Ask Somebody: Novembers

Hola hola. Is this thing still on? OK, well, this is the last question that was sent to my inbox and I have no others to answer. But fuck all, I think I’m going to use this lil substack as a way to be better about my writing practice, so…. get ready for every bad essay I’ve drafted over a decade? Thoughts about music? Villanelles? Who can say? WHO CAN SAY? (Mountain Goats reference). As always, feel free to ask a question in the inbox or email me or … yeah. Be good to yourselves. Sunglasses pic h/t the Hairpin:

So what’s up?

Does it ever get easier?

- You Know

Dear You (because I know, I do, I really do),

It’s not going to make it better but I want you to know I’ve written you back since this pinged into my inbox in August. I’ve written you back driving through torrential rainstorms in the Alleghany National Forest and picking my way through house music and cheering crowds at the Chicago Marathon off Canalport. I was still driving a lot for work, this summer and fall, and I wrote you then. I wrote you riding a shiny red cargo bike through dark abandoned train tunnels, and wine drunk in the pitch dark of a New Moon night watching my friends’ farm. But I didn’t WRITE you. And for that, just know, I’m sorry. I like to think myself an accountable person with a modicum of reliability, when I’ve not made it abundantly clear I’ve vanished into a cave of “I need to be alone, right now”. This would probably not indicate that fact. Thank you for writing. I hope you’re here.

It is November, now, though, and I am not sure it has gotten easier for you or for anyone. I’ve never really professed much love for this month. Thanksgiving is a strange end of week holiday of lots of people’s brittle expectations and to be quite honest, other than stuffing, food you can eat any time if you’d like. (Other than Dona Alicia’s Salvadoran Turkey. Truly a dish to be grateful for.) Since 2014, November is the time where Halloween hits, and I count down each day until November 11th. When that day comes, I mark down another year alive, and another year I have not been hospitalized.

I don’t know if I’ll ever want to or be able to write about that. Mostly it’s easier to name things: I was having a very fucking hard time being alive. The joke was: I didn’t even know that! I was in so much denial every single part of my brain had to torch itself in a desperate attempt to stay alive. This is what I tell myself. I know my own paths of self-immolation, which is perhaps why it’s hard for me to look at how close others get with banal pressures, whether it’s caloric restriction or hazardous adventuring or cells and kilojoules accounted for on the world’s most tedious digital abacuses. Again, though, that’s not what we’re writing about.

Does it ever get easier?

These years feel so much harder than the years that put me in inpatient. I know those years were hard because I can look at facts: the people who died, the bad men, the bad things. But I had less data, then. I had only been stomping around the earth for what felt like so long and so little, that I think I always assumed things would get better. Something would happen. Someone would show up. I would find luck, instead of being a vague version of clever that seems to mostly just make me a neat source of literary quotes. Because something good was possible, I could ignore the things that made it hard to be alive, or ignore the truth about what had happened to me. Something good would come, and none of it would matter.

It has not really come to pass, as it turns out. Or not like that. What came to pass that was good is that I remained alive. Which is such a literary joke because, well, I am not quite sure the being alive is the easy part. And that is ridiculous because I am told I am a fairly competent alive person. I could be an excellent detective’s housekeeper in a kind PBS mystery show, or a wonderful house-something, or the quartermaster of your dreams. I have been told I’m pretty nice to children, I have not killed any plant in my keep that was not going to die anyway, I can shine boots, change a flat tire, shine a ringed bathtub, type quite quickly, lift 50 lbs over my head, peel potatoes, and balance a checkbook. My hair is rather thick and I can sight read. I have been asked multiple times if I was a Scout.

And still. Oh, my dear.

Does it ever get easier?

I wrote to you in many of those moments because I felt full and I felt possible. In my head I had written things that felt buoyant but not saccharine, because I wanted to write you immediately, then and there. In the sun or with my legs moving sweet and quick, or impressed by the people in my life who are kind, and funny. Or near a baby that someone I love is going to do their damndest to bring up good, or stroking the ears of a sweet dog on a summer night. I wanted to write you then, sweetly, and kindly, and hopefully. And I write you from November.

If you are living an easy life in this world, which I write not to YOU, dear letter writer, but some proverbial world, then I do not think you live in the world. I do not believe in platitudes like God Doesn’t Give Us More Than We Can Handle, or Everything Happens For A Reason, or Rise and Grind, or Anything about being a buried seed. I believe if you make it out of this world at an age like mine without something that has threatened to rip your heart apart, we probably cannot be kith or kin. If all the people I love have borne despair, whether they want to or not, I cannot really believe we should pretend like pain doesn’t happen.

A year ago I had gotten COVID for the first time (yep). I recovered because of the care and love of dear friends and was working my way back from the West Coast, where someone had been pretty careless with my heart, to the Midwest, where I did not much want to be. Coming up from Austin on my way to meet my cousin in Oklahoma, I made a point to find the cemetery my grandparents are buried in.

The year before I was hospitalized, my grandma died. Which in some ways I am grateful for because I couldn’t bear to have her experience what I was like, or what I did. But I missed her terribly. At their grave, a warm wind blew over, and when I started opening my mouth to say something, I lost it. I started sobbing and I couldn’t stop. What I knew, though, was my grandma knew what was true. She was not a woman to say anything about anyone could or could not handle. Life was too brutal, and she knew it, to believe any loving God meant that. We talked on the phone once a week or so before she died and I still wish I could have that in my life, now. We wrote letters, and in one I wrote how I wish I could’ve found someone, or knew I’d have babies. She told me that’s not anything she thought about. When the car hit her car that would end up being the end, I managed to get my mom flown in from another country to say goodbye. I just ended up not being able to say it myself. But I had someone who loved me, who was grateful, who did her best, and knew it was not easy. I want to be that person, too.

I tell you about my hard things, and I tell you about November, and I tell you about Alice, my grandmother, who endured a lot of pain, who made sure the children she cared about knew it, who looked out for me, I tell you these things because they are part of what I live every day in a very hard world.

Does it ever get easier?

My dear, I do not think it does. But I also think that it is not always, every day, so terribly hard. Not for us. Not for me.

I am watching people in my life begin their journey to raise children. And I am watching elders in my life struggle as they cannot cope as much. I’m watching my completely capable friends who of course receive no support struggle. I’m watching as art and writing and music get stripped of joy, and the people who just want to DO it, turned into capitalist robots. And then I am watching the rest: Humboldt Park filling with tents, lines up Augusta to the food pantry, the fact my family is never going to get the papers to get here. And and and. I don’t need to list it.

And I could send you just to the poets: Mary Oliver (cliche) saying “Not everything is possible/ Some things are impossible” or Carolyne Forche saying “Better people than you were helpless.” I could send you this link to a silly essay I wrote a long time ago about my parents moving, but to be honest, this is something I sent across a transom from a terrible place I would not recognize. But I do believe what I said: there are so many places to keep existing in, in the world.

It doesn’t get easier, right away, all the time, forever, and it’s probably better to accept and tell ourselves that. What I desperately wish is that we could be a little more honest with each other about that. It IS hard. We are having a HARD time. Not in some weird, macro, headline sense, but if you are not around people who can help you admit and share that it is hard in your own way, without having to make a fucking Instagram story about it so some asshole makes money a million miles away from us, I just want you to know: my sweet hearts, it is hard.

And.

I wrote you back all those times because I want you to remember to capture the sheer, stark, indelible places where it is glorious. Not easy. Not fun. Not “pleasant”. It could be pleasure, and it could be joy, and it could be very fucking beautiful. The things that exist ALONGSIDE the hard. It’s not finishing the marathon or doing the training ride. It’s dancing with your friends on the sidelines in the sun, or the sharp shock of water on your shoulders in the shower when it’s over. Not a video of how cute your dog is, but the sweet smell of grass when you grab them strong around the neck. It’s dancing and working hard and helping people and the things that are HARD, but are good. And it’s really feeling great with the easy things: fresh tortillas, no parking tickets, a night full of sleep.

On Thursday I took the CTA train for the first time in about six months. Over the summer I was attacked while riding it, and it had been too hard. That night, though, I swiped my card in the newfound cold, walked up the steps, and stared out onto a clear skyline in a beautiful November blue. I got on the train. And it had gotten easier.

No, I do not think it will all get easier, my dear You. I wish, though, that the easy things carry you through.

x,

Carmen