My life has fallen apart a few times. Or it has felt like that every time I have had a heartbreak, and I have had a few of those. Not all of them were romantic. The most difficult ones were with my mother, father and brother.
Three years ago there were a series of heartbreaks, one after the other in quick succession, that pushed me to the brink. Everything that could possibly go wrong, did. Every relationship that mattered, broke down.
This time, my life truly fell apart.
From the outside, things probably didn’t seem very different as I went about my business. Perhaps I was just frowning a tad more than usual. But internally my world was blown into smithereens in a way that just could not be put back together. Life seemed to go on, but really it had come to a standstill. A bit like Richard Cory:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,
Edwin Arlington Robinson
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I don’t know how to write about this phase of my life. So many things fell apart, at the same time. One of the reasons I had put off writing for long was that I knew a day might come when I would have to write about those Dark Dark Days, and I feared I just wouldn’t be able to do it.
If I am to write about it now, I have to talk about my relationships with the people who were closest to me at that time – some dead, some alive – and I don’t know if I want to go down that road.
Perhaps I should start with making a list. My favourite go-to activity when things get overwhelming.
- My mother got cancer. Again. She was dying this time.
- My mother was also making it very difficult for me to care for her. Argh!!
- My brother and I were fighting. More than ever before. We came to blows one day. Easily the most shameful thing I have done.
- My marriage was unraveling quickly. What had felt like team work at one point in time had dissolved into constant conflict.
- Our couples therapist unfairly took sides. Et tu?
- Our finances were wearing thin. I had put my faith in simple living and suddenly we needed more money that I didn’t have access to.
- Our kids were not learning much at school, the same place where I was teaching. Should we move them out to another school where we wouldn’t be able to afford the fees anymore?
- I didn’t know if I could continue working at the school I called my second home, a place I had intended to work at for the rest of my life.
- When I reached out to the head of the school for help, her response was a single word: “Rubbish!”
- On another front, what I thought was a close friendship turned out to be utterly one-sided. It ended with her words: “I have nothing to say to you.”
And so it came to pass that one rainy October morning found me standing on top of the school library, two floors up, ready to jump, and end it all.
There it is. I have written it. A list of the ways in which my life came undone. Each one of them is a story in itself, but I don’t know if I can write more about them.
I felt like an absolute loser and a total misfit, that I didn’t really belong in this bewildering world, which demanded too much of me, or perhaps too much of the wrong kinds of things from me. Clearly others around me were more adept at this business called living, but it felt like some crucial bit of software got missed out when it came to me. May be it bled out when the forceps cut into my head as I was born. May be this was just the lot of people with the INFJ personality. Or perhaps I was just like millions of others who also struggled, simply because it is hard to be human.
In a last ditch effort to find some way out of this mess, I reached out to one of my oldest friends, and to my utter shock, she coldly asked me to man up and get my act together. The more I told her about the hard place I found myself in, the less empathetic she became. Why would she do that when I turned to her for support? But then, why do any of us do what we do? I later understood she did the best she could at the time, given where she was, and she genuinely thought she was helping me but it just wasn’t what I needed then.
So there it was. A crumbled life, with no ground to stand on. I didn’t want to continue living, but I couldn’t end it either. The only tether to life were my young children. I had to hang in there, for them. (And am I glad today that I did!)
It was during those Dark Dark Days that I stumbled upon a gem of a book. It was like the gift from Galadriel to Frodo – the light of Eärendil:
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
Galadriel, Lord of the Rings
The book offers exactly what the title suggests: heart advice for difficult times.
Perhaps I should begin with what the book is not. It is not a self-help book. It does not offer any comforting words such as “this too shall pass” or techniques such as positive self talk, affirmations or visualization.
Instead, it gently challenges us to examine the assumptions we make that cause our suffering. It challenges us to not run away from the reality of what is, but to find the courage to stay with it, however uncomfortable that might be, and to make friends with that discomfort. It teaches us how to practice maitri: loving-kindness.
My burning ache at the time I picked up the book was to find my anchor, the ground beneath my feet. I did not have much to begin with in terms of the traditional anchors: a happy family, a religious affiliation, a supportive social network, or even just wealth.
Right from childhood, I learnt to fend for myself. First internally, and then externally. Though I made friends through school and college, I never learnt to lean on them for support. I didn’t know how to ask for help.
When everything fell apart at the same time, and it became difficult to do it all by myself, when the relationships I had built – with my spouse, friends, place of work – broke down in rapid succession, I had nothing to fall back on, except myself all over again. It was just too tiring and difficult to be one’s own support.
As I was despairing to find new ground I could stand on, to somehow continue living in this difficult world and raise my three young children, I came across these words in Pema Chödrön’s book:
In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.
Instead of offering me a way to escape this sense of groundlessness, she offered something more radical:
When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality. There is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness.
She was encouraging me to become friends with this groundlessness, and not cast around for newer certainties. Dang!
The book’s first chapter is titled ‘Intimacy with fear’. Note it is not about overcoming fear or getting rid of it. She writes:
It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. […] Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to truth.
Yet our natural instinct is to escape from fear, to get rid of the immense discomfort that it causes.
No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. […] The advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, take a pill or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away.
Instead, she offers an alternative:
What we are talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it straight in the eye – not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of the old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and thinking.
Ironically, this was deeply calming at a time of uncertainty. It quelled the desperation to find new ground, thrashing around this way and that, and instead taught me to lean into whatever was my reality, however uncomfortable it felt. To stay with what is.
As the father in this story leads his three children on a bear hunt (ha!), they meet various obstacles like tall grass, a river, and mud. Each time, they sing in chorus:
Can’t go around it,
Can’t go over it,
Can’t go under it.
We have to go through it.
And so it is with fear, and later I discovered with grief too, once my mother passed away. You just have to go through it.
It is nice to have someone with you during difficult times – a friend, sibling or partner. Like Frodo had Sam. But sometimes, you don’t have anyone and you just have to do it on your own, like how Frodo had to face Shelob after he foolishly banished his loyal friend. At such times, find a book like this one by Pema
Featured Image: Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
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