loving the world is breaking my heart

a reflection on grief, beauty, and holding it all at once

Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, 1889 (Image courtesy of Google Art Project).

Earlier this week, I accidentally orchestrated a one-two punch of emotional devastation, delivered via podcast. Totally casual. No warning. No Kleenex in sight.

The first hit came from The New Yorker: Fiction podcast. It’s a dated episode, released in August 2024, but it found me anyway. The host, Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, sat down with David Sedaris, one of my favorite authors. He came to read aloud a short story of his choosing from the publication’s archives. His pick? Love Letter by George Saunders, published in March 2020.

It’s a haunting little piece. A grandfather writes to his grandson sometime in the 2020s. It’s never made explicit exactly where we are on the timeline, but things are bad. Civil liberties have eroded. Fear runs high. And the grandfather—well, he’s a little heartbroken. He’s rationalized, retreated, made compromises he’s not proud of. And yet, there’s this flicker of hope in the letter. A little ember of resistance he tries to pass along, clumsily but earnestly, to his grandson.

After reading, Sedaris and Treisman discuss the story. And Sedaris admits: it made him feel ashamed. Not because he was complicit in a dystopia, but because the story held up a mirror. It was art that made him confront something. Made him feel something. And that—that's the part that got me.

Because yes, the story is bleak. But it’s also funny. And beautiful. And, above all, loving. This fictional grandfather, flawed and small and trying, writes a letter that is equal parts warning and tenderness. It’s dark, yes. But it’s art. And so it glows with something else.

I sat with that for a bit. The ache of it. The beauty of it. The way a story can press a finger to your sternum and say, Feel that? That’s you. That’s what you’re made of.

The next day while I was out for my afternoon walk around my neighborhood, sweaty and glistening from the hot Austin sun, for some reason (the algorithm? divine timing?), I queued up a quite famous—yet again, dated—episode of All There Is, Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast. The episode features Stephen Colbert, and it’s one of those conversations that feels both impossibly intimate and universally resonant. They talk about losing their loved ones and how we can become grateful for the bad things that happen to us. About growing up in the absence of someone you still feel beside you. About how grief doesn’t leave, it just changes shape.

It’s a fascinating conversation. Personal to each of them and filled with utter sorrow and compassion. But it was something Colbert said near the end of the episode that completely undid me.

He was talking about a vacation he took to Provence, France, where he visited the site where Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night while institutionalized at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in 1889. He recalls turning a corner and being confronted by the painting (a copy of course). And he wept.

Why?

Because Starry Night is beautiful. But also because he knew the story behind it. He knew Van Gogh painted it in the throes of deep depression, from the window of an asylum, only a year before he died by suicide.

And yet, he gave us the stars.

Colbert, trying to make sense of the feeling, said this:

“The world can be so sad and you can be so shattered and so sad, but it can also be so beautiful. And the juxtaposition between the grief of the world and the beauty of the world is ecstatically agonizing.”

I had to pause the episode. Not because I was crying (although, I was admittedly teary), but because something inside me felt…rearranged.

Because isn’t that it? Isn’t that exactly the paradox we’re living inside of?

That ecstatically agonizing space between despair and wonder, where the most devastating and dazzling truths of life coexist?

I think about this tension a lot. I work for a humanitarian organization. Most of my days are spent reading, writing, and editing reports and content about the world’s most crushing emergencies. Children displaced by conflict. Families experiencing famine. Entire communities leveled by climate disasters. Every day, I stare directly at suffering that feels too big to hold—and yet it’s my job to try and carry it, narrate it, move people with it.

It’s easy to dissociate. It’s also easy to drown in it. I try to find a balance. I try to stay present, but sometimes I catch myself going numb. You have to, to a point.

But this tension—this unbearable juxtaposition of grief and beauty—lives with me. I carry it around. Like: how can there be this much hurt in the world and still…

a toddler in rain boots.
a neighbor who waves.
a violin on the subway.
a painting of the sky.

It guts me. Sometimes I want to cry just thinking about it.

There is so much pain in the world—personal, political, collective—and so little compassion to meet it. But somehow, despite it all, there are still flashes of goodness. Of creation. Of light.

Somehow, even with everything collapsing, Starry Night exists.

That’s what these two podcasts reminded me of. That the world is, in fact, falling apart. And it’s also full of small, miraculous beauty. That even in the darkest corners, there is art. There is music. There is love. There is a story passed down in a letter. There is someone still choosing to paint.

I’ll end with this. I was listening to Jon Batiste’s blues rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while editing the other day. And while I’ve listened to it many times since Batiste’s album, Beethoven Blues, came out last year, on this particular day it moved me to tears. I wasn’t expecting it. I was half-listening, half-distracted, and then suddenly—there it was. Something ancient and aching and alive, pouring out of the speakers. It opened me up. Rearranged me, again.

And I realized: we don’t really let ourselves be moved like that anymore. Not often. We armor up. We scroll past. We keep it light. But when we do let beauty in—when we let it cut through the noise—it hurts. In the best possible way.

Because to be moved is to be awake. To be moved is to still be here. To be moved is to remember that, yes, the world is breaking. Your world may be breaking. But you are not numb.

And if that’s not a gift, if that’s not grace, I don’t know what is.

xo,

liv

P.S. Van Gogh never knew Starry Night would be so loved. He painted through the dark anyway. Maybe that’s what we do. Make beauty we’ll never fully understand, and hope it lands where it’s needed.