Life Goes On - Things You Don’t Give Yourself Credit For

I dreamed I was talking to my grandmother yesterday. Just on the phone, and it was so normal in a way, she was upset that I was too independent. And then I woke up and remembered that she’s no longer here, and a little later, I got to writing a piece about that for Medium. I started crying. I’m someone who cries very easily, and pretty soon, I was bawling in front of my keyboard, just trying to power through the write-up. Really unlocked a lot of sadness there. It’s incredible how much emotion you can attach to a voice.

And then I checked my email, and found my confirmation for Hivefest in there. So I wrapped up the final details of the Medium article, and then I set about claiming my ticket. It was evocative for me in a way, because the previous time I attended Hivefest (Steemfest, back then) came in a similar manner. When I got the news that I’d won a ticket, I’d just survived the hardest loss I’ve had to survive in my life. I was shattered in ways I couldn’t even imagine yet. So the ticket came like a lifeline then, and while these here weren’t the exact same circumstances, they reminded me of that.

They reminded me, also, of the things I don’t give myself credit for. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to capitalize on disasters. It’s lucrative, from an artistic perspective. Pain sells. However, while it may be lucrative and exciting as an artist to focus on some negative experiences, it’s quite daunting for one’s personal life.

We should be wary of the urge to fetishize our sadness, as if the last loss we experienced is the one irreducible truth of our life. (Love Life, Matthew Hussey)

In developing my writing over the past few years, I’ve drawn heavily on hurts, on intense emotions. So much so that I amped them to more than their actual worth sometimes. I was listening to this song about a lost relationship the other day that starts with the lyric

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do

And when I first heard the song, I identified very profoundly with it. I thought 100%, yeah. But then recently, re-listening, I thought “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do? This piddly thing? Not by a long shot.”

To be clear, it was a very important relationship to me, the one I associated with this song, and it hurt so much losing it. But it wasn’t the hardest thing, even if in my efforts to write good shit, I may have inflated it to that status.

I’m very clear in my mind on what that actually was, and it’s helped give me a perspective on other difficult things. Sort of put them in their place.

As a writer, I get to scrape my yesterdays and turn them into fodder for my art. It’s fine. It’s, again, exciting. But in doing so, I sometimes forget that I can’t actually afford to do that with everything in my past. I needed to remind myself that these hard things I often write about, the heartache and the sorrows, those are manageable. Survivable, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about them in the first place.

The actual hardest things were (lo and behold) much harder. Things you don’t return to a lot, not even in the name of art, ‘cause they came so close to tanking you, it’s still very hard to keep your balance with them.

It was good for me to remember that. That I’ve survived things much harder and heavier than I give myself credit for. That there is a well of strength and resilience that lies undisturbed by most of these petty, surface-level heartaches. As it needs to be. It can’t afford ripples for every minor setback or upset.

There’s something very heartening in that. In knowing that you have the strength to survive so much worse.