Thank God the Joy Comes with the Grief

It was the best of times it was the worst of times? Yes please!

I once called my mom to tell her I was afraid to fly home because I’d been too lucky over the past few days and I was sure the tables were about to turn. (Specifically – and this is mortifying – I felt I had been too lucky while playing games of gin rummy with my stepmom. To be fair to me, I had been on a truly legendary hot streak. I don’t think I lost a hand all weekend. I wish I could say I was 12 but I was at least 16.)

This was not the only time I called my mom to tell her I didn’t want to get on a plane, though the other time was just because I had a bad feeling about it. Fifteen years later it would take a licensed mental health professional three years to suggest I take anti-anxiety medication, which continues to BAFFLE ME.

Point is, I was always looking over my shoulder whenever something good happened. Fortune comes hand in hand with misfortune and good never travels alone, I was sure of it. I spent so much time mitigating my own joy, counting out all of the bad to make sure it balanced the scale. It wasn’t that I was personally unlucky, or thought the world was out to get me. It was simply the way of things, and I needed to find that misfortune or else the sense that it was still somewhere ahead of me would crush me.

I would like to give you a little visual break but I don’t have a photo that goes here, so here’s a promotional image from The Iron Claw, a movie I watched recently and enjoyed. It’s also a movie about how men will literally invent a family curse rather than admit they’re a toxic parent. Zach Efron gives a performance so sincere that in one scene I didn’t even notice he was wearing a lime green mesh tank top until like, four minutes in. Recommend?!?

These days I don’t think about it so much. More often, I think, I feel the ways the good and the bad are parts of stories that I’ve been living for a long time. The joy and the grief are both points along the trajectory of loving everything.

Anyways:

The Joy

I signed with a new literary agent! I’m now represented by Trinica Sampson-Vera at New Leaf Literary and I am absolutely ecstatic. For readers outside the writing sphere, this means I wrote a book, sent out a query letter and a few chapters to a lot (a LOT) of agents, and went through a lot of rejection that sometimes felt personal and sometimes just felt like the way of sending art out into the world.

But at the end of it I met Trinica, and sometimes I still don’t think they’re real. In email, on a phone call, in the words of their authors and coworkers, they are so kind and enthusiastic and have this ineffable quality that boils down to the sense that they could literally accomplish anything at all that they set out to. In addition to everything on paper that made me very excited to work with Trinica, there was just the feeling that yes, YES, I want this person to advocate for my work.

And what a lucky fucking thing that is! And I did not count my recent misfortunes, I did not check the balance of the scale, I was just happy. While it’s lucky, it’s also just one marker on the map of writing, a brief stopping point in the story of drafting and revising and beta readers and querying that I’ve been living for a while now. That story is still going, and I’m so happy that it’s continuing with Trinica as part of it.

But also:

The Grief

My partner of three and a half years broke up with me in late April. The same week I sent the revisions on my novel to Trinica, I packed up my things (actually, mostly my friends packed my things while I held individual items and forgot what box I was putting them in) in the apartment we shared and moved.

Since that day in April I’ve cried until I’ve thrown up, I’ve cried until I got dizzy, I cried so much I got a rash on my face and then I went and did a show because THAT’S SHOWBIZ, BABY, and I’m actually so thankful for it because it was an hour where I was someone else. I became terrible at answering the question “how are you,” which is a real problem because people love to ask it!

Doing it all! (crying my eyes out, looking cute, wearing a shirt I’d just finished, about to go do a show)

Sometimes my grief is specific. I will miss sitting in the sunroom with coffee, I will miss listening to podcasts while we made dinner, I will miss our unwavering dedication to always having a little treat because dessert is important, I will think “I wish they made flat-bottom bags for the cat litter box” and then wish we could sing “flat bottom bags you make the rockin’ world go ‘round” together.

Sometimes my grief is amorphous. I cherished our life so much. There was an evening, early on in our time living together, when I walked into the living room to finish watching a movie and thought I will never get enough of this. The rest of my life would not be enough of this. Two years in, that feeling would still come along and trainwreck me every once in a while. I thought I would have the rest of my life to grow out of that feeling. I thought I would get to learn to be sick of loving like that.

Cherishing things is the way my body operates: my friends are the love of my life, art is the love of my life, I am the love of my life. Sam was the love of my life because I couldn’t help it, that’s the way I am. One of the people I miss most right now is me the way I was two months ago. I loved her too, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her and didn’t expect to have to.

I debated including this photo, but when I look at it I’m overwhelmed by how happy I am in it, and that is part of the person I will miss. I was happy, I had this sense of security and comfort and being at peace with where I was in the world that I’ve never quite grasped alone in the same way I was able to in my relationship.

Grief has warped my brain, and I lose my keys and my wallet almost every day and I often can’t start simple tasks and I can almost never finish them. I packed for a trip and was frankly shocked to open my suitcase and find that my success rate for packing clothes I actually wear was about 50%. I packed a skirt I haven’t worn in five years, and no, I didn’t wear it on the trip either! It is time for that skirt to go!

In the midst of my grief, I try to remind myself of the way I often felt I was asking my partner to be present in the world with me. To look, look, look at everything because isn’t it wild any of it exists at all? Look at that dog, look at the moon, look at those flowers, look at the light on the water, look at the instructions on the bag of cat litter because it’s a different brand and you’re using it wrong. Not everything is poetry, some things are cat litter and still it is so important to look at them.

This particular grief does have its own joy, because I am so lucky to have not once in this process felt like I was going through it alone. My friends packed my things and unpacked my things and made my bed and organized my shoes and hung my shower curtain. One friend literally gave me her water bottle. Another bought me a half of my favorite cake. Another went on a long long walk and brought me apples and coffee creamer. Four of them absolutely roasted me for ordering a hot dog from Five Guys, because in addition to having people to be kind to you, it’s important to have friends who will remind you that you are ridiculous, the long arc of your life is ridiculous, and Five Guys is not known for their hot dogs. It was NOT GREAT, by the way, I do not recommend it!

I don’t know what else to talk about, or when to end this newsletter, because this is all too often the only thing I can think about. Every time someone asks me about it with the caveat “only if you want to talk about it,” I leap at it with embarrassing desperation, because it feels as if the only way I will maybe ever be rid of this grief is if I exorcize it through talking.

And I sort of wish that I still had that past sense of every good thing having to be mitigated by something bad, because then maybe I would know why this happened. I would understand why one day the person I loved woke up and didn’t want to be with me anymore. Instead, it’s part of this particular story of being, of having been in, love, and that’s still not making sense to me. I thought I was in the middle of the book but it turns out all of the pages remaining were annotations and indexes and attempts at explanations.

So until I stop wanting to go home to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, until I stop having the impulse to put my hand to my chest as if I can press my heart back into the place it belongs, what can I say except thank god the joy comes with the grief.

Love you, thanks for reading,

Meghan