*I wrote this yesterday but got distracted by the Princess Diana documentary on Netflix (watch!!) and never sent it… so here is my belated note of thanksgiving for every one of you. Thanks for being my people.*
I just got back from a weeklong yoga/meditation retreat in Mexico. Up until the night before I left, I was still thinking I was going to back out. I wouldn’t have taken this trip in March, and the infection rates are worse now than they were then, so how could I justify going? I was prepared to quarantine when I got home and miss Thanksgiving with my family -- I knew that was the potential trade-off, but I still felt weird about it. I called my boss and he helped me talk through the rationale one more time – to remind me that I was taking reasonable precautions and that my plan was responsible. He told me that none of us are managing to zero risk, and that mental health considerations actually do matter in the balance.
And I knew I needed to go.
I made it through the election relatively unscathed (thanks to Mark and Michael and Dolly), but I was still barely hanging on. Based on Steve Kornacki’s description of the outstanding votes in Pennsylvania on election night, I decided that Biden had won, and that we just needed to hold on until it was eventually called. That cautious but steadfast optimism carried me through that week (in addition to a lot of dance parties and naps and alcohol).
Which might lead you to believe that I had some chill and didn’t just absolutely lose my mind when the networks’ decision desks finally called it that Saturday morning, but you’d be wrong. Your girl had zero chill.
It was genuine euphoria. There was champagne, and swimming pools, and a parade through Seattle playing Proud To Be An American and Beyoncé honking at every person we saw.
When I’m too happy or worked up about something, I have a history of kind of blacking out (even though I’m sober). It happened when ND played Bama in the national championship, and it happened when I went to go see Hamilton in New York. I remember walking in and sitting down, and then don’t remember either the first half or the first act. (Which in the case of Hamilton is tragic, but for the Bama game was divine mercy).
That’s what happened that Saturday. Full system overload.
One of the things I’ve learned with pain is that sometimes you can actually be scared to get better because it will force you to acknowledge how bad it actually was.
And in the days following that Saturday, I could start to sense how much damage was underneath the protective barrier I’d put up. It was extensive. Out of necessity, I’d numbed myself to as much as I could the last four years, and I’d built a system to keep out the daily news circus, but there was no escaping what we all lived through.
There’s the C.S. Lewis quote about how the only way to keep your heart intact is to give it to no one. Wrap it in hobbies and luxuries and keep it safe in a dark, airless coffin. In that coffin, your heart won’t break; worse, it will become unbreakable.
In the safety of the coffin the last four years, I’d missed out on a lot of light and joy. I also had denied myself some necessary grief. When John Lewis and RBG died, I couldn’t let myself feel the magnitude of the sorrow. But I knew that numbness was the price of admission, and I think it was worth the cost. I guess I just don’t know how I would have survived this otherwise.
But to feel the happiness and joy and relief come flooding in on Saturday, I knew the heartbreak couldn’t be far behind. I also knew the pride and joy were impossibly fragile and I couldn’t just immediately open myself up to all the news I’d been avoiding. I was allergic to the idea of starting the postmortem of Trump’s continued popularity and what it meant for the Democratic platform going forward. I just needed to celebrate and relish in this feeling for more than a day.
So I went into turbo dark mode, danced around my living room in ignorant bliss as recounts commenced, and held on until I got to Mexico. I had booked this particular retreat because of its timing after the election. I was either going to have to flee the country or go breathe out four years of suffocating toxicity. The shock of the 2016 election had done lasting damage. It’s like, I knew swaths of America hated women, but I didn’t know they hated us that much. Trump admitting on tape that he sexually assaulted women made some people like him more, not less. The world felt unsafe to me in a way it hadn’t before. And I had been deeply fearful in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election about violence and chaos and irreparable harm to our democracy.
What I’ve learned about the human nervous system recently is that even once you remove the stressor that put you in fight or flight, your body still needs to process the stress (adrenaline) that the stressor caused. If a hippo is chasing you and you somehow make it safely inside, it’s not like you immediately feel okay. You need some recovery time to explain to yourself what just happened, and to check in with your body and make sure you’re okay, and to breathe and lower your heartrate. Stressors and stress are not the same thing.
And so I got on the plane to Baja last week knowing that I had some major processing to do, and also genuinely afraid about what was going to come up when I finally sat still. I tried fighting against the feelings the first few days. I wasn’t ready. I kept to myself and laid by the pool with headphones on and went to bed early. But, as Anne Lamott says, grace bats last.
The best definition I have of grace is undeserved, unearned, unmerited, generous love. And that’s what I felt on my birthday down there last week. A pod of humpbacks swam right past me as I watched from my balcony. And the baby turtles were hatching on the beach and we got to go help release them back to the ocean. The moon hung in the sky over a brooding sunset that lingered for hours. I thought about what Cheryl Strayed said about how sometimes we need to put ourselves in the way of beauty. Beauty is what opens the coffin. I left my balcony and walked up to dinner, and this group of strangers I’d only known three days had a birthday party waiting for me.
Something in me just cracked open. I told them through choked back tears that sometimes I genuinely wonder how one person can be as lucky as I am, and this was one of those moments. I felt overwhelmingly loved…. all these memories from the last 38 years that condensed down into this singular, overpowering gratitude for the people in my life. I felt you all there with me in a very real way. Your love gave me the courage to finally open the coffin all the way and let in the sanitizing sunshine. To do the work I had come there to do. To release everything I’d been holding onto these last four years. You were my gifts.
Every year on this day I give thanks for friends who are family and family who are friends, and every year I mean it more than the last.
But this year? This year I think I’m at peak thankfulness. I have never felt deep in my bones grateful like I do today.
I also know how many of you are suffering this Thanksgiving. Facing health scares, and the challenges of trying to keep a small business afloat, and strained relationships, and fear for family members, and general existential dread and worry.
Everything is tremendously fucked right now – I’m not for a second pretending that it isn’t.
But I think if this year taught me anything, it’s that when everything is fucked is when you need gratitude the most. Finding things to be thankful for is the only medicine I can think of that works every single time. It’s palliative and curative. It both makes us feel better, but it also gets at the root of the pain. It’s the silver bullet.
I also know very well that sometimes we just can’t bring ourselves to the take the medicine. The pain is too deep to believe that anything can touch it and all we can do is bite down on whatever bullet we manage to find and hope the pain passes.
I think it’s offensive to the depth of suffering people are facing to expect that everyone finds something to be thankful for. If you’re spending today in a hospital room, or in line at a food bank, or lonely for company, or trying to keep the million worries and anxieties bubbling inside of you from boiling over so that you can get dinner on the table and make a happy memory for your kids, or an essential worker, or expendable labor, or a black or brown person in an underserved community, or a parent who also now has to be a teacher, or a teacher trying make the best of an impossible situation, or you’re just a person trying to remember where you belong without long-held traditions to moor yourself to – I think you should be exempt from Thanksgiving. Actually, I think everyone should be exempt from Thanksgiving this year (my acupuncturist told me that his family decided to celebrate Thanksgiving on Inauguration Day if the pandemic improves and I am FULLY on board with that idea).
I know what it’s like to search for gratitude and come up empty.
Shutterfly emailed me a “On This Day 10 Years Ago” photo earlier today and remembering that Thanksgiving in 2010 was like system shock. I was coming off of the hardest year of my life. I had lost the work I loved, and with it what felt like most of the rest of my life and sense of purpose. I hadn’t worked in over a year, my mom had just gotten diagnosed with breast cancer, and I was back living in my parents’ basement. It seemed like all of my friends got married that year and I was more alone than ever. As someone whose engines ran on achievement, I had never felt more worthless in my entire life. Gratitude was beyond my reach that year.
But in that darkness, a lot of you held onto the light on my behalf. You pulled me through. That 28 year old owes you all a debt of gratitude – because you got her here.
—
Of the baby sea turtles we helped release back into the ocean last week, 1 in 1,000 will survive. That 1 will spend the next 20 years out at sea, swimming up to 10,000 miles per year. And then one day, the beacon inside it will go off, and it will swim its way back to the beach we were standing on. It is genuinely mind boggling.
Today, I feel like that one sea turtle that somehow made it back home, against all odds. And I have you all to thank for that. The people in my life are the home I could carry on my back until I could find the current that brought me back to the beach. If home really is where the heart is, then I think I finally understand why I feel so at home when I’m traveling the world. It’s because you all have a piece of my heart, so my home is everywhere. Like horcruxes, but not evil.
So in this absolute horror show of a year when I somehow was lucky enough to end it with gratitude to spare, I’m offering up the surplus for all of us. I’m holding onto the light like you held onto it for me, and like you no doubt will again.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Alison
When Giving Is All We Have
(thanks for this one, Peter!)
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
