Endings

Life is so full of endings, isn't it? The endings in my life have nearly always felt catastrophic, have pulled me to my knees, awash with sorrow and despair, drowning in the feeling that a thing I cherished is gone. And this is especially true, I think, when a thing ends which we mistake as a fundamental piece of our identity.

When my first college relationship ended, I was annihilated. I spent an entire summer scheming how to win back the person and mourned, to some extent, for much of the following year. And yet, the end of that college relationship provided the opportunity to explore lots of other people and personalities; it opened me to knowing others in a more intimate and open way. After the end, I traveled the world and whispered into the ears of near-strangers my greatest hopes and dreams and desires and fears. I stayed up late in the night exploring my body and his body and our bodies together. I was open to adventure and to explore and to fall in lust and love and all of the feelings in between those two. And ultimately, when I did find a person with whom I wanted to spend a long, long time, I was better for having been broken. I was wiser and gentler and more confident. I knew my own body and the things it likes and doesn't and I knew the joy of exploring someone else's until the sun rises. And oh the people and the friends and the places I would have missed out on had that first love worked. It is a bit of judo, isn't it, that a thing that initially threatens to shatter us irreparably is actually a gift? It is a gift of opportunity, one that opens the entirety of the world to us if we are willing to embrace that possibility (and perhaps, I should clarify, when we are willing to embrace that opportunity because that broken period can last and last and last with no clear ends in sight).

And so it is such with every great ending of my life, that there has been deep, spine-shaking grief and mourning and devastation. There is always darkness and a sense that the way forward is no longer clear. To have one thing killed which means everything makes the entire world feel as though it will cease and turns things that used to elicit joy and fondness to things utterly devoid of meaning.

Yet, on the other side of that darkness is a life we never could dare have dreamed. After moves in geography, there are new relationships which change, challenge, and redefine you. At the end of identity-defining jobs, there will be new opportunities and pieces of yourself you've kept quiet for untold years that will begin to re-emerge and remind you of who you were before, the person who has existed (always) underneath. And in the wake of terrible, catastrophic personal loss, there is more love and opportunity and roads ahead than any of us dare dream.

It is a bit of judo, I think, that the things we find the most painful and dread in the small hours of the night are actually the same life-defining events which carve, define, and create us. It is the resilience and the grit required to find a new way, to extend beyond the borders of our own comfort, that we come to settle, yet again, in some new definition of normal.

And so, in the dead of the night, when my own life feels like it is teetering on the edge of collapse, I try (try, try, try) to remind myself that this is all normal. The dawn has always come and night only lasts so long.