It’s been an incredible year here on Substack. With over 15,500 views in 2023 (holy heck did I not expect that!) and new subscribers coming along all the time, Thursday has become my favorite day of the week.
Sometimes I’ve sat staring at a cursor, wondering what I might say to you all that will create some healing and peace and “oh, I’m not alone” vibes, and struggling through. Sometimes I’ve sat down with a first line and watched it grow easily from one paragraph to the next, like a vine along a brick wall. And sometimes I’ve opened myself at my center and let you all see the core of me, displayed on your screen in words.
It’s those last ones that really encompass what this weekly practice is for. This is what writing is for, if you ask me. It’s a way to say, here I am in all my humanity. Hurting, healing, whole, complex, evolving, loving, imperfect, honest.
Just like you.
These are my favorite dozen stories of the year.
(By the way, a paid subscription makes a great gift!)
Thank you, firebuilders*, for each word you’ve read here this year. And cheers to the next!
*see number one on the list!
Baptized: Coming Up For Air And Finding Everything New
It’s July. After the dreaded 4th, when a year ago my husband had just returned from having an affair and I didn’t know it but I knew it, and just days away from the date I refuse to even type though it’s burned in my brain, the date that a year ago I found their list of reasons to be together. A categorized list of secrets that had been kept from me. The true answers to questions I’d already asked and had been lied to in response. Four pages of ways to ruin my life…
The Opposite of Evergreen: Winter tells us how far, how very far, we've come.
Winter came in a little uninvited, if I’m honest.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It was Fall in Portland so recently. The most glorious Fall I’ve ever seen which sounds so grandiose but it’s true, and many others were saying it too. The trees were wild with color and seemed to take their time in dropping their leaves, letting the neighborhood streets become more and more vibrant each day when it seemed as though that couldn’t be possible. The skies were bluer and the clouds were sparse and cartoonish…
Dear Truth: I am so sorry…
Dear Truth,
Do you know that whispering is actually harder on the voice than speaking? (Of course you do.) For how long were you whispering before I finally heard you?
I am so sorry.
I ignored you. I pushed you aside. I covered you in excuses renamed “reason” and “logic” and even “courage.” (Courage! Let me also later apologize to courage for this.)…
Forgiveness: Is It Just A Nice Story?
This is a story about forgiveness.
Not very long at all after finding out about my husband’s affair I must have uttered the words “…but I will never forgive you” for the first time. I can’t recall if I said it out loud but I definitely thought it, and have thought it again hundreds or even thousands of times.
It’s not that I’ve locked the box on forgiveness and thrown away the key. Imagine that you’ve decided god can’t possibly exist but you read the Bible anyway, again and again, trying to understand. This is me with forgiveness…
Letting Go Of The Blue: How to paint over the color you really want to hold onto
This past Monday I took Isla to an antique mall in search of a few pieces we need for our new house, primarily a dresser for her room. My hope was to find something that was a certain size - taller rather than wide - and something I could paint to this “rosewood” color of her room. Something that looked old and well made but clean, without too much frill. As we walked from booth to booth, a few caught my eye but didn’t really hit home.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” I told her…
House Rules Apply: Always keep garlic in the kitchen, and other rules for living.
I hate that this list was her idea. His mistress.In the first weeks after I discovered their affair we interacted a little. She feigned the desire to help us repair our marriage, or at least to help him to be happy whatever it took. I say feigned because I can’t believe in the genuine nature of such a thing given her position and her decision making prior to those moments. But that’s not the point…
Softening: This Is All I Want
I want to live a soft life.I want my belly to move when I breathe. I want to stop and touch the rosemary bush down the street just to smell it on my fingers. I want to let the blackberries stain my hands as I pick them, to let the thorns scratch my arms a little so I can reach the best bunch further in. To watch the juice run down my daughter’s face as she eats them from the bowl, even if we haven’t washed them yet.
O Christmas Tree: Doing hard things, again and again, saw in hand.
“We can do hard things,” I whisper to myself as I grip the steering wheel and head up the mountain in a midday sleet. “We can do hard things!” I say louder, for Isla in the backseat, who is probably sleeping anyway. We say this a lot, words courtesy of Glennon Doyle, one of the women we call “Mama” in our house. The women who speak truth into our lives, who put words to our hardest feelings, who write books or music or host conversations on the hardest and most beautiful things in life from which I learn and hope Isla will too as she grows. Mama Brandi (Carlile), Mama Cheryl (Strayed), Mama Glennon.
I grew up in Pennsylvania where July meant that after you spent the day in the lake you’d get out of the water and put on a sweatshirt, huddle by a bonfire, watch the stars stay still or the fireworks burst and go, shivering under a blanket.
I never got used to July in Tennessee. The air is hot, day and night, and heavy. So heavy. After twenty-some years there, summer would come and it would weigh me down. On my shoulders. In my lungs. I wondered sometimes if I’d drown.
It took me two hours to get him to tell me. Two hours of begging, of justifying why I deserved the truth, of insisting that I knew, knew, knew, and that he couldn’t convince me otherwise nor avoid having this conversation any longer.
Finally, finally, he told me.
Looking back now I can see myself splitting into two people as I listened to the words I never in my life thought I’d have to hear…
Dissipating: The Two Sides Of Grief
Is this what grief looks like?
Sitting in the sunlight in my favorite chair in my new house, in the city I’ve dreamed of living in for a decade and a half.
Crying.
I cry all the time now…
The Firebuilder
I’m standing at my campsite. My tent is behind me, small and bespeckled in a purple and green and dark blue night sky print. My first ever backpacking pack, nicknamed Twilight, sits nearby. I am safe here in this place I’ve found, this imagined haven in the woods that’s part memory and part metaphor. I have everything I need.I built the fire myself. It took twenty years or so and I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I got lost gathering wood. I didn’t know how to light it. How to shape it. How to keep it burning and strong. But I got there.