The First Heartbreak
A poem written at fifteen, on heartbreak, proximity, and learning what it means to love without knowing how to let go.
Author’s Note
The following poem is reproduced exactly as it was written when I was fifteen years old. No edits or revisions have been made.
A large part of this body of work has been shaped by heartbreak. Not as a single event, but as something that followed me. This poem marks one of the first places where that depth surfaced. Love and loss held at the same time, without the language to separate them, without a way to set them down.
I’ve left this poem intact because its power is in its closeness. The contradictions remain. Wanting to hurt and wanting to hold exist in the same breath. That tension did not resolve itself with time. It stayed. It moved. It asked to be understood before it could ever be released.
This was an early cut. It went deep. Some parts of it are still waiting for the words to let go.
Untitled…
I finally can close my eyes
Rest instead
of tossing
Realizing the waste
has made it harder
Realizing the importance
had made me stress
And finding out it all didn’t matter
lets me give up
I choose to lie down, without thoughts
There’s an empty space inside me
That I know
not another can fill
I clench my fist as if
I were crushing your hand
I want to hurt you
I want to hold you
I want to not let go and
just feel you
I ignore all that is
burning inside
Ignoring you is a hard task
Indeed, although
Missing you pains me more
So I lie down in wrinkled sheets
Defeated and tired
Trying to close my eyes
wanting to rest and stop tossing
Trying not to think of it as
wasteful
Trying to forget how important
you were
Always though, the fact will be
Everything mattered
And I can’t give up
About This Body of Work
How the Fuck Did I Get Here? is a living memoir released in real time.
It is composed of autofiction chapters, recovered journals, present day reflections, monologues, and connective essays. Together, they examine a life from inside the moment rather than after it has resolved, tracing how power, survival, desire, and responsibility shape who we become and what we carry forward.
This work does not offer clean conclusions or redemption arcs. It stays with uncertainty. It treats lived experience as evidence, allowing meaning to surface slowly through attention rather than explanation.
About the Journal Archives
These are the original records.
The journal archives preserve early writing exactly as it was written, before I had language for survival, distance from the truth, or an understanding of what I was allowed to name. They hold questions long before answers, patterns long before recognition, and emotional truths before they were shaped into narrative.
The only changes made are to names and identifying details. The words, tone, and questions remain intact. What you are reading reflects how these moments were understood then, not how they might be explained now.
Some entries are offered freely. Others are held behind a paywall, not as a reward, but as a boundary. Certain stories require containment. Not everything benefits from exposure.
What you are reading here is not reflection. It is formation.
Continue the Story
This is a choose your own adventure living memoir.
From the archives, you can move outward into later reflections, autofiction chapters, or connective essays that reveal how these early questions evolved over time. You can follow a theme, a feeling, or a single line that stays with you.
Here are three places you might go next. Read them in any order, or leave them for later.
About the Author
Alisa Sieber is a writer, former Marine Corps pilot, nonprofit founder, and mother whose work emerges from lived experience inside institutions that demand endurance and silence.
She spent her early adulthood learning how to function under pressure long before learning how to stay inside her own body. Her writing reckons with what those systems shaped, what they fractured, and what it has taken to unlearn their rules without pretending they never mattered.
She now lives in Northern California, where she is building Chez Serendip, a regenerative cultural sanctuary for artists, writers, and cultural workers. It is a space for people to come apart and make art from the pieces. A place to tell the truth without needing to package it as progress. A place she would have wanted when she was doing this work alone.
This writing unfolds alongside that building. It is not separate from it. Both are practices of attention, presence, and collective repair, carried out in public and in real time.
Subscribing here is not about consuming content. It is consent to witness a process that is unfinished and still unfolding.