“Yay but fuck” is what my friend says about moving into a new house after her divorce. Over dinner in a popular, crowded wine bar, we bend over the table to whisperyell into each other’s faces. She says: “People are like, ohmygod, aren’t you so happy you get to make your house exactly what you want, paint all the rooms a different color?” She leans back, shrugs: “I mean, yeah, but I’d also like someone to be there with me and say, ugh, I hate that color, how about no.”
“Yay but fuck” is pretty much how I’ve felt about everything important in my life, while simultaneously trying to pick one or the other instead of holding them both.
My friend
calls it . My breathwork teacher Iona Holloway’s version is “Muck & Gold”, and Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes about “Beauty and Terror.”I’m drawn to the people who don’t hide from the complexities and unsolvable questions, like Mary Oliver, who says, “I love the world, but not for its answers.”
I’m not a fan of the balancing act, the grey area, being in limbo or the waiting room, navigating the in-between, or experiencing that moment on the plane when I momentarily forget which way I’m headed. Growing up as a child of two alcoholics and drug users with significant mental health issues was unpredictable, dangerous, and volatile. My coping mechanisms included dissociation and magical thinking, but also creating a rigid mental structure of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. It’s why this daughter of a hippie mom and Irish Catholic dad joined the Mormons. A church so rigid and extreme, it borders on cultish.
I thought there was safety in following the rules someone else had made up. I checked off all the boxes. I stopped drinking coffee. I wore the magical underwear to cover my porn shoulders. I paid tithing even though it meant I could not buy diapers for my babies and had to beg the bishop for help.
And yet, there was no peace in this self-imposed prison. I lay awake at night, heart racing, intrusive thoughts of all the diseases and accidents and crimes that could hurt my babies pressing against my temples and twisting my guts.
Rigidity and black and white thinking didn’t give me the relief from panic and anxiety I craved so desperately. Not knowing what to do, which decision to make, and sitting in the discomfort of uncertainty kept triggering overwhelming anxiety in my nervous system. I now know my body is trying to protect me, to warn me of an unstable situation that reminds me too much of the time my dad told me he’d kill my mom if she didn’t divorce him. It’s not conscious. It’s old wiring that can’t be easily fixed. When this happens in my body, sometimes nothing works.
Like yesterday.
I slept, I journaled, I worked out, I fed myself, I went outside, I attended a 12-step meeting, I talked to a friend, I went to yoga. And I still lost my shit at the end of the day. I had to get in the car and listen to “All That Remains” and keep screaming “Fuuuuuck!!!” through my tears until my throat was hoarse. I did that for half an hour straight, then went back home, had a full-on crying meltdown, and went to sleep.
I am sometimes concerned about the intensity of my feelings. But then I remind myself that 20 years of volatility and insanity, followed by 15 years of dissociation and repression, can probably lead to five years of being overwhelmed by emotions, of feeling like I’m drowning in them, that they’re too big for my body to hold.
I used to think I wanted my parents to quit drinking. But we all come by our coping mechanisms honestly. Quitting the crutch would mean dealing with the festering wounds underneath that made them drink in the first place. It’s no different for me. Letting go of controlling and people-pleasing and dissociating and overworking and buying things and eating four cupcakes in a row and trying to fuck away my feelings doesn’t fix my wound either. It only allows the space and stillness to look at my wound and accept the damage so deep I can see the bone and try to stitch it up as best as I can and breathe through the pain and hope I don’t pass out.
This sounds depressing, I know. It felt that way yesterday. All fucks, no yays. All terror, no beauty.
On those full-on Muck days, I remind myself of the Gold. One day last summer, I walked around our neighborhood during an orange sunset with grief in my lungs so thick it was hard to breathe. I remember that day for its heaviness and desperation. And I also remember it for the golden light poured out over the mountains, the grass on fire, and every face I encountered glowing and beautiful. On that walk, I remembered a day even longer ago, my teenage self standing on the balcony and staring at a different sunset. That one more pink and peach, a soft powdery shimmer. I remember it because the beauty was too much for me to bear. I thought, this is so beautiful it’s painful, and I went back into my childhood bedroom and didn’t look up at the sky again until it was dark.
Terror made me shut down, but Beauty almost cracked me open. And at the time, I could not afford to be cracked open. People who are wound tightly are so for a reason. People who hold themselves together have never been afforded the grace to fall apart. Shutting myself off from the terror meant shutting myself off from the beauty. Disconnecting from one feeling means disconnecting from all. So I had to look away.
But last summer, I walked through the orange liquid sky, heart aching and eyes open. I didn’t need to turn away from light and beauty and pain to protect myself. For a second, I thought I’d rather be alive and in pain than not experience the beauty of this moment.
I stood there on the sidewalk, at the edge of the tall grass, the mountains at my back, children and dogs and joggers all around me. I stared straight into the sun, then closed my eyes, grateful that something so far away could warm my tear-streaked cheeks.
There are moments now when I can hold it all, the yays and fucks, the muck and gold, the beauty and terror. I can make room—sometimes. And on the days I can’t, I remind myself of the long road I’ve walked, the many times I’ve tripped, often in front of other people, the years I laid down in the middle of the path, unsure if I could get back up, the strength it sometimes took just to crawl a few inches, how scared I was in the dark, how I couldn’t see, how I was alone, but not.
How I’m no longer ashamed to say this out loud even though I have not experienced the most horrible capital T trauma millions of humans on this earth have suffered.
How humbling it is that even an average life can bring me to my knees.
Not to pray.
But to get very still and feel around for a tiny hope telling me to stay right there as long as I need to and then get up to continue stumbling toward light and beauty, even if it comes wrapped in pain.
Wow, just wow. Thank you for sharing. Beautiful.
I mean, maybe that is prayer. ;)