I lost a lot last year. Not everything, but enough. I am not unfamiliar with loss, but I believe after 2023, and the wake of the pandemic that stole the years before it, I had finally reached a profound weariness with losing. I lost friends, lost family, my job, my savings, and so, so much time. I lost almost everything–or just enough. Coming out of my own Hades, like Orpheus, I dare to look back because…I must.
At that time, when all of those things disappeared from my life, it seemed senseless and devoid of reason. I thought I had done everything I was supposed to do. For the first time in my life I held in my hand a ticket to a future where I wouldn’t have to just survive. Almost as swiftly as I had grasped it, a storm wind swept it all away into an indifferent sky. One call, and my entire livelihood was taken from me. Before such things would have gutted me and left me bleeding out; but how many storms had I weathered before, and how many times had I seared the wound shut and got right back up? Those battles in my life made me a self-taught surgeon. I can suture myself back together, and this past year I had nothing but thread and time.
It rained a lot last winter. Do you remember the sky, those magnificent heavenly clouds, or how green the hills turned? There was so much time I spent on the road then, the scenery was a dream I gave to myself. Highway has always been good medicine, and I took all the roads I wanted in an effort to reclaim some semblance of agency. I understand the inherent aversion to being alone, but wrapped within the gift of all those miles, was myself, with nowhere and no one to escape to but myself. I felt like a kid again, perhaps because so many things had been taken so quickly from me and not replaced. Maybe because I felt small and powerless, with so much outside of my control. It rained on the road, and on the hills, and in my home, and I just wept. At times, they were all the tears as a boy I was told not to shed. As a man, I allowed that boy to finally just…cry. My pride, which was just the shadow cast by my shame, left me unable to bring that pain to anyone else. I suffered silently, like a good and stupid man.
My heart just broke. All those cracks that had formed over the years in the different corners of myself had spread along the chambers, like so many streaks of lightning. Until their patient and steady course weaved together in my chest and struck true. Holding my needle and thread, gazing at the Lichtenberg figure scorched across my heart, I didn’t know how to heal this wound. Only realizing then how terribly far I’d gone to keep it from ever breaking again. Behold me now, burned and utterly broken open.
I haven’t wept that much since I was a child. I suppose the more honest thing to say would be; I never really allowed myself the opportunity to mourn. How those arrears of grief accumulate when you don’t know how to allow yourself to feel it. Their dues arrive inevitably, almost always when all defenses are laid bankrupt and bare. Sometimes there is a lesson in loss. Truly I believe now that the collected loss was a chain, and these were all lessons I was not learning; and I would be whipped by that chain until I learned the lesson. Would that I could tell you that this was true of every defeat, but sometimes you can think you’ve done all the right things–and you still lose. Perhaps I needed to learn that too. My most obstinate course in dire need of correction, needing to be taught in a language I would understand. From a young age, I understood violence fluently.
Stripped of my station, rejected again and again in every possible shape rejection can be fashioned in, I think I finally found humility when my face was smashed into the dirt by the irons of consequence. I had never really considered myself a prideful person, until I saw the great lie that hid behind my dirty face. That innate desire of never wanting to be seen as weak by anyone for shame of my own perceived weakness. While being seen and acknowledged for my strength by people close to me has meant the world; this burden suddenly felt too heavy to carry alone.
Like most children who went the way of being born to burning houses, it is a tremendous task for me to ask for help. We tend to just sit in the fire. I had learned the hard way what happened when I did not reach out to my people the last time I had passed this way, through this great valley of defeat. I also learned that not every home I make has to burn just because I live in it; we just get so used to the fire, don’t we? As I said before, I am no stranger to loss. In 2016, I lost my sanity from years of breathing in all that smoke and ash. Perhaps the only sane thing I have found since then, has been the understanding that if you try and make yourself stone so as to never again wear singed skin, then life will find a way to shatter you completely. We are not meant to be these great, unfeeling machines numbing our pain by any means necessary. Once again, I was a stupid, stupid man.
Even possessing an innate understanding of this hard won lesson, it was still a colossal undertaking for me to show up in my perceived brokenness to my community this time around. In all my vanity, a part of me felt I had an image to uphold to these people that had come to rely on me. Thankfully, I was not the same man who had crossed this valley before, and I buried that part of me there, knowing it was nothing but shame that truly kept me from allowing those same people to show up for me the way I had shown up for them. Understanding, far better than most, that the foundational feeling that lies with the discomfort in asking for help is the fear of rejection. Fear built on the objective truth that, at a point in time, no one was there for us when we needed them to be. I became a compulsive savior, because no one came to save me. But that was then. Expecting a hand to reach back now is nothing other than pure faith, and it is an easy thing to lose faith in this world and the people in it when we did not have a hand to hold; but there are those in this life worthy of believing in. After so many years, with all that stone around my heart now broken away by the storm, I finally learned on the other side of that fear is love.
In spite of myself, I reached out and so many hands reached back. Had I only done so sooner, yet I try not to dwell in regret, for I would not be who I am without such lessons. My friends and family, the community I had finally learned to foster and nurture, loved me the way I needed to be loved. They went through the valley with me, and said a prayer for the man I was buried there. They listened without judgment, and never once invalidated my own experience or demanded anything for any of it. Had I kept all of that to myself, sat in the fire alone as I have always done, I believe I would have robbed them of the opportunity to show me that I do not need to be perfect to receive affection; another of life’s great illusions I accepted as a truth. When I had nothing, they still gave me what they could. At a moment when I was destitute, how profoundly wealthy I found I still was. That perspective, along with the steadfast hope that everything was going to be okay, made all the difference.
Of my life, there are stories too sad to tell, but allow me to tell you one thing that stands brilliantly illuminated above all of that suffering; the enduring belief that the love we give always comes back. Perhaps at the time, materializing in a manner in which we do not recognize. We fear that which we do not know, and I am afraid I have run from love many times in my life when I did not know what it was. The heartbreak I unintentionally caused others, to spare myself that same feeling, has filled me with such shame that at times I wonder if I hold onto that shamefulness in an effort to continue to punish myself. For so long I fed on the lie that the love I desired in life did not exist in an effort to soothe the ache of disappointment that dwelt in my romantic heart. Sustaining my malnourished soul on a convenient diet of disbelief, until the day I accepted that that love must exist, because here I exist. The only thing that was keeping me from feeling that love was myself.
So many of us are unknowingly indoctrinated into the belief that affection is a currency always to be given or withheld in exchange. Had I not learned as a child that love was only to be attained when I was without flaw, then perhaps I would not be so flawed, and would find my perceived past transgressions so much easier to forgive. I am a man shaped and manufactured by all of his mistakes. I am learning, and unlearning, and have done my best to make the cost of those lessons mean something.
Perhaps Orpheus looks back, because behind him is what he loves. But I am done looking behind me and defining myself by how well I carry the past. The loss that I see now as anything but senseless, I am now so grateful for. For all their impacts broke me open just enough to let the light back in. The price given in exchange was a new sight to see so much of the life I had dreamed was not meant for me, and what was meant for me will return when I learn to forgive myself enough to dream again. My eyes fix on the horizon in front of me, and my heart is open enough now to ask God for the forgiveness I still struggle to give myself. For I am humble enough now to ask for the help I need, and this is one burden in my life I no longer wish to hold on to.
For too long have I believed there was nothing worthy of believing in other than myself. Here I was, a God who couldn’t even answer his own prayers. All of these things I have done, I had to do alone, and for what? For whom? What was I trying to prove all this time; that I never needed anyone? I have only ever needed people, and have only brought profound suffering on myself thinking life could be lived any other possible way. For a very long time, I have been unable to forgive myself for what I have done to me. Then I saw all that pain was authored by an angry child, cursing the world for being so unfair. I acknowledge that poor boy and his anger, whose fires saw me through so many winters I would not have survived without. I take his tiny hands and unfurl them from all the things he foolishly thought he could control, and together we let go.
– Ian