Joyful, Anyway

Suffering is not a series of subtractions, it's a hurricane. And you thought you would spend your time doing the work of pain—that actual crisis of rupture and loss—but, no, it's mostly the salvaging and the paperwork and the difficult conversations about how everyone will (or probably won't) adjust to what's happened that takes you apart.

You're left there, looking at the rubble while everyone else's homes seem remarkably intact. In fact, the entire neighborhood looks perfectly new. Oh, wonderful, someone is power-washing their driveway while someone else is walking their dog past you on the sidewalk. Here you are trying to pick up the scattered semblance of emotional, physical, and financial predictability off the lawn.

I always felt this in flashes, bursts of realization that the ordinariness of other people's concerns struck me as a betrayal.

I notice how quickly I judge other people for their obliviousness to pain, but then, wait.

It's Tuesday again.

My primary concern is email and that strange buzzy feeling in my head. And the guilt—oh, the guilt—of being so very busy worrying about nothing terribly important at all.

When I was dying, I believed that I would never forget the cost of survival and the surrender of the ordinary. An inalienable citizenship with all those who suffer was mine. And this awareness would quarry a reservoir of gratitude so deep that it could never be emptied. I was scarred, I was transformed, I was changed.

But not enough.

 

CHAPTER TWO

THE ACHE

I HAVE LONG BELIEVED the term girls weekend should be replaced by the more accurate description immersive therapy weekend because of the exacting nature by which women can expertly take each other's problems apart in any location and concurrent with any activity. Upset about the low point of your relationship in the middle of a group salsa lesson? Tell me about how he never sent flowers for your grandmother's funeral, but give me a right turn, left turn, and a cross-body lead. That's female friendship.

Sometimes it will take the entire weekend to get through the bulk of it—the trading of stories, from the "Start from the beginning" to the tired satisfaction that we have wrung out every bit of meaning. How did he say it again? Remember how your mom did the same thing to you before? There is a truth carried through feminist thought that impresses itself upon me in these moments: women are split in two. There is a public self and a private one. The public self is chiseled out of every small moment in which a girl learns to be culturally "acceptable"—pliable, generous, erasable. You will think that you do not have a public self and you will play the part of a normal person with typical wants and needs (Starbucks! soft pants!). But then you will feel the need to close a door. Or pick up a phone. Or scream into the ocean as if you really, truly believed no one was listening. That feeling is the realization that sexism is the Greatest Show on Earth. We are sawed in half. Right there in public. Right before our very own eyes.

 

The Best Friend and I have already finished screen-printing, boozy brunching, massages, and something called "Contra Dancing," which is actually a country folk dance and not, as my father surmised, a festive assembly of Nicaraguan rebels from the 1980s. But now, after dance class and before dinner, I can sense some kind of intervention brewing because we have each been stuck in our own loops.

I have been stuck in the loop of chronic pain, interminable health appointments, work bureaucracy, and the same fight with my husband where we both play our parts with increasingly less creativity.

The sameness—the sameness—the sameness. Patch patch patch. It is a dark determinism.

Theologically speaking, I believe we have tremendous freedom to make meaningful choices each and every day. (A belief in predestination, in my humble opinion, tends to be wielded as a weapon by people who don't desperately need anything to change.) Unlike the charmingly cheerless Reformed folk who surround me at every turn, I do not believe in a hyper-causal universe where every step has already been laid out on the bed like an Easter dress.

So how is it possible that every single day of pushing reality uphill results only in it rolling back on me by nightfall?