Speaking the Unspeakable Things
Allow me to introduce you to something new: me telling a positive anecdote from my first marriage.
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Allow me to introduce you to something new: me telling a positive anecdote from my first marriage. (Hi, nice to meet you, too.) I will never forget meeting the guy who played my husband on the 1st National Tour of A Chorus Line. At our first rehearsal, I took one look at him and thought to myself, Well, shoot. I didn’t have this thought because of his personality, either—I didn’t yet know his personality. He was (still is) this stunningly handsome man with a dancer’s perfect physique, big green eyes, and a huge, charming smile. He was alarmingly kind to me. Also very complimentary, which really didn’t help. I had the slim hope that he might not be straight, which would have solved all my problems, really, but no such luck.
He played the part of my adoring husband so well. Like a true method actor, he would casually drape his arm around me or absently stroke my back during our ten hour rehearsal days. I pretended not to notice all this incidental touching, but it felt like electricity or fire or some sort of star that had fallen from the sky and found me just minding my own business in the New 42nd Street Studios, certainly not trying to be attracted to a random man I just met, but nevertheless lighting up my skin every time he touched me like I didn’t even have a say. And how does one not notice this? It really sucked.
The pose we always returned to in A Chorus Line’s infamous line had us holding hands, for goodness’ sake. And if I was very honest with myself, I didn’t mind all this closeness. Like, it wasn’t absolutely awful, which horrified me. I was married! Happily so. I’d never cheated, and didn’t intend to start—but I couldn’t believe I was so attracted to this guy who I literally had to hold hands with all day long. I had signed a contract and everything. And I was pretty sure suggesting to the director that, since all this hand holding and arm draping might just hurt my marriage, how about we just, oh, I don’t know, change the iconic and historic blocking? wouldn’t go over so well. So I sucked it up and did my job and tried to be nice to my partner without being too nice and tried to act attracted to him on the outside without being too attracted to him on the inside. It’s hard being an actor, but this particular job was brutal.
One night I took a deep breath, and told my first husband (for simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Judas. Don’t ask me why, the name just came to me) exactly what I was thinking. (What a way to live! Not dressing your thoughts up nicely, presentably, the way my mom dressed me when her mother was visiting. What a terrifying act of intimacy and trust to hand your newborn, naked thoughts to another and then just wait and see what happens.)
“So, there’s something I should tell you, but I’m afraid it will hurt you and make you upset,” I quietly told Judas one night. (Lol, JUDAS!) “You can tell me anything, Jess,” he said, just like I knew he would.
“Well. Okay. Um, I feel really terrible about this, but the guy who plays my husband in A Chorus Line is actually really really attractive. And I’m so sorry, but, well, I feel attracted to him. I’m not gonna do anything about it—I would never—but I just wanted to be honest with you, because I hate it. I feel embarrassed about it.”
To his credit, Judas’ face didn’t even change while he took this in. He answered so gently, so kindly. “I appreciate you being totally honest. But, Jess, you’re married to me. I know you love me; I know who I am to you. I bet that guy is really attractive—he’s a broadway dancer!—of course you’re attracted to him. You’re married, but it doesn’t mean you don’t notice attractive guys anymore. But I totally trust you, really, I’m not worried.”
After that conversation, I actually became less personally attracted to my partner. It was like this confession I’d made to Judas (couldn’t resist using this name one more time!) broke its power. And within a few weeks, I wasn’t attracted to him at all. I liked him, we were friends and had fun—but to my great relief, that was it. Isn’t it interesting how when you take something from the realm of secret and hidden and place it in the broad daylight of confession and transparency, that thing no longer grows or controls us in the same manner? It goes from the main character of our inner thoughts and emotions to, as Gotye sang in his hit song, just somebody that we used to know. And that’s powerful, that’s a way forward.
Now, let me be clear—I wasn’t wrong to feel attracted. It’s chemistry, in a way. Like walking by a donut shop and then thinking about how good those donuts smell. And then the donuts hold your hand and have a great smile and compliment your legs. I mean, that’s a simple, dumb analogy when compared to potentially threatening the sanctity of a marriage (don’t worry, that part came later; but it had nothing to do with my Broadway dancer friend, or even me—but what can you expect when you marry a guy named Judas!). My point is, feelings aren’t inherently wrong.
Feelings give us information. They are a kind of temperature taker for our inner self, and they are as wrong as a headache or a yawn or the tingly sensation we get when riding a roller coaster and cresting the highest height before hanging in the air for one elongated moment and plummeting down unbelievably fast while reconsidering every single choice we’ve made that has led us here (not that I’ve ever done any of that and now relegate myself to “purse holder” at amusement parks or anything, but I’ve heard). Feelings aren’t even thoughts. Thoughts can be something that builds up a soul or tears it down; they aren’t as innocent, as abstract as feelings—but we’re talking about feelings here.
What if we give ourselves permission to share our gross, ugly feelings? If what Brené Brown says—“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable”—is true, we cut off shame by making it speakable. What if we pick a trustworthy person to tell the truth to, and in so doing, stop nurturing shame? What if we talk about the jealousy within that makes us feel small and ashamed, and we find that we gain a new perspective and the power of the secret we’ve been harboring is broken?
I have a dear friend who told me about a new hire at her work. “Jess,” she tells me, “She has it ALL. She’s stunning and has the cutest kids and an incredible career—and she’s YOUNGER than me. I really want to hate her, but she’s so nice. Warm and lovely and inviting—I can’t even hate her. But I keep feeling jealous and I hate that.” So we talked about it. Mostly, I listened. I understood where she was coming from. I’ve felt all those feelings, too. And I wondered aloud if maybe there was more going on than she could see. I wondered—if my friend knew every detail of her life, would she still feel jealous? We caught up again a few months later and there was more to the story. She’d become good friends with this superwoman. “Actually, it’s true—she doesn’t have it all,” my friend told me on the phone. “There’s some sad stuff going on with her personal life and relationship and I had no idea. I love her now and I hope things really turn around for her.”
Researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of The Invisible Gorilla, explain something called selective sight. They explore the idea that our brains trick us into thinking we see and know far more than we do. They did an experiment where they filmed two groups of people, one dressed in white and one in black, passing a basketball around. They asked people to screen the film, specifically telling them to count how many times the basketball was passed between the people in white, and ignore the people wearing black. A lot of them got the number of passes right, but were then asked, “What about the gorilla?” Fifty percent of the participants gave a blank stare. “You didn’t see the man dressed in a full gorilla suit, weaving between the people throwing the ball, thumping his chest?” And stunningly, half of them did not.
That’s right, half the people watching the screen fully missed the gorilla. It’s easy to assume we would be in the group who sees the gorilla, but I’m not so sure. Certainly it’s not a guarantee. Certainly we’re not better at seeing than the people who missed it. My point is, we don’t see everything. Therefore, it’s really easy to think we know and see enough to decide that someone else has it better, easier, etc—but really, there’s most likely a gorilla that we’re missing and that gorilla would make us feel differently about the situation.
This leads right back to the earlier point of telling the truth, sharing our feelings to a trusted confidante: maybe, just maybe if we have someone explaining what they see, too, we don’t miss the gorilla. Maybe we start to see some more reasons for gratitude, maybe we start to figure out the jealousy we’re feeling is because there’s something lacking in our own lives. Maybe that something is a job in another field. Maybe we start making plans to be better qualified to get a job in that other field, now that we know we want it. Maybe we get that job, and we were right: it’s way better suited for us. And maybe all this happens because we named our jealousy, talked to someone about it, and figured out what it is we want. Maybe with some collaboration and honesty, we see the gorilla.
After my son Luca died at nine months gestation, I was jealous of pregnant women and moms with tiny babies. The summer after he died, I remember taking my oldest daughter Charlee to the pool and staring at a stranger: a poolside mom caring for her toddler daughter and newborn son, just like I was supposed to do all summer. My feelings were heavy and sharp, effecting my breathing. I kept thinking, That should be me, too. I should have everything in common with that woman. Instead I am left with jealousy. Eventually, I moved away from the kiddie pool, setting up where I could no longer see her.
I talked with my husband TJ about my feelings, parsed them out, naming them and organizing them through our dialogue in those early months of grief. It wasn’t that I didn’t want that mom to have her kids—I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t also. It was impossible not to compare and the comparison was devastating. Finally, I read someone say something about how another mom’s new baby had nothing to do with the death of her own, and that helped me stop comparing so much. Something about the wording was like a key that unlocked grace to myself and to all the new moms I came across (and let me tell you, the summer after Luca died, it sure did seem like literally everyone was either just about to have a baby or had recently given birth. My grief was like a magnifying glass on all women in this category, making it feel like they were everywhere).
Because I talked with TJ so much about my complicated feelings towards happy pregnant women (well, I assumed they were happy, anyway), he was able to give me perspective. He was able to add thoughts I’d never come up with on my own—especially humor. Yes, that’s right, humor. One day we were walking near the Public Garden in Boston when we stopped at a crosslight. There was a woman next to us wearing a fitted knit dress, perfectly showing off her gorgeous, huge baby bump. I tried to not even look, but TJ leaned towards me and quietly whispered, “Do you want me to kick her?” It was so obviously absurd that I laughed. I laughed long and hard and I look back at it now as the sound of a kind of healing. Of progress and grace and freedom. It was another step away from jealousy and I love that man for giving it to me.
When I brought my daughter Willa home, Charlee was three and a half. She’d had a good amount of time to get used to being the sole proprietor of her parents’ attention and devotion. I figured Charlee might experience some jealousy, but I wasn’t prepared for my toddler turning into a feral animal. Her first few weeks of having a baby sister were rocky, to say the least. I have heard that envy refers to the feeling of wanting what someone else has, whereas jealousy refers to the feeling of losing something valuable to you. Charlee was experiencing raw, classic, timeless jealousy. She saw a rival and reacted to this devastating, primal and very real fear of losing her whole world (and she wasn’t wrong: that world—the one in which she was an only child—did end. But we built a new one, and every time I see the joy she has in her siblings I am grateful we did). I recently read about a tool we can use when dealing with jealousy, and it has stayed with me. When thinking about why we feel jealous—when taking into account what it is we are either imagining or experiencing losing—also include this: consider the option that you might survive. Consider the option that whatever it is we are so terrified of losing isn’t the thing that makes us us and that we would still exist in all our color and nuance and brilliance—our flaws and ability to grow—without it.
I will end with this story. I was either a young adult or an old teenager when there was a meteor shower in our corner of the world. That night me and some of my brothers gathered on my parents’ deck to witness as many falling stars as we could. One brother would point up and say, “There! Wow! Do you see it?!” I’d try to follow his gaze but missed it. This happened over and over again. I was literally the only one in our crew that hadn’t seen any falling stars, and I started to feel discouraged. It was nothing crazy like someone stealing my husband or getting passed over for my dream job, but still, I started to feel a little like, What’s the point? Clearly I am not one of the special ones who gets to see falling stars. But then I switched my tactic. I stopped chasing the stars they were pointing out and laid down quietly. I simply looked up and waited. Eventually I got to see my own falling stars. Eventually it happened for me, too. That night helped me realize that it’s important to keep our heads down, work hard and consistently, and trust that God will continue to open the right doors. This is irregardless of what is happening around us. Maybe the person you went to high school with now has a constellation of stars named after her, she’s so good at spotting them. Good for her, God bless her, doesn’t matter and doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got your own path and what works for her won’t work for you anyway, so why bother obsessing over it. The stars that others see don’t take away from the stars we’re trying to see. There’s an entire nighttime sky of stars; there’s enough for all of us.
One of the matriarchs of modern dance, Martha Graham, warns artists, specifically, in this quote I will share. Perhaps you don’t perform or engage in fine arts, but please don’t exclude yourself from this admonition. Aren’t we each the creator of our own daily lives? Isn’t there an art to putting all our moments together and deriving the meaning that compels us to wake up the next morning and try it all over again? If you’ve never heard it before, let me be clear: you’re an artist. You’re making a whole life. Your days are your canvas and that’s quite a lot of responsibility, so don’t count yourself out when people talk about creating and how important it is. Graham writes:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open....”
This is my encouragement to all of us: tell the truth—to ourselves and trusted friends, too. Don’t allow shame to keep us from fully engaging, from digging into life in such a way that we come home with dirt under our nails and holes in the knees of our well-worn jeans. When we experience emotions, even (maybe especially?) the darker ones like jealousy, let’s listen. Let them inform us of how we are, what we need, what needs to change, how our actions and values could be better aligned.
And remember, dear friends, that in all the scenarios our active imaginations like to hand to us, we can also consider the possibility that we will survive.
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“Isn’t it interesting …?” Indeed it is. Love this, Jess.