What the Heart Wants

How wearing a heart monitor reconnected me to my body.

I took a deep breath as my doctor carefully listened to what was beating underneath the steel of his stethoscope: my heart. Something sounded off to him. “Your heartbeat sounds . . .  irregular,” he told me during my annual physical. “It could just be stress, but it could also be something else.” He told me he wanted me to wear a heart monitor for a week (day and night except for showers) to watch my heart’s activity so he could rule out anything serious like a heart arrhythmia. He asked me if I had felt any strange irregularities in my heartbeat lately which I had to think about for a second. Had I? When was the last time I paid attention to the literal beat of my own heart? After a few moments it occurred to me that indeed I had been experiencing some irregularities over the last several months; out of nowhere, whether running up the stairs in my home or just sitting down on the couch, my heart would go from a normal tempo to feeling like a speeding Caitlin Clark was dribbling it down the court. Bump-bump, bump-bump, bu—bubububububububump-bump. 

I can’t say I’ve given much thought to the health of my physical heart in recent years, maybe because my figurative one has demanded so much attention. I’ve felt metaphorically brokenhearted by the state of the world and all the ways it’s torn us apart, from wars to climate change. In fact, it almost feels like broken-heartedness has become our standard state of being nowadays. So this concern from my doctor about the condition of my very real heart came as a bit of a shock and was a major wake-up call: I needed to tune back into my body in ways I had been neglecting for far too long.

On a Wednesday morning a few weeks ago, a nice woman named Eliza (from the heart monitor company, not my bestie, Eliza) came to my home to install a monitor to my chest. The word “install”—which, for some reason, is how they chose to describe the process of attaching the monitor to your body—is such a funny yet apropos word to use for this experience. It made me feel simultaneously like the bionic woman—powerful and capable of all destruction—and like an outdated Macintosh computer from the early aughts that might be headed to the junkyard soon. Even my daughter got a kick out of the heart monitor. The first time I showed it to her, her jaw dropped as she asked, “Mom . . . are you a robot?” I winked and said nothing. OF COURSE I WAS. She was thrilled. For the next week, we pretended I was secretly a robot and no one knew it except for me and my little girl.

The installation (still weird!) took less than ten minutes and required the monitor to be secured just over my heart and a cord from the monitor to be secured to the left side of my rib cage. It was all held in place by what can only be described as industrial grade stick-on patches that I had to change once every couple days and which left me with one hell of a rash a week later. (Taking those patches off was like opening a sarcophagus for the first time in thousands of years, and my poor skin underneath gasped for fresh air.) Eliza gave me a charger with instructions to take the monitor off for one hour a day to charge it. Then she showed me the green, blinking heart icon on the device’s small screen, indicating it was on and working properly. If I felt any specific irregularities (like the aforementioned Caitlin-Clark-speed pulse situation), I was to double tap on the monitor to instruct it to take a deeper look at the state of my heart and its beating. 

Wearing the monitor was strange at first and made basic tasks like putting a bra on a little more complicated. (Early one morning when I was still very tired, I tugged my bra strap over my shoulder only to realize I had actually pulled the monitor cord over my shoulder instead. This pulled my breast into a strange position, making it fall over the cup so that my whole tit was just . . . hanging there. My nipple, like some sad cyclops in the dark, early dawn.) But as the hours and days went on, I grew a kind of emotional attachment to this little device that was equally as attached to me (literally). I would think about it listening to my heart with so much intention and tender love, trying to decode whatever message my heartbeat was desperately trying to spell out with its erratic rhythms, like morse code to be deciphered from my chest. At night, I would get into bed and turn off the lights, and the little green glow from the blinking heart would softly light up the bed, like a firefly trapped under the covers. It made me feel safe, protected, with a newfound respect for what it meant to be alive—to be living. 

The metaphor of the heart as a symbol for all that we feel and hold emotionally is as old as the New Testament. What the heart wants and the general state of the heart, metaphorical or otherwise, is the dominant theme of so much of our favorite art, from movies to novels to songs to, of course, poetry. I recently interviewed U.S. Poet Laureate, the brilliant Ada Limón, (Ada’s Further Ado interview coming this month!) who shared some of her most-loved poems and books on the topic: Francisco X. Alarcón’s “Never Alone”; Gregory Orr’s Selected Books of the Beloved; William Butler Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” with an extra special shout-out to the breathtaking final lines, “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

For me, poems that top the list are Ada’s own “Adaptation,” from her book, Bright Dead Things. And of course, there’s one of my all-time favorite poems, “Path,” written by my late mentor, Jack Hirschman. The opening lines read: “Go to your broken heart. / If you think you don’t have one, get one.” Those words are tattooed on my arm because I believe they perfectly encapsulate all that is holy and beautiful and painful about life and what is—what must be—endured in the living of it. 

As Jack so poignantly instructs in the following lines, the way to get a broken heart is to “be sincere. / Learn sincerity of intent by letting / life enter because you’re helpless, really, / to do otherwise.” My god, if that is not the truth then I don’t know what is. To me, it means that each of us is helpless to prevent all that comes with this process of living: the devastation, the grief, the joy, the consequences, the successes.

The opening lines of Jack Hirschman’s poem, “Path.”

We so often choose to become heart-obsessed in the stories we tell and the art we create, using the heart as a vessel for all these unquantifiable moments in our lives. Why not our lungs and the air we breathe? Why not broken-lunged? What is it about the heart as a metaphor for real life that we love so much? Perhaps it’s that the heart seems to be at the center of everything: responsible for our blood moving, our organs functioning, our lives being lived. 

In some cases, broken-heartedness is not a metaphor at all, but a very real physical condition. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, more commonly known as broken heart syndrome, can happen after a very traumatic life event when the heart's main pumping chamber changes shape. This changing of shape affects the heart's ability to pump blood effectively, causing symptoms akin to a heart attack. But just like the age-old metaphor of a heart being healed through love or magic, our very real hearts have the power to do the same.

At the end of my week with my heart monitor, Eliza told me to give it a final charge before she came to pick it up. Peeling it off my chest one last time, I realized that no matter the outcome of the test, I was now so much more aware of and grateful for this thing beating inside my chest, this thing I had taken for granted in so many ways. The monitor’s presence reminded me to breathe more—something I’ve written about here in our newsletter—and to pay attention more to what the heart wants, both the real one and the metaphorical one. A few weeks later, my doctor called to tell me the good news: my heart was just fine. I was experiencing something called premature ventricular contractions (PVCs), and there was nothing serious to worry about. (This was just my own particular diagnosis; Please do get checked out if you’re experiencing any symptoms.) I was relieved to hear it and felt closer to my own body and what it wanted than I have at perhaps any other time in my life.

The heart wants many things. It wants us to love the unpredictable rhythm of our own lives, the parts that thrill us, terrify us, let us down, and force us back up again. It wants strength, compassion, to be cherished and understood. What the heart wants is not pity, but for us to know that breaking is what it's built for—to break wide open, and come together again, over and over. The heart wants you, and only you. It wants to teach you how to be brave and heal in a world that stays broken. What the heart wants is blood leaping through its chambers, reminding you that you are alive. You. Are. Living. It wants the tiny hand of your child to press against your chest and feel its beating. It wants to lull you to sleep in the quiet night or show you how fast it beats when you’re falling in love and don’t even realize it yet. The heart wants you to know that you’re going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay. That it will be there with you—right there, in your body, in your storytelling, and in your life—until the very end.

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What are some of your favorite creative works on the subject of the heart or broken-heartedness?

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