Here’s a sample of the (first) narrated newsletter which is one of the new features included in my subscribers-only expanded newsletter. As I mentioned in my first newsletter of 2022 this weekend, in addition to my free monthly newsletter (which will remain free), I’m now also offering a paid version of my newsletter with monthly or discounted annual subscription rates. Paid subscribers will receive a narrated version of my newsletters so you can listen anywhere you see fit (like a podcast). I’ll also release at least one additional subscribers-only monthly newsletter. This is a reader-supported publication and I would be so grateful to have you become a paid subscriber by clicking the “Subscribe now” button. Either way, thank you for being here, reading, and now listening! I love this community and you are an essential part of it!
(Click “play” above for narration) When I was going through a divorce in my late twenties, I moved back home with my parents. There is a popular game called Chutes and Ladders in which you roll dice and either land on a ladder and climb up, advancing closer to your goal, or go down a chute and start back at the beginning or close to it. I remember thinking my divorce and subsequent move back with my parents felt like the biggest chute, the terrible one that takes up the whole dumb board. But the truth is life is not so binary as Chutes and Ladders would lead us to believe. One step doesn’t reveal a ladder or a chute. Two steps don’t even do that.
The day my first husband left (I have to be very specific. I’ve had too many people reach out after having read something I’ve written and express sadness over TJ having left—and I’m like, No! Please re-read that! TJ did not leave! He’s sitting right next to me, he just made me a Christmas card out of a rite-aid flyer, he’s the truest person I’ve ever met and HE IS STILL HERE, Thank God!). After my FIRST husband (emphasis on first, please) left, I quietly packed a suitcase and drove back to my childhood home.
I moved back into my room—the one that, for most of my life, had been painted half pink and half blue with a yellow strip of tape between them (really great option when you just can’t choose one color! Also when you’re six!) The summer I turned 16, I came home to a surprise room makeover. My pop had painted it hunter green—no tape at all—and had replaced the pink carpet with wood flooring. It was mature and cool, a place that says, ‘You’re invited to write angsty things in a journal, labor over songs on the keyboard in the corner, and change your outfit a thousand times.’ It was perfect. It still looked like this the night I moved back, but I couldn’t unpack my suitcase and fill the dresser with my clothes. It was too permanent. I knew I lived here now, but keeping the suitcase open on the floor allowed me to pretend that it was just a quick phase before I got my life back.
After some weeks, my pop casually mentioned the suitcase. “It might be easier if you unpacked it, Jess,” he suggested. “You could put your suitcase in the closet and free up that space on the floor.” That night I put my clothes away. The drawers closed with a dull thud, one after the other, staccato reminders that I was here. Really here now. Like the sound of the door when he slammed it the last time he left. Like the sound of his boots on the stairs one of the many times he’d left before that. Me in our bed, listening, the sounds telling me something, mingling with my own crying, together making a pattern, a counterpoint, a song with no words. I grab my computer and write something down. It’s a dirge, mournful, the song finally has words.
Unpacking my suitcase felt like a chute all the way down the board. I thought about my friends who were doing fine, happy in love, having babies, unpacking suitcases blithely, mechanically, unemotionally, because it was fine and they were fine and the suitcase on the floor probably meant a vacation. Their days were filled with ladders. They’d pick up the phone and it’d be a call about another ladder. They’d answer the door and a ladder would be left on their porch. With a bow on it. I’d answer the door and try to pretend I didn’t actually live at my parents’ house. I wouldn’t lie, exactly—just act like I was eventually going home without mentioning I was already there.
I think we need to do something. I wonder if we could try—I’m not saying perfectly master or anything so terribly hard as that—just asking that we try to hold off on our first instinct to label a sudden life event as either a chute or a ladder. Either a climb or a fall. I’m not suggesting we stop talking about how something makes us feel—not for a second—but I wonder if we can just say, ‘Chutes and Ladders is a game that’s kind of fun but so is Candy Land and I’m not really afraid Lord Licorice is gonna hunt me down anytime soon.’ Like, that’s just a game and life is so much more nuanced. Terrible doors are terrible, yes. And they can lead to places that are good. I am only saying it because I’ve seen it—a few times now, actually.
Also, we cannot possibly be introduced to a life event and instantly comprehend the entire ripple effect it will have. The Bible has this real zinger—
“We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.” (1 Corinthians 13:2, MSG).
We don’t see so clearly; we don’t know how, exactly, this life event will end up. We can know some things. We can know we’re grieving and in terrible pain. We can know our own brokenness, yes, definitely. We can see with a terrible clarity what we have lost. But we cannot know what grace will come and do. The forms it will take. The things God does in grief. The way the heart expands. The people who will help us. The healing that will start right here. Right here where it hurts. We know the state in which the grace and healing will find us, but we cannot know the state in which the grace and healing will leave us.
After I’d unpacked my suitcase and really moved into my parents’ house, my mood hadn’t improved. I was depressed. My therapist said it was not permanent, that it was because of this major life event and that I wouldn’t always feel this way—but most evenings it was hard to believe this. Mornings, too. Opening my eyes and reacquainting myself with my life was hard. And I had to do this every day, over and over again, for as long as I was here. Being young and healthy, chances are, I’d be here a long time, which felt like a life sentence. But there were breakthrough moments where I could believe that I might change and grow and heal and one in particular has stayed with me.
While home, my parents’ dog had puppies, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. I highly recommend that a newly grieving person live with seven fluffy puppies. I mean, therapy, sure. Exercise is good, too. But don’t skimp on the puppies, that’s a must. Anyway, my pop asked me to paint a Puppies For Sale sign to put at the end of their lane, and I got right to work in the basement. I spent hours down there with paints and brushes and a nice big blank sign. I lost track of time and skipped a meal and completely forgot about both how I felt and my recent diagnosis of situational depression.
I didn’t stop until the whole sign was covered with adorable puppies and INQUIRE WITHIN! and a phone number and art I was proud of. Finally, I came back upstairs late in the day and my pop found me in the kitchen. “What happened?” he asked, his voice sounding strangely excited.
“I finished the sign for the puppies,” I said.
“Yeah—but did anything else happen?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, did anything really good suddenly happen?”
“Nope, everything is the same—why?” I asked. (This was getting weird.)
“You look…different, Jess,” my pop explained. “You look, well, happy, actually.”
I took in this strange new observation and finally said, “Oh, well, hmm. I guess, actually, I don’t feel so bad. I really loved painting the puppy sign. It might have been the closest thing to happy I’ve been in a very long time.”
“Well, I would have asked you to paint a puppy sign a long time ago if I’d have known it would effect you like this,” pop said, smiling.
Now, before you, dear reader, tell me that’s great I can paint a puppy sign and feel better, but you’re not much for painting and guess what, it’s not all that easy to find seven puppies to suddenly live with when you’re depressed—this isn’t actually what I’m telling anyone to do. (Though a gentle suggestion to walk a dog when you’re grieving might be in order. Petting a dog lowers blood pressure, heart rate, slows breathing, relaxes muscle tension, and results in a significant reduction in cortisol, a major stress hormone—so come on, volunteer to walk one at a local animal shelter, grab a dog, and let’s go!) But (deep breath and repeat after me: I am not minimizing grief, I am not minimizing grief, I am not minimizing grief), I am suggesting that the problems life confronts us with bring opportunity to become more creative and therefore more resilient.
I do not mean creative in terms of performance or fine art. Those things are wonderful—I deeply LOVE them, the world surely needs them—but creativity in its most basic form is not necessarily performative or depending on a set of paint brushes. Creativity is problem solving. That’s it. It’s the ability to connect the dots and find a picture that makes some kind of sense. Like tracing out Cassiopeia in a sky full of chaos and stars. Finding that crooked W and telling the world that you see a story, a bit of mythology that helps you see better and even move forward. I recently heard a psychologist say that the most creative people in the world generally have grief in their life at a young age, that most have lost a parent before age nine.
This actually makes sense to me. Grief presents us with a very real problem. When my first husband left, I was compelled to write, night after night, my words trying to reconcile the acute suffering I was experiencing through my divorce with my conviction that God’s grace is sufficient for me, that life is worth living. It was like a math problem that wasn’t adding up correctly, so I went back to the board every single day, chalk in hand, writing it down in an effort to solve this problem.
In that time, I was hired to choreograph a dance piece and, though I didn’t feel like doing much of anything at the time, I decided this was something I needed to do. It was more problem solving—but this time with movement. I created a piece that showed a clearly hurting girl being carried by someone. I dedicated it to my brother. Slowly, I was solving the problem of grief, of my pain and suffering. I was tracing the stories that the night sky illuminated, pulling out constellations from a dark sky. I was finding some answers in the grace that came—despite or maybe because of my heartbreak, I couldn’t tell you which—but it was undeniably present. And it was proving my theory of life being worth living.
I don’t think I need to tell you about all the ways my grief for Luca, my son, has demanded creativity from me. More problem solving. How do I live with a son dead? How do I work this out? It’s a major problem. I’m not sure I’ll ever have a pat answer, but I have had to become more creative in order to find new ways forward than that which I had planned (raising all of my children). The incredible writer Joan Didion aptly said,
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
And so I get to work. I problem solve for hours with walks and conversations and prayers and, maybe most of all, words. Arranging them, using them to love and grieve my baby, to trace grief in the nighttime sky, point to it as a constellation worth knowing, a story worth telling.
The puppy sign was a glimpse of creativity. It was a small problem—nothing like the problem of grief—but nontheless a problem my parents had with marketing. They had puppies to sell but nobody knew about them, so I solved that problem with a sign. But it was deeper than that, too. There was a blank canvas, my own sentient being, and suddenly the sign turned into a story. There was this conviction, this thought: Look what I can make, what I can do, what still needs to be done and made. With relief, I saw that the world did not end when my heart broke, after all, for I came alive while painting a puppy sign. It was a proof of life that I desperately needed and it turned out to be maybe even weightier than mere happiness. I realized I was alive and that what I did mattered and that blank signs weren’t going to go ahead and paint themselves.
I realized that Chutes and Ladders doesn’t exist. The world is not this black and white (Thank God? Do I dare thank Him for the pain mingled within the absolute joy? For this doesn’t simply mean that nothing is sole hardship, it also means that nothing is sole loveliness, too. At least not on earth). In her book, A Woman’s Book of Grieving, Nessa Rapaport writes,
“…The opposite of depression is not happiness -- a radiant, receding goal -- but vitality, to feel alive each minute you are given. Then when sweetness comes it is most sweet, and when sorrow comes you know its name. In the aftermath of suffering, what you find is shockingly alloyed: All happiness is dappled, and even bleakest tragedy has moments of strange praise.”
I suppose those hours spent painting the puppy sign conjured up a “strange praise” within. I learned that here I am, creative, problem solving, full of vitality, still. And this is what I am trying to say: not even despite, but during the losses and suffering we are forced to endure, we discover life is yet dappled. There is no broad stroke that paints it all terrible. (Though, I do believe that God paints with a broad stroke and this is where we find the grace.) We discover those moments of strange praise that encourage us so profoundly, it is akin to bread for the literal starving. It’s a lifeline when you’d otherwise drown.
Creativity and resilience are tantamount to thriving. In my experience, chutes often afford us growth in these areas. They are the problems that teach us to problem solve (you can’t know how to problem solve without problems. I wish you could). Therefore, though we can absolutely call chutes terrible, maybe the effect of a chute isn’t. Or at least, doesn’t have to be. Maybe a chute can actually turn into a ladder—down the road (though, it’s a road we wouldn’t readily pick).
Here’s to growing in creativity. In accepting that life is dappled and that, while we suffer, the creativity of God is such that we are left better. Softer, kinder, more compassionate, more hopeful, and the kind of more creative problem solvers that the world needs.
Ps my parents quickly sold every single one of those puppies. I can’t necessarily say it was the puppy sign—but I also can’t say that it wasn’t.
