My mind has been swarmed with the side-effects of a sinus infection. Which has me in bed for a few days reliving.
There was a moment, about four months ago while I packed to move, when what remains of my belongings were spread across my bedroom floor.
Something about the sky and the cloud. And not seeing the one through the other.
I don’t know how to write about this last year. Or how to talk about it. Or even if I’ll triumph through what’s left of it.
I've laughingly told my therapist that this has been the worst year of my life. And once I explain–provide details and facts and a timeline of events, we just sort of look at each other wide-eyed and chuckle in that nervous way that sits at the back of the throat. Because, well, yeah, it’s not been all that great.
The worst year of my life (or one of, if we look at the spectrum despondently). Which is true, but only in the short term. Because, really, this will not be the year I look back on when I’m old and at the end of my life (should I be so lucky) and recount as a way of detailing loss and desire and pain. My humanity wasn’t revealed in the muck of this year, more my durability.
A year of very specific lessons. And some quite expensive ones.
But so many of the mistakes I now find myself glancing sideways at and wondering if they weren’t actually blessings.
Not-good-things in service of better-things.
...
I saw Macy just a few weeks ago. She took my picture one of those first weekends in January. It was so cold and a few (but not many) things had already gone wrong, but we laughed and sipped steamers and talked about all that had changed and all that was now good, and how all-that-is-now-good almost always rushes in after all-that-is-really-not.
This go round, these eleven months later, I picked her up at the PHX airport, collapsed into her arms and began to well up.
We talked about this year. The all-that-is-now-good. Begging forgiveness, immediately, for having to work and being tired in that way that sees my mind slipping off the back edge of a cliff and into the ocean below.
But it felt important to bookend the year. To finish it, in the same way it had begun. (Only this time we sipped Arizonas and I'll see her before the years end.) I wanted to see what was on the other side of the lens. Wanted to see if the last however many months were made visible on my face, for better or for worse.
They were.
...
I own so little now. Got rid of so very much. Missionary work and moving will do that. Cast everything in a new, very harsh light. Suddenly so much was extraneous.
And so I whittled. And so two weeks before twenty-one, I quietly let go of nearly everything I own.
Which isn't totally true, but is true enough. (Because I now own eighteen pairs of leggings.)
The pretending is over now.
Less. Less stuff. Less pretense. Less pretending.
At every turn this year I’ve had to ask for help. To say things out loud. To reach in the direction of the open hands around me. And I’ve been so lucky to be met with so much generosity. Offered work, opened home, a diet coke whenever I craved, encouragement when I felt I least deserved it.
But asking for help costs something. Is not easy to do.
I talked to a newish friend months ago. A woman I've known for only those short months, but well enough to say that she is good and kind and better than most. And talking to her, struggling to keep a steady voice and the incessant leak of my left eye, she said, Let me help you.
No, no, I casually brushed her off.
But the thing was, I did need help, and so I took a breath and said, Actually, yes, I need to talk to you?
So I sat there, wiping my eye, listening to her voice.
It was such a small gesture. And yet. And yet and yet.
I didn’t have to ask for her to do it.
I didn’t have to ask for help in that moment. It was offered freely.
And it took my breath away.
...
A sympathetic pumpkin pie, an extra set of hands. A lifetime of not always having to ask.
There's so much to look forward to.
...
There's a Dear Sugar Essay that I constantly go back to. More like essays. But in this moment there is one that I'm thinking of:
Perhaps the good that can come from this terrifying experience is a more complex understanding of what God means to you so the next time you need spiritual solace you’ll have something sturdier to lean on than the rickety I’ll-believe-he-exists-only-if-he-gives-me-what-I-want fence. What you learned is that your idea of God as a possibly non-existent spirit man who may or may not hear your prayers and may or may not swoop in to save your ass when the going gets rough is a losing prospect.
So It’s up to you to create a better one. A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.
What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?
A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.
A pumpkin pie.
Book endings.
Something smaller. Something less.
Less in the service of the more.
A really terrible-no-good-very-bad-year in service of a better ever-after: a simpler one.
xo.pa
