Splitting yourself open

On love, loss, and the courage to stay awake through it all.

A year ago today, I got engaged to the man I’d spent the better part of a decade calling the love of my life. We stood in the rain on a rooftop in Paris, him in a gorgeous suit and a pearl necklace, me in a leopard dress for reasons I still don’t understand. We held onto each other like we were the only solid thing left in the world, and as I laughed at the movie-like view over his shoulders I remember thinking, “This is what it feels like when things finally click, when everything does work out for once in my goddamn life.”

I thought I understood what it meant to pay attention to my life. I was wrong.

I don’t know when I realized something was off, but I know I spent longer than I should have ignoring the anxiety pit in my stomach as it got louder and louder over the winter that followed. That thing we call intuition. The whisper of a knowing. The fights I kept picking, the plans for a shared future we just couldn’t agree on, the pages upon pages I would fill with journal entries beginning and ending with it’s not really supposed to be this hard.

I still call that man the love of my life, because in some way he is, and because I believe we spend our lives crossing paths with many soulmates.

But three weeks ago, I took off my ring and took down the pictures of our smiling faces from the walls. I said goodbye to the person I was when I met him at 24, and to the part of 31-year-old-me who would have done anything to avoid feeling this kind of heartbreak ever again. Both are gone forever now, and no amount of pleading will get them back.

You can’t always get what you want, kid.

But if intuition is anything to go off, you might just get what you need.

Last spring, a few months before we got engaged, I’d flown to London chasing one of my favorite highs: a John Mayer concert. Standing outside before the show, I told my partner something I'd been telling myself for years. “There's this song I’ve never heard him play, Edge of Desire. It's one of my favorites, but I can't get my hopes up or I'll spend the whole night disappointed.”

The thing about protecting yourself from disappointment is that you end up protecting yourself from everything else too.

Joy.

Ease.

Flow.

Connection.

Authentic presence.

Real, real life, in all of its tragedy and glory.

For ninety minutes that night, I rejoiced with every chord change, every spotlight shift, every riff and audience reaction. Dancing badly, singing loudly, completely alive. The one thing I missed? The first thirty seconds of the very song I’d waited fifteen years to hear.

I knew the notes, I must have recognized them, but I was not done protecting myself.

Instead of fully awake and aware and alive, I was scared and small and certain that I shouldn’t try too hard. I just stood there as my ears rang out, chills breaking out all over my body. I looked around the same arena that witnessed some of the happiest moments from the whole eight years I called London my home.

I made a decision, let it click into place before John could even get to the first chorus: I don't want to miss any more of this. Whatever I do, I don’t want to miss a single moment more.

I spent the last three years telling anyone who’d listen that at the end of it all, learning to trust your own North Stars is all you have, so really, the cosmic joke is fitting.

Poetic, almost.

You think you’re done self-abandoning? You’re taking responsibility for the life you truly want, no ifs and no buts? Alright, then, fucking prove it. Fucking prove to me that you’ve actually learned the lesson.

Look — I may be a lot of things I wish I weren’t, but I’m not someone who backs down from a challenge. When I got back from my month in Bali, I did so with a new mantra: No more blinders. I’m going to be wide awake, aware and alive for whatever comes next.

I held onto it sleepless night after sleepless night. I let it guide me, even and especially when I couldn’t see more than a single foot ahead of my nose. I whispered it through sobs so heavy I felt like I didn’t have functioning lungs anymore.

In the end, I made the one choice that would split me wide open. Like many women before me and many after me, I realized that choosing yourself feels like betrayal until you understand the only alternative is self-abandonment. That awareness is a brutal gift because it means you can never un-know the truth.

It means facing every way you’ve participated in your own smallness.

It means telling the many fragmented parts of your soul: we’re doing things differently this time.

You’re not on your own kid, and you’ll never have to be.

The song I almost missed that night is about a longing so powerful it threatens to undo you:

“Don't say a word
Just come over and lie here with me
'Cause I'm just about to set fire to everything I see
I want you so bad I'll go back on the things I believe
There I just said it
I'm scared you'll forget about me.”

It's about the ungodly fear that if you look away for even a moment, it will all disappear. Wanting something so badly you'd abandon yourself for it. So much effort, so much sweat and blood and tears, and for what?

We spend so much of our lives bracing for pain, disappointment, the rug being pulled out again. It’s easier. It’s safer. It’s what we’re taught, what we learn to model from such a young age. And it’s precisely the reason we miss the moments we were waiting for, the ones that could change everything. The hand reaching out, the nudge of intuition. The knock on the window, life saying “Hey, this way! You and I, let’s go.”

Because if there’s anything that the last three months have taught me, it’s that when you jump, something does catch you.

When you follow whatever light you can find, the next step appears just in time.

When you actually listen, you start to understand what you’re hearing.

I used to think I’d spend my life chasing what burns me, but I now really believe the opposite is true. If it’s meant for you, you won’t miss it. If you pay attention, life will keep playing your song until you're ready to hear it.

Sometimes it’s the gentle hum of a familiar lullaby, and sometimes a devastating crescendo of a scream. We don’t get to choose what we get or when we get it, but we do get to choose what to do with it.

We get to choose ourselves, over and over again, and get to be in service of no-questions-asked, full-body-yes authenticity in a world that desperately needs us to be.

These are terrifying times, I don’t need to tell you that. You feel it in your bones, just like I do. The world tilts and we keep on trying to find our balance, but that’s exactly why paying attention matters more, not less.

Every flicker of light just so.

Every choice that expands instead of restricting.

Every note singing us home to our truest selves.

It all matters. It's how we might survive this.

A way of saying: Even here, even now. I am still choosing to believe a different life is possible. That more light may be on the way to us right this moment. More love. More joy. More peace. I don’t need all this armor. The world won’t be this heartbreaking forever.

On the other side of self-abandonment, music is always playing.

May we be awake and aware and alive to hear it, because from where I’m standing, it sounds a lot like hallelujah.