It's just that this is my thing now

On the humility of pain.

Hello, hi; we’ve got a bunch of new subscribers here since I had the honor of contributing to Suleika Jaouad’s newsletter last Sunday. What an honor, and what an extraordinary community she’s built. Welcome, new readers. Thank you,

Suleika Jaouad

; you are amazing.

---

Next week, I’m traveling with my daughter to the Midwest to meet my mom, my brother and his family, and all our extended family to celebrate my mom’s 70th birthday. For those of you who’ve read We Are The Luckiest, you might remember that my mom’s 60th birthday was a significant turning point for me. I drank the night before and was so brutally hungover and wracked with anxiety that I had vertigo all day and had to lie down everywhere. Toward the end of the party, I escaped outside for a moment to get some air and cry in my car, and my brother came looking for me. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, I said to him, “This is my thing,” and he replied, “That’s right. This is your thing.”

Such a simple statement. No lightning strikes or grand proclamations. Just me and my brother standing on a sidewalk in the suburbs in late September. That’s how it often goes, though; as

Cheryl Strayed

said, “Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Ten years later, part of me wishes I could tell that girl how much gobsmacking goodness was in store for her, but another part doesn’t; I wouldn’t tell her even if I could—even if she could hear it. I remember old-timers saying something like this in the early days. They’d say, I wish I could give you a year of my time so you’d know it gets better. But even if I could, I wouldn’t, because it would rob you. They said this because it’s the hopelessness, despair, and pain that change you. Without immersion in those depths, you’re never humbled enough to develop genuine compassion—never desperate enough to relinquish worn-out defenses and illusory methods of control.

In other words, without the pain, we don’t change.

I’ve spent the better part of the last seven months since my relationship ended resisting the pain that’s here or trying to speed it up and move through it more efficiently.