Lines and Reviews 5 | Mental Health Fiction: My Heart and Other Black Holes

I know that the cover is very plain but I have never been so glad to NOT have judged a book by its cover!

I would say that it was fate that brought me to this masterpiece. And, in turn, this masterpiece saved my thread from being cut short. I read this on my lowest, when I was falling to an abyss. The timing was really..

This book is a friend, a companion, a therapist, a mirror, a looking glass, a window, a saviour. It showed me that we are our own monsters, that the only one who can save us is ourselves, and that things will eventually be better. I want to say more but I'll save it for my Mental Health Section so I can relay my feelings more freely. You can tell just by the amount of highlighted lines I saved how much I loved this book. It's one of the very few that I could and would actually read again and again.

In Jasmine Warga's debut novel, we follow the friendship of two suicidal teens who have come together to end their misery. 'Cause misery loves company, right? 

Favourite Lines from:

My Heart and Other Black Holes

by Jasmine Warga

Epigraph: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust

Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.

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Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood.

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“He was fucking sad. That’s it. That’s the point. He knows that life is never going to get any different for him. That there’s no fixing him. It’s always going to be the same monotonous depressing bullshit. Boring, sad, boring, sad. He just wants it to be over.

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Sometimes I wonder if gravity is the problem. It keeps us all grounded, gives us this false sense of stability when really we’re all just bodies in motion. Gravity keeps us from floating up into space, it keeps us from involuntarily crashing into one another. It saves the human race from being a big hot mess.
I wish gravity would go away and just let us all be a big mess.

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I wonder what it will feel like when all the lights go off and everything is quiet forever. I don’t know if it will be painful, if in those last moments I’ll be scared, but all I can hope is that it will be over fast. That it will be peaceful. That it will be permanent.

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With my dad, you always had to tread lightly, like you were walking on icy pavement—it was so fun when you were gliding, but it was very easy to slip.

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Maybe the sadness comes just before the insanity.

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Guidance counselors always love to say, “Just think positively,” but that’s impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-thought-killing machine.

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“I like other people’s words. They fill me up.”

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When I listen to music, I’m searching for a place to hide, a place to escape my emptiness.

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Yes, he looks like someone who was designed to be popular and successful, but he also looks like someone who was made to wear grief.
 He wears it well.

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I wait for the feeling to pass, but it doesn’t.

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He looks over at me and my heart seizes and I think that any second, it might explode. Sometimes I wonder if my heart is like a black hole—it’s so dense that there’s no room for light, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still suck me in.

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She never bothers to ask what’s wrong or what’s going on with me. She doesn’t want to know.

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And then he rests his head on my shoulder and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I think he’s looking for comfort, but I don’t have any to give.

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Even though my presence would likely hurt more than it would help. It always does.

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I wonder if joy has potential energy. Or if there is potential energy that leads to joy, like a happiness serum that lingers in people’s stomachs and slowly bubbles up to create the sensation we know as happiness.

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It’s like your sadness is so deep and overwhelming that you’re worried it will drown everyone else in your life if you let them too close to it.

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“Sometimes, for me, it feels like my grief is eating me alive

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I draw because sometimes it feels impossible to talk. It’s like I’m trapped in this deep hole that I can’t get out of. I draw to try to escape it, even though I know I’ll never be able to.”

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“You know what’s confusing?”
 I nod to let him know to go on.
“Watching you be so happy when you think about science. It makes me kind of… happy.” He slouches his shoulders and shuffles his feet. “And that’s confusing.”

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He squeezes my hand so tight, I can’t feel it anymore. I wish someone would do that to my heart.

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Sure, there are dead stars. But at least before they died, they were stars.

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“Doesn’t it have to do with how our perception of things can’t always be trusted? Like our human mind is too slow to be able to fully comprehend things that are fast.”

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Einstein theorized that the faster we move, the slower we perceive time to move.

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Maybe I was wrong about Mr. Scott. Maybe he did always want to be a teacher. Maybe he’s one of those people who were built for caring.

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“I think to be a nerd you have to be smart.”

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Everything used to seem so final, inevitable, predestined. But now I’m starting to believe that life may have more surprises in store than I ever realized. Maybe it’s all relative, not just light and time like Einstein theorized, but everything. Like life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.

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I stare at him blankly. I can’t say what I want to say, and I figure silence is better than all the words he doesn’t want to hear.

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“You’re like a gray sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.”

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“A curious one. But I guess all questions are curious.”

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the universe begs to be observed, that energy travels and transfers when people pay attention

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Maybe that’s what love really boils down to—having someone who cares enough to pay attention so that you’re encouraged to travel and transfer

to make your potential energy spark into kinetic energy. Maybe all anyone ever needs is for someone to notice them, to observe them.

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Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.

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But as cheesy as it sounds, maybe the good days will make it worth getting through the bad ones.


For too long, I’ve made my past my future, afraid to imagine anything else. And I acted like that—static—afraid of my own kinetic energy.

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“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell out of heaven."

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That everything is subjective in the human mind. Our emotions, our opinions, they’re all relative. It all depends on perspective.”

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I know that my picks have mostly been romance novels even when I said that I didn't like such genre, but promise, I did not pick this one for its romance. In fact, I hated the romance part of this book. There are some parts in which I'm dissatisfied but overall I deem this as a very impactful read.