lie no. 28 | 11.21.19
The next morning I woke up before the sun came up—still in The Bahamas—and went outside to watch it rise. I walked down the gravel road a bit, away from the house we were staying in to ensure I couldn’t be seen, and found a big rock to sit on. What felt like tears I didn’t think I could possibly have left hit my cheeks at an increasing rate.
I’d been spending a lot of time alone staring at the stars on this trip so it seemed perfectly normal to turn to them for the answers I so desperately sought. Life has this funny way of focusing us on finding the answers before we even know the questions—and Guru Google makes finding those answers far too easy. That morning it gifted me with the following horoscope for my year ahead, c/o FreeWillAstrology.com:
“A typical fluffy white cumulus cloud weighs 216,000 pounds. A dark cumulonimbus storm cloud is 106 million pounds, almost 490 times heavier. Why? Because it's filled with far more water than the white cloud. So which is better, the fluffy cumulus or the stormy cumulonimbus? Neither, of course. We might sometimes prefer the former over the latter because it doesn't darken the sky as much or cause the inconvenience of rain. But the truth is, the cumulonimbus is a blessing, a substantial source of moisture, a gift to growing things. I mention this because I suspect that for you, 2019 will have more metaphorical resemblances to the cumulonimbus than the cumulus.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said to no one in particular as I fought the urge to throw my phone into the gravel.
I looked up to find a lone grey cloud floating directly above me in an otherwise clear pink sky just as a raindrop hit me square in the eye.
There’s this distinct feeling I get when I’m on the beach just before a storm hits. It’s as if I accept or give in to the clouds closing in overhead, knowing they are about to suck all the water out of my being only to drop it all back down on me. It’s not fear, it’s not dread. It’s a surrender of sorts.
If anxiety is just excitement holding its breath, maybe pain is just growth holding its.
I’d had a couple panic attacks by this point in places I considered sacred—first the airport, then the beach—and I learned to give in and just breathe through them. I couldn’t control them, when they struck or how long they lasted.
I stopped having them as soon as I acknowledged them, as if the panic simply needed to get my attention. As soon as I gave in to it, it let me be.
It was like putting out a fire, except instead of cutting off it’s oxygen I found that sharing the air with it extinguished the flames far faster. Maybe pain works the same way. I can’t control the weather, proverbial or otherwise, but I had to stop letting it control me. If it was going to rain for the foreseeable future, I could sit in the storm or I could learn to dance in it.
Well, at the time I continued to sit there motionless—a few more minutes, a few more raindrops, a few more breaths—before going back inside and getting through a few more days. The dark cloud above me that morning disappeared out over the water as quickly as it appeared.
The figurative one I couldn’t seem to shake followed me home. I got sick again almost as soon as we got back, which sent my metaphors-and-meanings maker into overdrive. I finally started to feel a little better on my 35th birthday, but anxiety moved in as soon as the fever left. I had so much to do. I was so far behind. I had barely been able to get through the work for my existing clients let alone bring in any new ones. And I was about to go to Mexico for the rest of the month.
I got up and managed to make it the ten steps from my bed to my desk in the next room. I’m not a big birthday person—I prefer to be out of the country on it—but I do like to use it as an opportunity to think about what I want out of the year ahead. Something really did have to give. Why not start with just about everything?
I opened up the 12-tab spreadsheet I created to track the health of my business and deleted it. What good is a healthy business without a healthy human being behind it? I’d created it a year earlier to legitimize the business to myself before I believed in it, before I believed I could do it, and it had done its job.
On paper, everything looked great. Making matters worse, that felt like a lie, or at least not the whole story, and I decided it was time for some new KPIs.
I flipped to the first page of a fresh notebook and wrote down three goals for the year. Mary Oliver calls them “rules for living a life” in my favorite poem of hers:
Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it
That’s it. That’s all. No weekly meeting goals. No contact-to-contract conversion rates. No pipeline minimums. I had no idea why, but I believed if I could achieve those three things this year, things would be better. Things would be different. They had to be.
Maybe it wouldn’t indicate performance, at least not in the business sense; maybe it wouldn’t drive revenue. I didn’t care.
I was done performing. I wanted to start living.
“Write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” I jotted down on a post-it note and stuck it to my desk to replace the ones previously tracking percentages to various goals.
For months I’d been writing an essay to submit to The New York Times in hopes of getting it published under the Modern Love column. By this point I was probably a hundred-plus drafts into what eventually became Lie No. 22 instead.
I look back at that time now in such awe of myself—to think I was writing about anything related to relationships as I was struggling to understand my own shows just how deep the human need for love and craving for connection runs. I still had so much hope at a time I felt I had none left.
Writing had become my saving grace by that point, my guiding light. I wrote every spare minute I had—starting to appreciate its healing effects but not yet taking it seriously enough to do during business hours (heaven forbid the boss catch me). Writing, and that essay in particular, was the impetus for extending my Mexico trip to include San Miguel, as was what I wrote on the post-it that day.
I couldn’t explain why but 35 felt like an important birthday and the only thing I really wanted was to find my spark again. I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about finding it, but I felt this inexplicable pull toward San Miguel and this essay felt like the border to the puzzle. I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I gave myself the time and space to finish writing it, then maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to move on—from both the piece and it’s subject matter.
I booked my trip to San Miguel, grabbed my checkbook and my birth certificate and left the house.
Two days later, Mary Oliver died. Once again, albeit through wildly different circumstances, I was heartbroken over losing someone I never knew. One more of these and I’d have a trend I didn’t want on my hands! Social media was less savage this go-round, it was gentler on me. It felt as if there’d been a vote and the world decided: Today let’s be civil, let’s turn the internet into a public memorial service where everyone, anyone, can share a tribute as we grieve this loss together.
I thought about how incredible, and rare, it was for so many to share their gratitude for a person using almost exclusively that person’s own words. I scrolled post after post reading Mary’s words that day. I found utter comfort in a verse I hadn’t seen, or hadn’t noticed before:
“I wanted
The past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country; I wanted
My life to close, and open
Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
Where it falls
Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
Whoever I was, I was
Alive
For a little while.”
Me too, Mary. Me too.