Artist Series: Everyone's Heart is Broken
On Writing: An essay by Jade Moyano
Every month I am publishing a piece from a contemporary artist I admire. This month, I am thrilled to share an essay by
. “Everyone's Heart is Broken” circles around the essence of humanity, which is to say it circles around healing, around love. It shows us how healing is often found in the places that make us uncomfortable, the places where we feel the most vulnerable. The healing is in the details, in the noticing, in the shared pain of strangers. The love is there, too, if you’re open to it.Jade sent me this piece at a time when I desperately needed to read it. I needed to be reminded of the details that go into living. I needed to remember my oneness with the world around me, and with the pain of others. Something about this mutual pain, this collective broken heart brought me closer to healing, closer to warmth, closer to truth. The truth of living.
Jade is a journalist, travel writer, and the founder of Trust & Travel.
She uses her gift with words to foster human connection through impactful storytelling. To her, writing is about meaning, it’s about creating bridges of shared experiences between people. She has spent the past 8 years writing for publications such as Monocle, Conde Nast Traveller UK and US, GQ, People, Passion Passport, Here Magazine, and Uproxx.
When she’s not telling tales from her worldly explorations, she’s helping brands tell their story by guiding them to find their authentic voice. She works as a conceptual storyteller and researcher at Airbnb.
Before we get into her work, let’s start with three questions.
What are you reading right now?
I am rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s wonderful to revisit the classics, especially as you mature and begin to understand story arches differently. This one is so intricate and layered, it’s thrilling to be reliving it. Nobody does what Marquez does. I’m in awe. I just finished reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I picked this up to break the flow of One Hundred Years, which can be very dense. The way Murakami describes running alongside writing is refreshing but also extremely intimidating. I hate running so now I wonder if I lack discipline altogether!
He says writers need two things to succeed - talent and focus. Talent is subjective and focus, objective. You can work on focus but you can’t work on talent. Though I feel everyone can learn to tap into a well of magic.
What do you do when you’re coming up against resistance and you can’t seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?
When I’m facing resistance I stop everything I’m doing and go in the total opposite direction. If life gets hard I stop trying to live it and focus on presence. If I can’t write I read a lot instead. If I find myself procrastinating I get out of my head and into my body. Whatever takes the pressure off, that’s what I do. And I snack. And roll some organic tobacco and sit with my discomfort until it turns into gratitude.
Tell me about this piece. Where did it come from?
This piece came from the melancholy airplanes make me feel. I fly a lot. Too much for my own good. This year I kind of overdid it with the traveling and I started to notice my behavior on planes a lot more. I realize I feel more inspired to write when I’m trapped and slightly claustrophobic. I also tap into a calm and a space of surrender that I can’t tap into anywhere else. I’m a deeply sensitive person and the lack of stimulation makes me hyper-aware of the details and the shifts in my psyche. Being around lots of strangers when you feel vulnerable is a beautiful way to set aside any notion of otherness because you realize how alike we all are. We feel the same pain and I really believe we all walk around with broken hearts hoping for relief or a pause or a moment of understanding. You get all of this when you tap into the essence of humanity. We are here to heal our hearts and become better at love.
An essay
by Jade Moyano
Everyone's Heart is Broken
I’m emotional on airplanes. More emotional than I am during a heart to heart, or when someone cries on my shoulder. In life I’m strong. On airplanes I notice mothers. Their shoulders tired from carrying a bag full of diapers and snacks, toddler in arm, clothes stained with milk and pizza sauce, hair up in a bun. They travel alone to take their babies to see their grandparents for the first time. I notice people’s anxiety, the ones whose hands tremble and whose prescription drug bottle caps get stuck. People who bite their nails, people who dress up. I notice everything. The girl sipping Coca-Cola at 9 am, the 2-year-old who feels completely jailed and wants to run free but can’t. Flight attendants who hate their jobs, flight attendants who love it. They treat you differently, you know. There’s no better place to see the truth than on a tin can floating in space.
I cry because I feel pressurized. I watched a film where a 9-year-old fell in love with his teacher and his little heart ached because he couldn’t understand why she didn’t love him back. That kind of stuff makes me cry. Or when I watch movies about divorce, and people giving up after 25 years. All of our hearts are broken but we keep trying and we fly because we hope it will make things better. More bearable. We’ll be closer to our dreams, to our loved ones, to ourselves. Planes carry the heart of humanity. Your life depends on a pilot and a machine, your well-being on the kindness of strangers (who may hate or love what they do). Drop your ear pod and watch 25 people get up from their seats and look for it, because they really want you to find it. They help you look for it, they get up and lift their cushions off their chairs. Kids crawl under the seats and the whole plane is mobilized to see you win. But you don’t find it. Instead, you find a bag of potato chips, which make you sick, you refuse to eat airplane food. This is humanity. Trusting in the goodness of strangers, tired together, sad together, crying together at different things, looking like shit but knowing that in just a few hours everything will be better. I write you letters, I keep them to myself. I wonder what happened and sometimes I know exactly the moment everything shifted and I feel sorry. And then I don’t. I’m wearing the socks an ex-lover gave to me. He was annoyed I used to hike with the wrong socks. I’m not a big socks person, I don’t pick them carefully. He gave me this orange pair but I never wear them, unless I’m on the plane. On the plane I accept acts of kindness, I can respect the fact you didn’t love me enough to be honest but you wanted me to be warm. I kept the socks, and since then I like to give my favorite pair of socks to people if their feet look cold. I do this because of you.
On the plane, I play with kids, the screaming ones, the crying ones. I ask if they’ve been on planes before and they want to grab my earrings and my hair and I point out the window to amuse them with clouds. One cries then all of them cry. Humanity. In matching outfits, in shirts and pants, in shoes and socks, eyes heavy from lack of sleep. On planes, it doesn’t matter what you do, even if you’re in first class when the plane shakes your stomach drops too. You have to trust the same way. You may get off first but you’re breathing the same recycled air. The storms affect us all the same. There’s always someone grumpy. Someone nervous. Someone hot. We have no idea what we’re doing with our lives but at least we’re going somewhere.
Where to find Jade:
Such a beautiful interview and read, thank you for sharing x