let the other shoe drop
If you’ve spent a winter in close proximity to me, you know that I love snow. I love the smell of it. I love the way it glitters on rooftops under the streetlights at night. I still remember the night I walked out of Grand Central Station and trudged through inches of the stuff on uncleared sidewalks (in booties that weren’t waterproof) just to see the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. I got miserably sick as a result, but I’d do it again 10,000 times.
Snow reminds me of my childhood, sledding in the woods behind my house with my Dad and sister -- me almost always barreling into a tree, but dusting myself off and running back up to the top every time. Snow makes me feel happy and free, like everything is possible and anything can happen.
I was all about it – until the winter I lived in Boone, NC. If you were with me that winter, you know that I never even wanted to look at the stuff. I’d stay in my bed, blinds drawn, as much as I could. My friend Maggie would barge into my apartment anyway and we’d watch Happy Feet, “because we live where they do,” which did help. I didn’t want to play in the snow or smell it or feel the cold of it because all of those things reminded me of all the happiness I could not feel – I was deeply depressed at the time. And I took my anger out on the snow. It had lost its magic for me, I suppose. Everything had.
I was in so much pain in that season. I’d not-too-long-ago graduated from Wofford, still feeling shame from the suicide watch medical leave I’d had to take in the middle of my tenure there, and had pretty much accepted that I was going to feel depressed and joyless forever. The thing about depression brain is that it’s really good at telling you that everything is awful because you deserve for it to be awful, and if the awful lets up, that it’ll be right back – don’t worry. So whenever I got a glimmer of something good, I set the timer to track how long it’d take for the awful to come in its wake. I always waited for the other shoe to drop, as they say – and for good reason, because it usually did.
I remember one particular snowy Boone morning, I got back in the car after a Harris Teeter run, nose red and runny, and slammed the door shut and just YELLED at God. If He was so good, why had He let me be deep in the throes of depression for the last four years? Was I ever going to feel better? Would I ever really feel happy again, and if I did, would it just be me listening to the timer tick, waiting for the other shoe to drop, forever?
But the thing about the girl in that grocery store parking lot is that she had no idea what was coming next (and this isn’t where the story gets better).
Over the next couple of years (buckle up), we lost Maggie (in the most terrible way I can think of), I went through two incredibly abusive relationships, and two sexual assaults. In the mix of all that trauma, I’d gone right back into my depression comfort zone, which now had a walk-in closet straight out of Sex and the City, walls lined with rows and rows and rows of other shoes.
All of that shot me right back into so much pain, and so much numbing of it. I call this my wild season, and it’s hard for me to not feel shame over it, but I’ve had to learn how to forgive that version of me for trying to heal the best way she knew how. Three years post-parking lot breakdown, after yet another night at the bar, I crumbled into my bed, opened my Notes app, and penned this little gem at 2:37am:
“Dear God,
This was a lot to ask of one person BY THE WAY. Like, are you f****** serious? IT’S A LOT, in case you are taking notes for a future human. Two abusive relationships, a murdered best friend, two sexual assaults…like…seriously? That was the plan? You couldn’t have like, toned it down? Or picked like, one or two??? Is this just how my life is gonna be forever?”
I have always appreciated relationships in which I can say how I really feel.
I’m a few years out from all of that now, and I think about those two girls often – the one in the grocery store parking lot, and the one curled up in a ball in her bed, yet again.
I’ve been reading about this thing Brene Brown calls “foreboding joy” – it’s where we take the presence of joy as an indicator that something bad is right around the corner. Kind of like “too good to be true” on steroids. For those of us who battle depression and anxiety and trauma, this is a language in which we are fluent. We are comfortable in distress because we know it so intimately – to the point where tranquility and happiness begin to become synonymous with impending doom. We become conditioned. It’s how we’ve survived.
Foreboding Joy was pretty much the captain of my ship up until a year ago, and if I’m being honest, it’s been really hard to learn how to steer without her telling me that everything was going to veer into disappointment and disaster.
It is work to learn to stop setting our “other shoe” timers. But it’s work I’ve been sobbing on my therapist’s couch through this year, and I’m here to say that momentary gratitude for and curiosity about these little joy glimmers beats the hell out of holding your breath.
So stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Let it. Because it’s going to whether you like it or not. As much as I’d like to think I’ve maxed out on trauma and hardship, I know that more is coming. We do the best we can to make the world a better place, but ultimately, I don’t think we can stop the fact that hard things are going to happen to us, and even worse, to the people we love. None of us are exempt from pain, and that one I know for sure. It can hit you hard, and out of nowhere, and nineteen times in a day if it feels like it.
If you’ve been to my home, you know there are post it notes all over the place – on doors, cabinets, mirrors. The one on the back of my front door says, “You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever’s coming” and it’s the first thing I see before I hop out into the world every day. I need a lot of reminding on that one.
But on my therapist’s couch, I’ve learned to be present with my joy rather than count the seconds until it dwindles. I’ve learned that pain will keep coming, but that I am resilient enough to see it as an eventual teacher (and also that whining is allowed). I know that I have what it takes to navigate the good as much as I’ve become adept at trudging through the bad.
Oh, and the closet full of other shoes? It’s my favorite place in the home that is my life. I’ve put a velvet couch from Anthropologie in there, so I can sit and just look around at all the obstacles I’ve met, from minor disappointments to full-on devastations.
Losing Maggie is a bright pink studded pair of Louboutins – because losing her was just shattering, but I’m grateful that I got to have Joy Lessons from the best heart and biggest smile and Ringleader of the Get Out There and Love Everyone Today circus.
The Abusive Men, who taught me that love and abuse can’t exist at the same time, left me with many, many pairs of custom Alexander McQueen flippers that I get to use for diving into the depths with people who have a story like mine, giving them a pair, and showing them that they can get out, too.
Then there’s the section of needlepoint flip flops, shiny black Ted Baker oxfords, Converse, driving loafers (and even a rare drop of the Air Max 90) from All the Men Who Ghosted Me – and looking them over, I am reminded that I deserve respect and connection and compassion. To some I even whisper “thank you for walking away, in whatever manner you did, and freeing me up for something better for me and heading toward something better for you.”
The Sorel tie-up fur-lined snow boots that Depression and Anxiety and PTSD made just for me have a special shelf, because when it snows, I feel happy again. I want to dance in it again, and stick my tongue out and taste life again. I feel the possibility of it all again, and I wish I could speak that back to the versions of me who thought everything was going to be in ruin forever.
But now that I think about it, all the other shoes did that for me.
So let them drop. You never know what occasions you’ll need them for later.
