Crying everywhere

this is what it looks like when you blow up your life

The thing about grief is that it is uncontainable. It balloons inside of you, erupts out, seeps into everything, and often you don’t have much care for the consequences. I have been crying everywhere recently, to everyone—at the coffee shop, on the phone, at my daughter’s school, in the woods, at a party, at the pediatrician’s office, in every room of my house. I am a walking billboard for grief and a mirror to the world—a warning, if you will: this is what it looks like when you blow up your life.

I have been learning a lot of not so nice things about myself too. I have learned that when I feel pain—and the pain is immense—I become both obsessed with and immersed in it and I want to cast it off immediately like a grating wool coat. I want to remind everyone everywhere that I am hurting because I don’t want to hurt alone, but I won’t accept their kind words or care in return, so in the end I do. I think I’ve learned I do it not to feel better or find relief, I do it because I really just want everyone to hurt with me. I want the world to burn like my insides do.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds; I’m not walking around slashing tires or setting fires to people’s homes or anything. But every once in a while, when I am overcome with everything, I lash out at the people I love and set small fires to relationships I care a lot about and some I should probably do more to protect. Maybe as a test for them: who will stay with me through this dark? Maybe as a test for me: how unbearable can I make this world for myself and still pick myself up from the ashes and stay? Or even and likely worse, can I ruin everything enough that there’s nothing left to keep me?

As someone who deeply identifies as kind, I am surprised and ashamed of my viciousness, however slight in the grand scheme. And the more mistakes I make, the more I believe I deserved this. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop making them.

I had so many beautiful plans for this year and now I can’t help but feel like, despite the wealth of joy I only just recently felt, I was focused on the wrong things. My nature journal lies untended, I haven’t started a single seed, the camping supplies I began sorting through weeks ago are lying in a neglected pile in the basement. I keep getting reminders on my phone to make summer plans that are now up in the air. Plus I’m due to write another nature article for the local paper, another musing here, and, honestly, I’ve barely been outside.

Something I’ve always prided myself in is my vulnerability, but the willingness and, more realistically, the need, and the inability not to share what you are going through with everyone is also an ineffable curse. Here I am, writing to over a thousand people, mostly strangers, about my strangled inner world. God, do I wish I were more composed, demure, and I could keep it the fuck to myself! And yet, this is also what I believe makes the world a more bearable place to be: honesty, truth, connection… it’s what helps me heal.

I did go for a walk yesterday. I saw so many robins pecking in the dirt, the flash of a bluebird’s wings, a male red-bellied woodpecker on a birch tree, and I nursed my baby right below a tufted titmouse who sang and sang and sang. I heard peepers chirping lightly from the trees, the sun was bright, two swans were looping beside each other in the water, and the smell of skunk cabbages underfoot as I walked through the damp woods was strong and exciting. I felt, very briefly, not completely distended with emotion. I cried—boy do I cry—but I also smiled.

When they say to just put one foot in front of the other, they really mean it, whoever they are. Today I will order snap pea seeds and spinach. I will drink water and nettle tea. I will take a walk and try to nap when the baby does and put my devil phone up on a high shelf for as long as I can. Today is also the due date for the lambs on the farm and I am awaiting their arrival like rainfall in a drought. Eagerly is an understatement. Something joyful, something soft, a sign of the tumble of time.

xx hannah

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boiling sap with my baby on a warm day