This sucks & I love you.
I know there are landscapes more bleak than New England in late February, but today, with wind streaming across a beige and frozen field, I think I would welcome them. Bring me your crowded cityscapes, your arctic tundra, your endless prairie. Anything but this.
To be clear, I love this place. Deeply. But the combined forces of day-upon-day of pandemic and winter leave me - like many of us - disarranged. The edges blur. If Esther Perel is right in saying that “desire needs mystery,” then no wonder that - two years into an ocean of sameness - we’re estranged from our wanting.
Sometimes this is comical. A friend and I message each other in a competition to see who’s become more dull. “Texting my spouse in the other room about pillow dimensions is a thing I do now,” they say. I counter with, “Jon just cleaned the shelf above the stove and it’s the biggest news here since 2019. I feel that we’ve really leveled up our ennui game.”
These are the small indignities. Then there is the friend with two kids under three and a full time job who hasn’t had a reliable week of daycare since December. She uses the word hemorrhaging to describe life right now. There is news of mothers gathering together to scream into the night with collective rage and exhaustion.
Grieving without a discrete event to organize around is confusing. With an acute loss we could bring casseroles or gather together in remembrance. But the sheer ongoingness means we are in constant and nebulous mourning. Our condition feels chronic.
And if having a chronic condition teaches me anything, it’s that when you’re breaking yourself to find the thread of what works, try less. Tread gently near making it better, or endlessly searching for the why. Adopt extreme gentleness.
If you can, you might meet this moment with an inartful but deep truth: This sucks, and I love you.
I’m surprised, over and over, by how much of a salve this kind of honesty is. By the difference between wallowing and witness. Perhaps you also feel the difference in your body when you try out this phrase, or the smallest softening of effort.
This sucks & I love you doesn’t try to pretty-up the circumstances or rearrange the pieces. It also doesn’t look away or offer platitudes. Here is solidarity - sol - at its roots: whole, entire, undivided. It says: I’m with you through the full catastrophe.
When we touch the thread of this kind of companioning, we might feel more available to notice what doesn’t suck, to entertain the notion of what I call resource but what might also be called gratitude. Not the far away imaginal kind - tropical sun, free childcare, the end of patriarchy - but the solid, nearby: coffee. sweater. soft scarf.
In a beautiful conversation between Liz Gilbert and Pico Iyer in On Being, Gilbert says,
A friend of mine gave me a tip: to lower my standards [laughs] of gratitude, to lower the bar and to catch the low-hanging fruit so that it’s not — it doesn’t have to be these huge, epic, grandiose gratitudes. The more physical they are, the more I felt it in my body…remembering that doesn’t necessarily send me into despair over the state of the world, and it starts to kind of rewire my brain.
I find so much grace and honesty in this description. Gilbert doesn’t promise comfort, she simply says that this practice “doesn’t necessarily send me into despair.”
For now, I’m freely offering this sucks & I love you to all who need, and drawing from the amaryllis blooming on my windowsill which - if I listen closely - whispers a rumor of something called spring.
