A heart soft enough to break

Because change is inevitable and often. And sometimes awful.

My daughter’s artwork, first grade.

Hi cacti,

I hope you’re well. I’m still getting “back on my feet”¹ after experiencing a traumatic emergency. Now that life has normalized a bit, I find myself reevaluating the past few years of my life, which was spent (exhaustively) working on a memoir. This new and harrowing “chapter” in my life has transformed what I thought of as my “story.”

In writer parlance, a major revision is unavoidable, but I don’t know if I have the energy to undertake it. I’ve been daydreaming about writing fiction as a way to have some sort of creative outlet, but life remains too draining and busy. In sum, I am full of ideas but low on executive function. Extreme stress will do that to you.

And, as usual for me, I am once again reckoning with my own long-simmering existential depression, because there is nothing like nearly losing someone you love in a highly tragic way to make you confront the meaning of life, and for someone like me, it’s a slippery slope into self-loathing/feeling foolish for rushing to wrap a pithy pitch-worthy narrative around my story while it was still being written.

Gah. Man I’m getting bleak! And things were bleak. But now things are OKish, and I’m also managing OKish. (It helps that I took a leave of absence from work, something I wish all people who are suffering or taking care of people who are suffering could do with ease, but the FMLA sucks and so does our national obsession with capitalism/working too much/fucking poor people over/making us all sacrifice our mental health for a paycheck.)

Gah! There I go again getting bleak! So, back to being OKish. The whole reason I logged on and wrote this post today is because I came across this lovely letter/poem from (brilliant) mystic chaplain and author

Laura Jean Truman

and really wanted to share it:

God,

Keep my anger from becoming meanness.

Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity.

Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking.

Keep my anger turned toward justice, not cruelty.

Remind me that all of this, every bit, is for love.

Indeed, right?

~Joy

1. The internet tells me this expression comes from the world of boxing. I guess there’s also that stupid Chumbawamba song, too. Boxing as a sport needs to die. Much like that song.