Derailed (an old draft, series of moments)
Breakups, getting fired, missing friends, and other times when your ascendancy ends.
A few meditations on the turmoil of my 30s. Mostly reflections of moments in time. More of a personal post than normal. There is no structured point to this one. Just a series of personal observations, perhaps in a patchwork.
The hardest part is figuring out what you’ll tell your friends. When you’ll tell them. Who gets to decide what to tell them. Unraveling a life is a mess. Having your life unravelled for you, after you had sworn to uphold it in a redwood wedding grove 3 months before, was brutal.
And then you have to weave a new one after all that anyway.
I was off in the mountains while she was at cultural festivals I wasn’t invited to. As it turns out, with her new girlfriend that would later become her wife. I felt I should belong in both, but the mountains were home, and the culture was what I was told I should enjoy.
I had married a surprised lesbian. A surprise to both of us. That fact about her is no fault of her own. The mess of going through it, though, was messy. Some of it rather funny in retrospect. But never funny during. The details of the story are not wholly mine to share. I can now laugh about some of it in private. But they also were a trauma I got through, that became an earned identity. Somehow you’ve got to think that life is both an absurd joke and pregnant with meaning at the same time.
What’s wild to me know is how much resilience I had to build getting through all that. I’ve had two similar heartbreaks since. To paraphrase Darbra, I’m looking for people I think there should be two of in the world. I’ve found two since the derailing you read about here. The rub, of course, is they have to feel the same about you.
(author’s note: The first two didn’t, the third did. I got married this summer)
I’m becoming practiced at returning to port, alone, and weathered. Another attempt to cross the ocean, to the continents on the other side. Through storms. A shore you can’t find alone. One voyage, the one I wrote about here, had to turn around when my co-captain turned out to be a mermaid and dove under.
We search for masts worth strapping ourselves to. In San Francisco, a city of broken romantics, island hopping in flotillas, wondering why none of our vessels are seaworthy. Finding a co-captain in an archipelago of transients for an ocean passing is proving harder than I thought.
Grace, grant me the mind to hedge the bets I must balance, the heart to commit to the loves I must leap after in faith, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Post script: I got married a few years after I drafted the above. Mental note, when you’re going through shit you don’t even know if you can get through, keep going. You’ll teach yourself that you can get through things you don’t yet know how to get through.