Good Luck Out There, Bravely Facing All That Breaks Your Heart

A message for the morning after.

A Note for You If You’re Having A Bad Day

(And if you aren’t having one, go ahead and skip this particular missive, because it’s not for you!)

My Love,

I took melatonin last night because didn’t everyone? And so I slept soundly from 10 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., at which point my body seemed to intuit that they had called Pennsylvania. 

I was up from 2:30 to 4:30, searching. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I felt lonely. It felt more like the middle of the night than it had ever felt. My husband Luke was snoring, and while I felt happy for him, I was also annoyed. A hug and a kiss would help right now, husband. I made a lot of noise, hoping to accidentally wake him up so I could hug and kiss him. This kind of worked, but in the way that he doesn’t remember it this morning. My waking self must have gotten inserted into his dreaming one, because he said, “Yes yes. We are doing it. A good job. A good job.”

This newsletter is called “you are doing a good enough job,” and on certain days, where everything feels bleaker than normal, wow does it ever feel hard to believe that the job you are doing is good enough. My impulse is to think that I could have and should have done, somehow, more. Or better. Or smarter. Something. Believing that I have not been doing a good enough job is sort of comforting; it gives an individual perceived control in places where in truth, control is in short supply. 

Right now, I’m on a train going to school, where I’m going to teach my students, who I think are going to have feelings about the election.¹ This was one of the main thoughts I had at 3 a.m.: I’m supposed to be a teacher in the morning.

I do, in fact, remember exactly what my teachers did and said after Election Day in 2004 and in 2008. I went to high school in Portland (2004), and a small liberal arts college (2008), and so peoples’ politics mostly aligned.

In 2008, my professor chastised us. “Be careful and don’t make assumptions. There are people who are devastated about this election outcome, and you’re ostracizing them. That’s how this country becomes more broken.” It was like she was saying, Your feelings are too much.  And also, I was basically positive she was a hard-right Republican, which, looking back, she almost certainly wasn’t.

My high school teacher, who was the faculty adviser of Students for Social Justice / Activism, was 34 years old and openly devastated about the 2004 election results. He would have probably canceled class if he could have. Instead, he let us talk. He moderated the conversation, but I still remember feeling upset. I think I went to the bathroom to fume or cry (probably cry, who are we kidding). I didn’t want to know about my peers who were happy or indifferent about the results, and I didn’t want to manage other peoples’ sadness or anger, either. The big pool of big feelings made me feel more unmoored.

So what is a teacher supposed to do the day after an election? I’m not sure. At 2:30, I refreshed social media, trying to see if anyone I loved was awake. I wanted to be with someone I loved. 

Molly was awake. God bless Molly and her social media presence; she had added some prescient memes to her Story. Molly and Luke were roommates in New Orleans, and she and I did stand-up together. Over the past year, she’s been battling breast cancer, and we’ve been in touch over Marco Polo. For a little while, we were talking every few days. I love Molly. Molly was awake. 

I texted, she texted back. I love you, I said. I love you too, she said. My two big take-aways from that conversation were:

1. In a Marco Polo a few weeks back, I’d quoted Mary Oliver saying, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life,” but I hadn’t cited the quote, and so Molly thought that was a thing I just came up with, which, flattering; but I needed her to know that no, Mary Oliver came up with it. I sent her the poem. 

   1. The thing about that poem is that, while that last lines feel like a call to action when taken out of context, the poem itself is about watching a grasshopper. It’s about watching THIS grasshopper, in this exact moment. And when you aren’t sure what to do with your one wild and precious life, watching a grasshopper (or looking at a tree, or finding water, or saying hi to a pigeon, or choosing to remember that whether or not we deserve it, we still have access to nature; we still have the opportunity to be present with it and appreciate it) is a good choice.

2. Molly said this:

   

   And after Molly said that, I fell back asleep for a whole hour. 

I had one last dream before I got on this train going to work. The dream took place in the second act of Into The Woods, and friends from my recent past were playing the main characters — plus my cat Norman, who is in real life a Republican, was there — and Jane from grad school (not her real name) had just been killed by the giant. Luke was the baker, and my friend Jess was Cinderella, and my sister was Little Red Riding Hood and — this part doesn’t matter to you, does it? You get it. The point is, I woke up singing “You Are Not Alone.” There’s a lot of plotty stuff about “mother is not here now, she’s been eaten by giants” in this song, but also:

Who can say what's true?

Nothing's quite so clear now

Do things, fight things

Feel you've lost your way?

You decide, but

You are not alone

Believe me

No one is alone (no one is alone)

Believe me

Truly

People make mistakes

Fathers, mothers

People make mistakes

Holding to their own

Thinking they're alone

Honor their mistakes

Fight for their mistakes

Everybody makes

One another's terrible mistakes

Witches can be right, giants can be good

You decide what's right, you decide what's good

Just remember, just remember

Someone is on your side (our side)

Our side

Someone else is not

While we're seeing our side (our side)

Our side

Maybe we forgot, they are not alone

No one is alone

Someone is on your side

No one is alone

If you haven’t heard this song, it’s likely reading as a stack of platitudes, so I recommend listening to the Broadway recording. (NOT the James Corden Anna Kendrick one; I don’t even dislike them as people, they were just MISCAST.) 

==The dream was on-the-nose, I guess, but honestly any time I wake up without a Laurie Berkner song stuck in my head is a win for me so I’ll take it. The message my subconscious wanted for me is nevertheless clear, I think: if you’re grieving, scared, angry, hurt — find some people you love, and love them. All the rhetoric I could find on social media this morning was along the lines of, “This is what happens when —” and “The Democrats thought they could —” and “The world is over because —” and “Time to get to work.” 

Yes, eventually, we will have to get to work. But first, make dinner. Get the night of sleep you need to get. Marvel at a grasshopper. And after that: moment by moment.

The last thing I want to say to you is this: there’s a difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is choosing to believe that things will turn out well, while hope is focusing on the paths that are, indeed, possible, and taking the physical and mental steps towards clearing those paths. Optimistic people don’t fare much better than pessimistic people in terms of long-term health outcomes and overall survival. Hopeful people, though, do. This is science. 

And so.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart. You can do it. I love you; I’m here with you. We need you.

Love,

Sophie

1. They really, really did. And now that class is over, I’m crying a little bit, feeling for them. I ended up telling them about 2004 and 2008, and asking if they’d like us to have an easy and distracting day, to which they said, “Sure.” And I gave them fruit snacks.