the bill always comes due, and often the amount has compounded and increased while we pretended it wasn't there. In real life, most of us are not so wise. We have to keep breaking and breaking and breaking before we finally learn: pain later is often pain greater, and part of that pain lies in the knowledge that while the initial wound might be blamed on someone else, this pain ... we could have spared ourselves.

The truly tricky part? Knowing when our heart is broken, and when it is only bruised. When do we stay, and when do we walk away? Broken hearts can learn something from broken noses... but there is still so much unknown.