where the light comes from

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I won a talent competition at church. (I've actually talked about this before, but any excuse to post this photo.)

It was the first time in my life that I felt like I had done something well. I was never going to be an opera star, or a rock star, or any kind of star, because to be truly excellent and rise to the absolute top, you need to have about seventeen different kinds of hammers in the toolbox you carry around inside your chest and I had only one. I still have it, it sleeps quietly inside me, snoring softly, and I only ever really let it out to play when I'm alone in my car or the stairwell or a really excellent empty locker room. It's not the ability to really dig in and rip it, although any karaoke night anywhere will try and teach you otherwise. It's being able to blow the goddamn doors off the sucker, but almost never doing so. It's the other end of the continuum, the softness, the sensual gentleness that comes from barely letting the air vibrate over your vocal cords, the shimmering thrum of powerful control, knowing that the reins of the magnificent stallion snorting and pawing at the ground are being held carefully with both hands. Celine Dion destroyed the world with it, Kelly and Ella and Annie, Sara Ramirez has brought me to tears with the clarity of her heart ringing through into this moment. These women all have it in spades and I only have a tiny polite slice, but it let me slip into the college mix with some of the best vocalists in the world. Even at nineteen I knew that it wasn't enough to set me on the grand stage, but I've always been grateful for the gift that I know it is, the ability to show strength through a most delicate, exquisite tenderness. It hibernates deep inside me, and it's exceedingly rare that I share it with another human being (driving in the car with me doesn't count). I let it out at my grandmother's funeral, and that was right and good, but only a few times since then have I truly opened my heart in this way.

In the few weeks before my birthday every year, I let all the highs and lows roll around in my brain while I swim-bike-run-walk-dogs-write-papers-burn-eggs-botch-song-lyrics my way through the world. I try to rewind and sort through what I'm most grateful for, and this year it has been an exceptionally difficult task. I don't know how to talk about where I am in a way that is raw and honest and real without sounding like I'm complaining or acting a victim or simply just bitching about the cards I've been dealt. I've written this post, then deleted the entire thing and started over, a dozen times. I'm doing it again now, and what will be, I suppose, will be. The sun has already set on my last day of being forty, and I'll start there. I am grateful for that, from within the musky darkness of the early evening. Lit only by the glow of my laptop screen, this year finally taxiing to a close. The nose of the plane will soon dip towards earth, the landing gear will drop with a muffled clunk, and through the night I'll quietly carry myself back home, alone.

I do want to talk about the gratitude I can see, because my life is not without grace. This year for my birthday, I decided that the present I would give to myself would be to write letters to all of the people I love the most in the world, taking the time to be thankful for their presence. One of these letters is in my pocket now, the sharp edges of the card poking into my leg as I sit here and type. I'll hand several out over the next few days, some will sit on my desk for three months until I finally address them and walk the twenty feet to the mailbox, and at least one, I am sure, will never be sent. This year I learned how to let the people who love me carry me gently. And somehow, by leaning into that, as terrifying and groundless as it was, I learned about the importance of being gentle with myself. I'm not any good at it yet, I might never be, but I'm trying. Once a week(ish) I sit on my therapist's couch and we have been wading through the impossible and exhausting task of yanking every demon I've ever had out of the moat surrounding all of my own darkness and then jabbing holes into the brutal underbelly of everything that has ever caused me pain. These sessions wring the breath from my body, they leave me worn out, beaten and empty for days that follow. But I keep going back, because only in doing this work am I going to be able to keep growing into the woman I want to be. So I'm grateful for a life that has cornered me into embracing this growth, because reaching delicately but ever so deliberately for the sun is what will make me a better friend, partner, co-worker, daughter. It's what will make me a good mom.

This year. Grateful sparks scattered thinly across it, only flashes, the most brief reminders of who I am. That I still exist. The day when I coerced my doctor into an ultrasound even though I only came in for blood work because I had spent a week having nightmares that I was pregnant with triplets, that's one. He heaved the huge sigh he probably heaves 900 times a day because it's literally his job to deal with irrational pregnant ladies but hauled in the machine anyway. That moment, the one where I saw my baby for the first time, the tiny flicker of a heartbeat, that is a moment that I will always be grateful to carry. Knowing that I had created a miniature human who was living and breathing (sorta) and craving watermelon inside me, seeing, hearing, experiencing that was one of my most beautiful and breathtaking moments of my entire life, no matter what came next. Another day, early in the summer, I parked my bike at the rack in Ward and was bear-hugged from behind by a perfect stranger, laughing, who told me that he had never had as much fun hauling ass up the mountain as he had that morning, about thirty meters behind me watching me drop gummy worms and sing all the best Doobie Brothers songs the whole damned way. A few moments on the bike, actually, riding seventy or eighty miles when I was only a few minutes pregnant and feeling like I could conquer the world, putting the TT back together and mostly bitching about how uncomfortable the saddle is but also remember how fucking good it feels to lay down in the bars and dig in, every muscle in majestic perfect motion, flying low and sweet over the flex of the earth. Rediscovering an old favorite song from 2007 and walking around for a week nodding to Britt and Lecrae, ready or not, here I come, I'm about to show you where the light comes from. 

My birthday, a year ago. Every minute sparkled with hope, a gorgeous frissom of opportunity. I remember that I swam at 6. The pool layout was still COVID chaos so I snagged my favorite lane from the opposite end, nestling comfortably into the quiet rhythmic hive of early morning lap swim while the sun rose glittering pink and orange and purple all around us. I taught strategy that morning, 75 minutes of intangible resources and saying Zoom hello to everyone's cat. A chocolate cupcake was my second (or maybe third) breakfast and then I was off on the bike, climbing high into the brilliant blue, cookies in Ward, a breakfast sandwich in Lyons, smelling like bacon and burping coffee the whole way home. There was my favorite kale salad for dinner (never has a more Boulder statement been uttered) and then red wine on the porch under the twinkle lights, texting and talking with those most dear to me until the wee hours of the morning. I was finally able to see that I had been getting my legs back, gathering myself around me in all the most fantastic ways, and suddenly the air was rich with optimism. I felt it that night, the magic of the universe sending me off on the warm wind of new direction. I'll tell you that I loved you, before I ever knew you. I believed that it was my future unfolding before me, I trusted, and I leapt.

And now. Now we are here. Where there's no way to bend the last year into a story that rings with buoyancy and joy, where I'm still trying to clamber my way back from the kind of pain that will consume you, that will eat you alive, if you let it. One of my best friends said to me a few weeks ago, it's like the light has gone out inside of you, and never has anything been more true. That is how it feels, like I'm a ghost, like I'm living behind a triple-thick pane of bulletproof soundproof painproof glass, where no one can reach me, where I don't even want anyone to try. There are people in this world that think She Who Screeches The Loudest And Is The Most Vicious is a show of strength, and I've bumped into far too many of them in this life, in this year. It doesn't cost anything to be cruel. It's easy to lash out when you feel like you're backed into a corner, to react to pain by causing more, to spray a sudden gush of fury and vitriol just so you feel like at least it's getting spread around a little. But I've got this one tool in my toolbox, you see. I know how much strength there is in holding back, in letting the air throb gently across the cords instead of taking a deep breath and shrieking hatred and poison at the top of your lungs. The greatest power is shown in mighty gentleness. The strongest people are those that can still be kind even after the world has torn them apart. And this world, this year, has torn me apart. The universe has repeatedly raked me with her claws, I rolled the dice a dozen times and never once came up boxcars. But I tried. I've returned elegance and love into the howl of the hurricane more often than not. And when I haven't, I've apologized, I've taken responsibility for what I've done, and I've worked to be better. That's all I can do. It's more than most. 

This year. I refer to it as The One Where I Failed At Literally Fucking Everything. There are no rose-tinted glasses to smash it through, there is no joyful spin where I've turned up in an asymmetrical trendy haircut bleating about my happy ending. I'm just here. I feel broken, ruined, most of the time. My soul is exhausted. I've gone quiet and small, I've retreated, because I've reached my own personal breaking point and it's the only way I knew how to make the pain stop. But there's a problem with facing life in this way, and to borrow and butcher the best of Leonard Cohen, it's because when there are no cracks in anything, the light cannot get in.

If there is anything I can say, on this last day of forty, it's only that I'm still breathing. The smoke ain't gone but it's clearing. So rather than spend another moment on this pain, the life of this year, I'm thinking forward in time, and that's where I finally return to hope. Hope isn't enough (hope is not a strategy!), but it's a start. Hope is a big word, hope is the first step of living a life where every day I align my actions with my values, my head with my heart, where I haven't given up, not yet, not ever. 

This last letter of gratitude, written to myself, to a year from now, to forty-one. Darling, I hope you heal. I hope you recognize how radiantly beautiful your scars are, because while devastating now, these scars mean that you weren't afraid to try, to leap, to bear so much incredible pain against the possibility of everything. I hope you find your professional place in the world, where you are surrounded by people who are delighted by the biggest and loudest version of who you are, because they understand that it makes all of us better when we are given enough space to exist, who know that there is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel small around you. I hope you find a home under buckets of sunshine, whether it's mountains or oceans or rivers or nothing more than your teeny tiny dream house that rings with barking and little giggles on a huge splat of land. I hope Nespresso brings back your favorite flavor of coffee and there is always cinnamon raisin bread on the shelf. I hope your body makes it through, I hope that you're a mom, a little boy balanced between your swinging hands, forever. 

I hope that you wake up every morning knowing that there's someone in bed beside you who cannot fucking wait for you to open your eyes and begin the day, someone who loves you the way you want and need to be loved, enthusiastically explosively exclusively with their whole heart, someone who wants to grow with you and beside you and doesn't mind that you never really get the lyrics exactly right (and maybe this is just Annie and maybe she just wants her fucking breakfast and maybe that's okay too). I hope you can see that the work you are doing right now is repairing what's broken, filling in the cracks with gold, you won't ever forget the damage but maybe you'll be able to see how necessary it was to grow in this new direction, excruciating but ever towards the light. I hope you finally throw out some of those white tee-shirts littered with holes, I hope you rise up as the whole damn fire. I hope that this year, the one that has stripped you so raw and naked bare, teaches you to hang onto only what you can't do without. Because maybe it's when we see how little we actually need to survive that makes us realize how powerful we really are. To remove everything except the most fragile thread of what we must have, not just to survive, but to thrive. I hope you finally buy the Graham chair; I hope Graham spends every single one of however many days he has left prancing cheerfully in your wake, a tiny one-man fan parade. 

I hope you've carefully kept only the humans in your life who adore you for all of your wonderful weirdness, who are willing to fight for you as hard as you've fought for everyone else, who show up, who treat you with such grace and gentleness that you've finally learned how to treat yourself the same. I hope you're always open about falling apart because it's what will keep you together, alive, and breathing. I hope that you finally remember to tie the drawstring on your bikini so you stop accidentally mooning everyone on deck. I hope you start swimming again, harassing Instagram again, plant both feet in a stairwell and let the kindness and sweetness of your enormous heart ring and blow the universe wide open, again. I hope you always choose to soften where the world tries to harden you, because you have seen over and over why compassion is so necessary. I hope you continue to let love guide you, in even the smallest things, because that's what all life is hungry for. I hope your sky stays this blue, I hope you never stop laughing, I hope there are billions more fat belly bump shots and bike selfies and bikini selfies and open mouth selfies and dog selfies in your camera roll, I hope you know that you bring into this world things that no one else can. I hope you figure out how to turn the light inside you back on so that it burns brighter than ever before, I hope you gather these sparks together and allow them to burst into flame. I hope you survive, sweet girl, I hope you shine. I hope you thrive.