what a night at the moth taught me
on heartbreak, the society of spectacle, and the creative process
Happy belated Valentine’s Day! ❤️
I hope you had a lovely day filled with flowers, chocolates, cute, heartfelt cards and professions of love if you celebrate this holiday.
Although, judging by the flood of articles about the ongoing loneliness epidemic, there’s a good chance that Valentine’s Day was just another reminder of what’s missing.
But this post is for all of you because with love comes inevitable heartbreak. And last week, I found myself in a room about people talking about exactly that.
I went to The Moth at Fremont Abbey. The theme was “Love Hurts.”
If you’ve never been, The Moth is basically a live storytelling event where anyone can get up and tell a true, personal story—five minutes, no notes. They randomly select ten people from the crowd, and a handful of audience members serve as judges. The storyteller with the highest score moves on to compete at the next level, eventually reaching the national Grand Slam.
(my friend Elisa sent me this story from The Moth- it’s my favorite!)
As you enter the venue, you are given a slip of paper with a writing prompt. The evening’s prompt was: “Write about a time you were rejected.”
I take the paper and walk in.
The Abbey was so jam-packed that some people had to stand in the back. There was a good mix of people there- older folks, families, fashionable yopros (young professionals), college students, couples out on dates…
Throughout the night, the host pulled the responses from the page and read them between stories. A week later after most of the stories and night has blurred together, one response sticks with me:
"The girl I had a crush on dumped me before our first date. It’s been over 20 years, and I still think about it."
It’s amazing how certain moments, like plot points in a script, stick with us forever. A year, ten years, even a lifetime later, those moments still hold weight.
The most striking thing about watching people at The Moth share stories- about first loves, messy friendships, sibling betrayals, bad roommates- is how beautiful and communal and how right it felt.
There is something so profound about standing up and telling a story or experience of something that happened to you while a room full of strangers listens and feels all of the emotions you were feeling in that moment. A room full of people tearing up, gasping from shock, laughing together- it’s a kind of emotional alchemy that makes you feel incredibly human.
keeping it under control
If there’s something that I’ve learned about life so far, it’s that emotions don’t just disappear.
It’s so easy to suppress them, ignore them.
You can distract yourself by throwing yourself in work, or by scrolling through social media on your break. You can drink until you’re numb, you can smoke a blunt until your mind is as hazy as the cloud that passes through your lips, you can escape through fandoms- obsessively following sports, reality tv, or whatever world you choose to disappear into.
But those emotions don’t go away. They linger.
They resurface, like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole… when you’re driving to a doctor’s appointment, or waiting in line at a cafe, or when you are tossing around in bed at 3 am, when the entire world is quiet except for your buzzing mind, and a random smell, or song, or fleeting thought suddenly pulls you back into a moment you thought you had long buried.
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.”
- Bessel van der Kolk from “The Body Keeps the Score”
I used to be VERY good at tapping down on my emotions. But no matter how hard I tried to contain them, they would start to seep through. It got to the point where I didn’t even know what I was feeling anymore.
The best way I can describe it is like being caught in the ocean, struggling to swim back to shore. But just as you think you’re making progress, a wave comes out of nowhere, slamming into you so hard that you lose all sense of direction.
In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk explains how unprocessed emotions- especially trauma- don’t just stay locked in your mind. They manifest physically in your body- chronic stress, muscle tension, headaches, insomnia- all the things we chalk up to being “overworked” or “stressed out” are often signals that there are deeper emotions that we’ve refused to acknowledge.
So yes, suppressing your emotions can be incredibly easy with all the noise and media pulling at our attention (even though they will eventually demand to be felt).
… Or, you can go the other direction.
sharing is caring?
How many times have you been on a date and suddenly found on the receiving end of a full-blown trauma dump? You barely know this person and suddenly they are telling you about their ex who cheated on them three years ago, their strained relationship with their mother, their existential dread about whether they peaked in college.
Or do you have a friend who always calls you just to vent about all the terrible things that happened to them that day and never asks you about yours?
(have you ever thought that maybe part of the appeal of listening to someone else’s problems is that it gives you a break from thinking about your own?)
Lately, buzzy phrases like trauma dumping, emotional labor, and holding space are everywhere—therapy-speak that has been bleeding into everyday conversation. But where’s the actual line between trauma dumping and just sharing your life with someone?
Yes, venting to friends is healthy. But sometimes, it comes from a selfish place.
I love how the internet has given us a space to be vulnerable in ways we never could before- youtube vlogs, confessional tweets, substack essays… the sheer volume of content being posted every second proves that whatever you’re going through, someone else is going through it too.
It’s like a digital version of The Moth event that I went to. Except instead of a room full of strangers listening intently, it’s an algorithm deciding how many people will engage with your thoughts and feelings.
And that’s where the judgment begins.
Last month, Selena shared a video of herself crying about deportations, only to delete it a few hours later after garnering a wave of criticism- including, somehow, getting bullied by the White House. Later, in a follow-up post, she wrote “apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people.”
In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argues that we experience the world through images and performances rather than real, lived experiences. Our emotions are no longer just felt—they are curated, packaged, scheduled to be posted at the best time where people will see it with a perfect little thumbnail made public for consumption.
And I think this is why a lot of people were miffed with Selena’s video. Was filming herself crying and posting it online truly an act of vulnerability? How much of it was performative?
We saw this during the BLM protests in 2020. It wasn’t enough to care; you had to be seen caring. If you didn’t post, you were complicit. If you said the wrong thing, you were canceled. Meanwhile, celebrities desperate to prove their virtue, gave us a painfully awkward and tone-deaf Imagine video that I still cringe at.
I know this is part of the reason I’ve struggled with social media. Every time I post a photo of myself, I feel torn—it feels “fake,” but at the same time, if I’m being honest, I want to. I want to be seen, to connect with other people, I want my opinion, my thoughts to matter.
But at some point, everything becomes content. Whether we realize it or not, we’re all performing for the machine.
machine men with machine hearts
And the machine—the algorithm—doesn’t care about connection, only engagement.
Social media thrives on outrage, on division, on whatever keeps people scrolling. It rewards the hottest takes, the people who scream and cry the loudest. The algorithm doesn’t ask, is this good for society? It only asks, Will this keep people watching?
And that’s why I think having in-person events like The Moth are so important.
Strangers sit together- not to argue, not to exist in an echo chamber, but to listen. To witness each other’s stories. In a world where so much of our discourse happens online, we need genuine human connection.
As Charlie Chaplin said in The Great Dictator (1940):
Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…
(Charlie Chaplin’s speech in this movie is probably my favorite speech of all time)
cannibalizing your emotions
So what do you do with all these messy, pesky emotions that build up- the anxiety, the worry, disappointment, anger, heartache- that feel unbearable to the point where you don’t want to feel them anymore?
You consume them.
(Creatively).
Chuck Palahniuk calls this "Dangerous Writing". A writer has to explore an unresolved personal wound that can’t be resolved. A death, for instance. A loss that lingers, a deep-seated fear. Something that seemed personally dangerous to delve into.
Screenwriter and podcast host Meg LeFauve calls this going into the “Lava”. A writer must go towards what will burn you up emotionally. The thing we are most afraid of is exactly the thing our characters must confront in full honesty. And it can be terrifying.
I really like the idea of thinking of emotions as fuel for my creativity. Instead of letting my emotions consume me and envelop me in a vast ocean, I consume them.
I’m burning them as fuel for something good- something beyond myself- something special- something powerful.
I took a screenwriting class through Sundance Collab with Michael Urban, who always left us gems of knowledge that I scribbled down on my notebook. One was:
“you write what you’re going through- even though you may not realize it in the moment.”
You might think you're writing a sci-fi movie about aliens, but beneath the surface, you're actually writing about grief—because maybe your grandmother passed away recently, and you haven’t fully processed it yet. Or maybe you’re writing a tense thriller about a character on the run, but deep down, it’s about your own fear of failure, of never quite escaping the expectations placed on you.
So let yourself feel everything fully. And then consume it- break it down, digest it, and turn it into something else.
I’ll leave you with one more gem I have written down from Michael Urban’s class: that every story, no matter the genre, the medium, always boils down to one thing: love. ❤️
what i’m consuming 🍰
Made some apple tarts earlier this week and they were delicious!
who i am:
Hi, I’m Gisella! I’m a repped screenwriter based in Seattle. I directed a feature-length documentary and most recently, my pilot Body Brokers was on the 2024 Blacklist Latine List. Follow me on my journey to get my first screenplay green lit 💚
A) Great topics for Valentine’s Day. You tied your points together very well under the main theme!
B) I’ve gotta go to the Moth
C) We need to host an event similar to this
D) Great choices for the videos! Loved the Moth one—so funny