Bummin' You Out

It's a little crazy how writing can be so satisfying and yet so tedious and wrenching at the same time. I'm sitting here in a cafe in OTR, drinking a latte and trying to ignore that there's a cold draft coming in from the window next to me. I know that – logically – there are moments during the winter months when I'm NOT freezing. It hasn't even been THAT cold this winter so far. I just can't remember that most of the time. The cold feels like a constant fog soaking in my fingertips, my shoulders – even my nose when I'm trying to sleep. 

Today I tried to stop by a store I'd briefly talked to last summer about carrying Olive & Clyde cards – I'd gotten myself all psyched up, prepared what I was going to say, packaged cards to show the owner, even gotten some prepared for retail display in case she was up for taking cards now. But what happens once I walk downtown? The store isn't there anymore. So now I'm writing in a coffee shop instead. And maybe I got a cookie.

This isn't really news, but I've learned writing is a roller coaster on your emotions. Some days I feel extremely capable and like "I got this. No problem." I can see all the pieces and how they fit together, and I BELIEVE I can fit them together. Other days I feel like it's pointless for me to even be trying to write. Who do I think I am? Stop messing around and get a real job. Lately I just feel profoundly incompetent. Like the words coming out are pointless and awkward and just plain bad. I know this is a mental thing and you just gotta push through it – even if my writing is horrible, that's what editing is for – but it's really easy to let the "you can't do this" beast take over your head. On those days I tend to gravitate towards working on Olive & Clyde because at least it's more tangible and easier. Writing is SO. HARD.

SUCK IT UP. 

I've had a couple rough days the last week or so, though if my friends are a representative sample, it's something January seems to do to everyone. The cold, the lack of sunshine, the lack of holidays to look forward to. And lately it's felt like death is everywhere, though it's touched me only tangentially (knock on wood, cross my fingers, wish upon a star, beg God for mercy) – my friend's grandmother, three high-profile celebrity deaths, a fatal heart attack of a distant relative in his 40s, an elementary school principal a few miles from our house who was killed when a bus jumped a curb, the country singer with cancer on her deathbed whose pictures my aunt keeps liking on Facebook. And then a few days ago I was absently scrolling through Facebook, as apt to do, when I came across a friend from high school's post. Someone had died, tragically and unexpectedly – my friend wrote about how confident and funny and badass the girl had been in high school, and how much her heart hurt for her two daughters left behind. 

Since my friend and I went to the same high school, and also since I was filled with a morbid curiosity / horror, I clicked through to try to figure out if I knew this girl. I did, very obliquely. Not enough to say we were friends. We were the same age, in the same graduating class. I spent I don't know how long clicking around her profile, her husband's profile, her sister's profile, trying to figure out what had happened, why her family was alone now. In her photos they all looked so happy and beautiful. Curse you people and your privacy settings! I felt ashamed and wrong as I kept digging around – it was none of my business. I didn't even know her. It felt intrusive and rude, like I was being a busybody, a spectator to other people's very real pain. But I couldn't stop. What kind of psychological issue did I have that I was fixating on this? 

A day or so later, the original post showed up in my feed again, this time with an added comment where my friend had responded to someone else's question and given me the answer I was looking for: she'd died in her sleep, from some kind of respiratory illness that hadn't seemed like a big deal. Her daughters had the same thing and were fine. She'd just never woken up. 

Having the answer didn't help any, because it wasn't an answer at all. The fact that we all can drop dead at any time has always been there in my head – that's part of why I'm so neurotic about it. This doesn't help. I kept imagining her poor husband, her poor daughters, and how lost they must feel. In the midst of my mental self-torture, I got the very acute feeling that death was following me around with a hammer; it was unavoidable and imminent. How can anyone find any joy in life if as you get older death just becomes more and more common? How can people have children when they know all the horrible things that could happen to them? My dog will die. My grandparents will die. My parents will die. My friends will die. I will die. I can't even type all the people who will die because part of me feels like I'm tempting fate by putting it into words. But the fact is death comes for all of us. No exceptions. DUH DUH DUH. 

I'm sorry. I know I'm bumming you out. I'm bumming myself out. But here's a thought I had a few nights later, exhausted from the topic and placating myself with some hot chocolate and toast. As I stirred the hot chocolate made from my Great-Grandma Doris's recipe into the mug my Grandma Pam got me for Christmas last year, I thought about how my other great-grandma, Grandma T, used to make us kids hot chocolate and toast at night. She'd butter the toast and cut it into halves, and we'd dip the ends in our hot chocolate when it was still too hot to sip. Good bread and butter and hot chocolate is delicious. As I thought about that, and how both my great-grandmas were gone, I felt sad, but it was a good kind of sad. It was a "I'm lucky I had them" sad. A "there's still part of them that's with me" sad. It was a "someday if I have a child I'll make them hot chocolate and toast and tell them about my grandmas" sad. 

I have to learn how to be okay with death – or at the very least, not spend my whole life worrying about it coming so that I don't enjoy the time I have with the people I care about. That's easier said than done, but that's something I'm going to try to work on. 

Sorry for bumming everybody out :/