Suffer Better
Musings on grief, darkness, and friendship
Blessed are the days where I’m floating in a pool with my closest friends, passing around a hollowed-out pineapple filled with whiskey and taking turns spilling our secrets and heartbreaks of the last 6 months. We get our hearts broken differently now, settled into marriage and approaching middle age faster than I’d like to admit; the stakes are getting higher. It’s miscarriages and sick parents and cancer scares and breaking bodies and lawyers and flooded houses, and we’re the privileged ones, and still young at that. The cuts are fewer than the abrasive and volatile years of youth but even now the scars don’t fade like they used to.
But yes, we are blessed with each other and those moments and I for one do not know where I would be without friendship. That day in the pool, we drank our pineapple whiskey and laughed and splashed and cried. It was mostly the company, but the water was nice too. I had my new underwater camera housing and clumsily directed my friends to pull themselves into the deep. Water photos are my absolute favorite; maybe because they are hard, maybe because they lend themselves to dramatic pops of light and the shadowy depths beyond, maybe because water has so much damn feeling. It felt good in the pool to try to make my little art. This summer was hard - physical and mental illness took a toll on me and when I stopped feeling bad, I just stopped feeling all together.
I am much better now, mid-fall, and I clawed my way back by turning back, looking back (and also changing medication and prioritizing my health, etc…) I am very different from 16 year old April and yet - I’m not. Feeling her again also meant I feel more like myself than I have in a long time. Joy does not come easy for me, and I’ve wasted a lot of time feeling bad about that instead of just being me. I’ve leaned back, just a little, into the old comforts of moody artwork, dark colors, bristling emo music, and shadows of doubt. That’s just a part of who I am. Can I embrace that while still pushing for progress, for positivity, for happiness?
We have leveled up with age and it’s not as black and white anymore. No more lamenting the bad. Instead, we honor the grief, not because we want it but because it’s going to be there either way. Which is, of course, quite difficult when we’re in the thick of it and it feels so relentless. There is a weight pulling you below and there are days, months, years even, when you can’t remember when you last broke the surface, but you will. And the first gasp of bright, light air feels so good only because you spent so much time in the depths.
Too on the nose? Let’s try this: Embrace the push and pull. It is critical. Even comedy is the build-up of tension followed by release. It wouldn’t work without the tension. I also see it every month in running, as my training builds miles on miles on miles and then there is glorious rest to let the body adapt. People will not progress without it. And I do not think my internal contentedness of late would feel so sweet if I hadn’t spent months in an anguished fog. I’m not even sure I’d have recognized it.
Older and wiser, we carry each other through the years, learning to suffer better. Into the deep we go.