Reporting live from Heartbreak Season.
Five months into a pandemic, five days into remote first grade, five months of managing the delicate patchworked balance of parenting and working and cohabitating without consistent childcare. A five month old niece I have yet to meet, nine months away from family without certainty of when we will see them again. Fires burning our beloved state, dear friends evacuating homes to which they may not return, sacred forests of my childhood in flames. An impending election with chillingly high stakes where our democracy and dignity hang in the balance. A global reckoning. Oh, and the puppy has Giardia. Again.
It's a lot.
As a life coach, my work is about creating and holding a space for people. To land. To unload. To unpack their heartache and pain points and life's knots. To untangle and decouple the fears, fantasies, projections, delusions and illusions - about themselves, their lives and their children - from the facts, the reality, the truth, their truth, about who they are and what matters to them. To quiet their saboteurs. To make room for their dreams and desires. To ask the questions and compel the action that moves them in the direction of what they want most and where they feel most free.
My own heart, the hearts of my friends and family and child and clients, feel heavy and hopeful these days. But more often heavy. It can be hard to feel hopeful when your home is literally and figuratively on fire. When you feel consumed by despair, dismantled and trapped by the simultaneous impossibility and inevitability of your situation, and tired. So tired.
At a time like this, we can convince ourselves that it's not possible to feel free. That thinking about what we want and what matters to us and what does and doesn't serve us is a luxury. That now is not the time to dream.
Oh, but it is. Now more than ever.
Did you know that I played competitive ultimate frisbee in college and well into my 20s?
Well, I did. I am proud to say, many years and lots of scar tissue later, that I played for two of the early "big four" teams of women's club ultimate. I got to represent our country with San Francisco's Fury at the World Ultimate Championships in Germany and even rode on the coattails of the dynasty that was Boston's Lady Godiva to win a national championship! Their ninth, my first and only.
Ultimate taught me a lot. How to pack a cooler, how to shotgun a beer, how to parlay my years as a childhood gymnast into the horizontal feat known as "laying out". Ultimate taught me about teamwork, leadership, sportsmanship, and spirit of the game.
Most of all, it taught me about getting scrappy.
When you play on a team like Fury or Godiva, you get used to winning. To coasting through tournaments, handily winning game after game, even with your rookies as your starting lineup. To not meeting your match until the finals, if at all. I wouldn't say the attitude was one of complacency or cockiness as much as confidence, experience, and the core belief that we came to win and would.
But I remember a time when we were not winning. Much to our surprise, we were losing, without much time to come back. Humbled, caught off guard, and exhausted, we huddled together for a time out. I can still feel the sweaty shoulders of my teammates under their muddy, sticky jerseys. I can still see their sun-kissed wind-whipped faces, drawn together in a circle, hats pulled low, eyes focused hungrily and intently on each other as we collect ourselves and one another. Love and pride and fear and shock and belief and grit in our faces. I remember our captain rallying us to dig deep, to see what we were made of. She said, "we came here to be down by two." This was why we played and why we played together. To see what happens when we are losing, to see who we become. To come back. Our strength and skill and souls would be tested here, now, because we were losing. This moment, she reminded us, was what we came here for.
I have been thinking of that sweaty huddle a lot over these past five months as I find myself in the sweaty huddles of my current life, humbled, shocked, and often feeling very much "down by two".
I think of my grandparents. The grandfather who escaped persecution as a young man in Nazi Germany and started a new life in this country. I think of my other grandfather (pictured above) who was shot and lost a lung as a marine at Iwo Jima. I think of the love of his life, my grandmother, who drove across the country to California to say goodbye to him before he shipped out. They loved it here and she said, "When you get back, let's live here." And he said, "You mean if I come back."
We discover what we are made of when we are down by two. We stare into each other's wide eyes and throw our arms around each other's shoulders as our hearts pound and we breathlessly regroup and huddle up and prepare to get back out there. We are humbled. We get creative. We believe. We get scrappy.
So here we are. Down by two. Bring it in.
We are staring down the truths and decisions and changes that this time demands of us to consider, as parents, as people, as institutions, as a country. And while this season of our lives and our history has dealt its fair share of challenges that have been disorienting and heartbreaking and have forced us to muddle through, with this time also comes an opportunity. A distilling, a crystalizing, a clarity. What do we want? What matters? What can't we be with? What can't we be without? What can we let go of? How and where do we grab a hold and mobilize? How and where do we surrender?
Our greatest hope for resilience is to find our compassion as well as our strength. To be with it. To stay. Being present means asking yourself, "What can I be with, NOW? How much compassion can I bring to what is here?" It's about showing up. And getting back out there.
A friend of mine's parents have been married for 58 years. And every year, they write new vows and renew them in front of their home and family. The regularly occurring joke that inevitably one of them makes is whether or not the other person wants to renew "for another year".
That is how I have been getting through Heartbreak Season. At the end of each yearlong day, packed to the brim with highs and lows and angst and exhaustion and hope and fear and laughter and frustration and tears, I ask myself, "Do I want to renew for another day?". Can I be with what is here, now? Can I get back out there tomorrow?
Yes. Yes I can. Yes we can.
With love and solidarity,
Abby
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep, loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. ”