Welcome to The Museum of Modern Heartbreak, an open online archive of breakup texts, job rejection emails, spam, scams, and unanswered cries for help. This archive preserves that specific brand of helplessness which arises when we receive some item of devastating personal news through the fundamentally impersonal medium of online communication.
There's an extra twist: you will only be able to view this archive by contributing to it. Once you submit the form below, you will be shown exactly one entry by some other user. You can spend as much time with it as you like, screenshot it, print it, whatever — but if you want to see anything else you'll have to refresh the page and submit the form again with something new. Your submission, if approved, will live anonymously as part of the archive.
So, what makes it into the archive? We approve entries that meet the
following criteria:
1) All valid entries are image files — usually text screenshots, but feel free
to get creative and surprise us with GIFs, evites, and memes. You will not be
able to submit anything that is not an image, though.
2) All proper nouns, including names of people and institutions, are
redacted (████████). A reader should not be able to piece together any identifying
information about the parties involved
in your image.
3) Your entry is yours to share. It's not ripped from some
other corner of the internet, nor does it deal primary with anyone but
you.
4) Lastly, the content of your entry encodes some profound emotion that
is offset, altered, or made awkward, cold, or hurtful by the medium of its
presentation.
If all of this makes sense to you and you're interested in participating, go ahead and submit the form below. Then click the button.