Sh*t To Help You Show Up October 14, 2022
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
Hey, friends. This is the Friday Let Your Life Speak newsletter, where I try to provide some links and other resources that will help you show up for your life, enhance your integrity practice, or just need passing along because they are great. If you appreciate the work that goes into the newsletter and have the means, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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Way back in early 2013 I was in the throes of the most hellish portion of my divorce from my ex-husband. Divorce is not the worst thing that can happen to someone. There are much worse things that humans inflict on each other. But those of you who’ve been through a contentious divorce can attest that it’s an earth-shattering experience— all your plans for the future, so much of your understanding of yourself and love all get summarily tossed off a cliff, and you with them.
That winter I was unemployed with two young kids to raise, eking by on child support and food stamps. In retaliation for my filing for child support and refusing to let him set the terms of our divorce agreement, my husband introduced our kids to his mistress two weeks after I moved out, regularly insulted me to the children, harassed me on the telephone, accused me in court documents of domestic violence and perversion, intimated that I might abuse our children, and trashed me publicly on social media.
I was dying inside, yet had to keep living on the outside. So, I went to see one of my teachers, a woman I’d studied astrology with for years, to get grounded and find a way forward. I’ll never forget that after laying it all out for her, anguished and tear-soaked, she reared back in her chair, gazed at me, and asked in the sort of calm, disembodied voice you’d probably hear in one of those sleep apps these days, “What if nothing’s wrong?”
No one had yet named toxic positivity in those days. I had no language to describe her implication that in the face of losing nearly everything, being totally broke, embattled, and heartbroken, and having no idea what the hell I was going to do to survive what I should really be doing is getting philosophical about it all. I just felt like I’d been slapped, full-palm, while she serenely half-smiled at me.
Here’s the thing which I can say now, though, nearly ten years on. Her choice of wording was asinine. There were, quite obviously, any number of things seriously wrong with my life at that point that weren’t going to be solved by philosophically reframing my response to the experience. I had to find a job, support my traumatized kids, figure out how to navigate the court system, and protect myself from someone I’d loved who was now hell-bent on destroying me by any means necessary. She clearly wasn’t the right person to help me with any of those things.
From my current vantage point, I can also understand the big-picture lesson she was trying to impart. Sometimes our greatest failures and tragedies are when we learn the most about ourselves and others. Our lives take us to unexpected places, often the path is painful, but if we stay awake to the whispers of possibility being offered we can wind ourselves around to destinations that feel increasingly more true to who we actually are.
Sometimes the truest thing we find out about ourselves is that we can keep going no matter what. But discovering you’re an indomitable badass is no small thing.
This doesn’t mean I’m thankful for the shitshow that was my divorce, anymore than I’m thankful for being sexually abused when I was a kid, or raped when I was seventeen. Abuse and oppression are never “useful life lessons”. They are trauma, which often leaves us anxious, hypervigilant, bitter, depressed, despondent, and full of rage.
Surviving it all, though, with attention to the personal work I continue to have to do to make use of those experiences has brought me a life I hadn’t imagined, which I love even in its imperfections. Now I am a better mother, a more compassionate friend, and a freer and more emboldened lover. I cling less anxiously to my own ideas of how things should be and am more faithful that I can find beauty in the unanticipated twists and turns life offers me.
I am undeniably a truer version of myself than I was during my marriage. So, though I’m not thankful for how my divorce went down, would never have chosen it left to my own devices, I am glad it happened. It was bad and shitty and replete with wrongness, but in the end, it was also one of the rightest things I’ve ever survived.
“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as if it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment— not discouragement— you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.” — Joseph Campbell
I posted this quote when I came across it recently, and some folks had really strong, negative reactions to it. I think the very first comment was, “Sounds like toxic positivity to me!” And I agree, sort of. But also sort of not.
The primary frustration I have with what is now called toxic positivity, beyond simply the fact that it’s a presumptuous, uncompassionate way to treat people who are struggling, is that it has caused many of us to turn up our noses at any notion of the work that is required to make meaning out of our tragedies and failures. As they used to say, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
The trouble with toxic positivity is that it comes from outside ourselves, shows no respect for the time it takes to assimilate experience, and so often involves language that implicates us in our own suffering. No one can, or should, tell you when or how to make any kind of sense or meaning out of the awful, unexpected things that happen to you. And exhibiting “love”, as Campbell refers to it, as opposed to “discouragement”, in the face of tragedy isn’t always possible. It’s fair to be despondent, depressed, or full of rage when terrible things happen. Because nine times out of ten the horrible shit that happens to us is unfair. No one should have to be perennially loving in the face of that.
(Unless you, yourself, are honestly moved to be that way. If so, god bless your sweet ass.)
But you can also get stuck in that crisis place, become habituated to that way of being in the world, and end up solely anxious, hypervigilant, and bitter. Campbell is wrong that “any disaster you can survive is an improvement”. Rather, any disaster you can survive can be an improvement. Can lead, over the course of time— with a lot of self-reflection and rejiggering of learned behaviors, thought patterns, and relationships, not simply a change in your attitude— to a vast improvement in your sense of yourself and your life.
You might still be periodically anxious, hypervigilant, and bitter (Join the club!). Continuing to be periodically less than positive is not a sign you’re failing or that the shit that happens to you is your fault. It might just be that you’re awake to the reality of a world that is systematically designed to destroy you.
You also may not be able to make any sense of tragedy while it’s happening (I never can), but you can reach a point eventually where you make some meaning out of it. Where you can allow it to widen your sense of connection to everyone else who is struggling in this world. Which is to say, everyone.
You can be anxious, distrustful, bitter, hopeful, strong, courageous, joyful, despondent, grieving, and grateful, all at the same time. You can choose to make use of what happens to you to become more whole, more than what fate or circumstance offered you, and more than those who would try to destroy you could imagine. Promise. We’ll do it together.
While we’re at it, here’s some other great stuff I’ve found in the last couple of weeks:
The memoir No One Crosses The Wolf by Lisa Nikolidakis. Talk about taking the tragedy life hands you and doing the work to make yourself out of it. Brutal and magnificent.
This New York Times article about the answer to burnout being connection, by Tish Harrison Warren. It’s also the antidote to addiction, in case you haven’t heard. Deep connection fixes nearly everything.
A poem, For Everyone Who Tried On The Slipper Before Cinderella by Ariana Brown. This one made me let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
That’s it for today, lovelies. I hope wherever you are there are a few leaves turning brilliant colors and you can somehow find yourself a cider donut. These are the true meanings of October, in my book.
JUST read that poem this morning ~ Ariana Brown pulls the thread Mary Oliver made visible so many years ago....