Sometimes things fall apart, despite your best efforts to keep your shit together. Despite your best intentions and your attempts at self-growth and community care and your morning pep talks to yourself. Despite your calendaring and your journaling and your therapy and your commitment to always showing up better for yourself and those around you. Despite your deep passions and your skillsets and your experience already from the school of hard knocks. Despite your virtual reality mindfulness app and your understanding of how important sleep is. Sometimes things fall apart while you’re watching them get hit by those planes. Other times, they fall apart when you went to the fridge to grab that quarter of an avocado from that baggie; you turn around, and nothing is where you left it. Sometimes things fall apart just when you had found your groove, just when you had mastered that art of paint-by-numbers (and yes, it’s an art!), just when you started eating your vegetables again. Or worse, just when you had gotten really adept at putting on cruelty-free mascara in that fancy way you saw on that British reality show about makeup artists. Sometimes the strong grow weak, the influencers become influenced, the ralliers lose their voice. Sometimes things stop working, even though you’ve wound that clock before, you’ve shined those shoes. Sometimes, you’re the one that broke it. Sometimes, that superglue you got at Loews can help fix it. But sometimes, the superglue is too old and you need to wait until you go back to the store to get more … even though waiting for more superglue is superhard. Sometimes, you feel alone even though your old dogs are right there, not letting you sleep because they have needs and weird sleeping positions. Other times, you realize, they feel alone … so you snuggle them, as if you’re the superglue that can mend it all. And sometimes, you can mend it all. Other times, your superpowers don’t work for whatever reason—like that short circuit in the bathroom that made your favorite light (you know—the really silly, old one?) stop shining.
But … and I say this with very cautious optimism … it will shine again. And no, I can’t be sure of it. But I’m getting older (though I’m not nearly old yet), and I’ve lived enough life to see lights go out for no reason and then come back on—sometimes for no reason at all, sometimes because you updated the electricity in the house and there was suddenly more bandwidth.
I know there is a lot of loss out there right now. My heart is with you, and I just wanted to remind you that it’s OK if, sometimes, you don’t know how to fix the broken parts. That’s an OK place to be sometimes, I think.
xo,
jazz