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In my early twenties, the first time I moved to the city, I worked as a temp in a Midtown office building, passing my days in a grim cubicle, on a floor without windows, running database searches on high-asset clients to make sure they didn’t have criminal records. At the holiday party I got sloppy drunk on cheap wine and asked everyone if the rumor was true, that we didn’t have any windows because a temp in Miami had jumped from one. Sometimes on my lunch breaks, I’d go to MoMA, just for twenty minutes, just to stand in front of a Seurat painting of the ocean and the sky at twilight. It helped me remember the size of the world—his horizon full of shimmering dust, those tiny points of paint. Those twenty minutes of beauty felt more important than all the hours around them, but they also made me crave a life whose ordinary hours I wasn’t running away from. That life wasn’t something I felt entitled to. It was just something I wanted.
If writing was my great love—and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man would ever be—I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison. Maybe submitting myself to another’s needs—becoming a wife, and then a mother—was precisely the antivenom I needed.
jesus this is just me lmao
In class, I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all tell ourselves and others about our own lives. You have to dislodge the cocktail-party version of the story, I said, in order to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath the anecdote: the anger under the nostalgia, the fear under the ambition. I didn’t want their breakups summarized, I wanted specifics—wanted them stress-eating cookies as big as their palms, their fingers smelling like iron after leaning against an ex’s rusty fire escape.
Looking at those lovers, gleaming and entangled, I remembered the first time C and I went to dinner, at an Italian restaurant tucked inside a brownstone. As C walked me to the subway afterwards, it started raining. Dark spots speckled the sidewalk.
C offered me his jacket. I refused, saying it was my own fault I’d forgotten to bring a coat. He shook his head, amused. “So you deserve to be cold? Ridiculous.”
He draped his coat over my shoulders. “Just take it.”
He knew the universe didn’t give people what they deserved, anyway. You might as well stay dry while you could.
During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.
<3
Sometimes what I wanted from my lawyer was impossible—her assurance that I was justified in ending my marriage. She had given me no sign she felt this way, or that it was her job to feel any particular way about my marriage at all.
Still, sometimes I wanted to believe that in taking this case, she was somehow—like lawyers in the movies—fighting for my innocence. As if I needed to prove that my leaving was justified in order to deserve any kind of happiness.
In my heart, I knew there was no such thing as innocence. Only the choices I’d made, and the life I built in their shadow.
On Sunday afternoons, right after I dropped the baby with C, I went to a twelve-step meeting in a vinyl-sided clubhouse across the street from a sprawling cemetery. It was only women. The walls were hung with wooden whales painted with slogans. Feelings aren’t facts. One day at a time. Things I’d heard before. Things that didn’t help, until I woke in the middle of the night and needed them—not as a woman needs wisdom, but as a thirsty person needs water.
In that room, when I described my husband’s anger, my voice got hard and smooth as a shell. When I described the nights my daughter was away, it cracked in two. One piece of me said, It’s unbearable. The other piece said, It’s fine. Both pieces were lying. Nothing was fine, and nothing was unbearable.
The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.
Some people called this grace recovery. Some people called it the love of strangers. Some people simply called it God.
The first time I got sober, I hated praying. It made me feel like a liar—full of greed rather than faith. I got on my knees and asked for things from a being I didn’t believe in.
The second time I got sober, I felt forgiven by prayer. It didn’t require belief. You could just get on your knees. You could do this anywhere. My bath mat became a church pew when I stared at shampoo bottles and tried to picture a force beyond my imagining. If I heard the word “God,” I pictured squinting at a nearly empty conditioner, thinking, Where are you?
Prayer didn’t require certainty. It could take root in all this wondering. It could take root in the honesty of wanting things. Years later, my sponsor told me I didn’t have to worry about asking God for the right things, carefully editing out all the requests that felt frivolous or selfish. Who did I think I was fooling, anyway? Might as well bring all my yearning.
How many times since her birth had I thought, I’d kill to be alone. How many times since the separation had I thought, I can’t stand to be without her. How many times, across the course of my life, had I wanted contradictory things from the universe and then convinced myself I could solve the contradiction by naming it?
In those early months of separation, my friends became my family. Or perhaps it was truer to say they always had been. I’d often been a creature turned like a compass needle toward the intoxication of falling in love. Even in sobriety. Especially in sobriety. But the weave of my everyday life had always been girls and women: bean stews and freeway commutes with my mother; a tight crew of girlfriends in high school, when I felt utterly invisible to the brash, cackling boys leaning against their SUVs in the parking lot; a college best friend with whom I stayed up until dawn drinking Diet Coke and arguing about God.
Romance was what I’d always felt most consumed by, but my relationships with women were the ones I’d trusted more. They built and rebuilt my inner architecture. The version of myself made possible by conversations with friends was the self I most readily recognized—the self that demanded the fewest contortions.
My close friends were not all versions of my mother. Each was no one but herself. But with all of them, I found a version of the safety my mother first introduced me to: You don’t have to keep earning me. I’m here.