Tracing Exercises
by Sarah Jane Souther
Hello readers,
It’s me, SJ, dropping in to say that this week is a break from our regularly scheduled programming since we’re busy working on our event tomorrow. We are completely sold out, and even have a waitlist going which blows my mind. If you got a ticket, thank you and we cannot wait to see you.
All of this event planning has me reflecting on the beginnings of this project. How the impetus for it was disorienting heartbreak. I can close my eyes and see the window seat of the plane where I was sitting when the phrase “Unfortunately, I love you” first came into my head. The afternoon light from the unobstructed sky, the ache of February, the sorrow of that season. And the strange thing that happened in my brain, when I got the idea. I really think it’s true for many things in life that if we don’t laugh we’ll cry. And that phrase, “Unfortunately, I love you” made me want to laugh. Just a little. Made me want to get out of myself and make something from disappointment and the lack of love that I longed for.
In each of my most difficult seasons, there’s been a moment where the narrative changes from I can’t believe this awful thing happened to me to what can I make of this. I never know quite what it is that brings about this shift. It’s a quick steeling of the nerves. A realization that I can either be broken by life or break life somehow and in the moment, I get a sudden thirst for violence and a determination to break whatever I damn well need to.
I had one of these moments when I decided to move to New York.
I have this memory of sitting in the rooftop lobby of Mr. Purple, a hotel on the lower east side. It was August, blue sky and blistering. I was jet lagged, having just come from London and I could feel a cold coming on. Feverish, exhausted, sweaty, I’d been running all over the city, entering at the wrong subway entrances, meeting with strangers that might be work connections in sterile offices with fluorescent lighting, trying to find the shady side of the street and realizing there was no shady side. I’d had dreams of moving to London permanently, and they were all smashed around my feet. Disappointment clung on me, crept up my throat like the soreness from a virus. New York was plan B, and it had nothing of the cool grey charm of London. And so far it wasn’t looking like the sparking city I’d longed to move to when I was fourteen either.
I had a call with a design agency I was interested in working for and the man I spoke with was a bit brutal. He’d told me good luck with finding an agency job without an MFA and while my portfolio was good, it wasn’t going to cut it in the competitive design atmosphere of NYC. I hung up the phone and looked out at the skyline. Grungy, in that part of the city. Smoke stacks and crumbling brick and cracked sidewalks. The whole yawning mess of metal and asphalt and humanity sprawling in every direction. And I thought: this is a place that could squash a person flat, like a bug under a shoe.
And then directly after that thought, I had another one. It was as if the city had challenged me to duel and it was taunting me to decline, get on a plane, leave, never come back. And in that moment I knew that was the opposite of what I would do. Perhaps New York would break me. Or perhaps I would break it, crack through the surface and find a heart and maybe even a home.
Three months later, I had a job on Hudson Street, an apartment on West End and 84th and a cat. I guess I was still a little resentful of the east side skyline and its taunts, so I moved my whole life west of Broadway. And I did crack the surface. Or rather I found the millions of little cracks in this city where the perseverance and the talent and the joy shine through.
These pinch points in the plot of my life and the narrative shifting moods that accompany them, come for me like thunderstorms in the summer. They are swift and overwhelming and after they’ve passed, my life is irreversibly different.
I think that moment on the plane with UiLY was something similar. A thunderstorm, brewing on the horizon, even if the full impact wasn’t hitting me yet.
While UiLY is (and always will be in many ways) a sad-girl project at heart, it’s morphed into something so much richer. It’s become a conversation about what love really is and what it looks like to live it out. And this crew of five women that make up UiLY have come to mean more to me than any group of people I’ve been a part of.
This realization hit home at one of our recent writers meetings. One of our gals had gotten engaged the day before. The other five of us gathered in my apartment, bottle of bubbly ready to pop as soon as our member of honor walked in the door. When she arrived we assaulted her with screams that can only be produced by a group of late-twenty and early-thirty something women celebrating an upcoming marriage: high pitched and piercing and full of unadulterated joy. We plopped her down on a chaise lounge and made her relate every delicious detail.
We went around in a circle, everyone giving life updates; new jobs and looking for new jobs and old heartaches and hoping for new heartaches to replace the old ones. But when we got to the last woman, she started to share about some deeply painful things going on in her life. Tears rolled down her cheeks. I don’t know who moved first, but the next second we were all sitting on the floor with her, a hand on her knee, one on her shoulder, someone holding her hand. We sat like that for an hour maybe. And then we prayed and hugged goodbye and my apartment was silent and dark again. Filled only with lamp light and the ambient light from the thousand windows outside my own. But the silence was different than before. Like love had hollowed out a space in the night and brought a peace with it that lingered.
That night felt like a sample of life in all its depth. Laughter and tears. Celebration and mourning. Made beautiful by the simple of act of being in it together.
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On some lazy Sunday afternoons when I have too much time and a coffee in my hands, I begin to go down the rabbit hole of what ifs… what if I’d chosen something different that day on the lower east side? What if I’d gone home, moved to a different city? What heartbreak would I have avoided, what incredible joy would I have missed out on, what if UiLY had only ever been an idea in my head, what if I’d never drawn close to these women I can now call some of my dearest friends?
Frederick Buechner says, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” Some of the things that happen in life feel like they will scar us irreparably. And this used to frighten me. I guess it still does. And while my life hasn’t been crevassed with any kind of extraordinary grief, I have a few scars of my own. I used to think that tracing over them was unhealthy, too much of a reflection on the past, a hindrance to my forward momentum. I’m not sure any more. Is there a way to trace the scars that reveals the purpose of them? That shows us all the good that came from them, all the love they let in, all the people who walked with us, how we were never really alone, even when we thought we were?
UiLY started as a scar. And it’s become a pathway to something abundant and beautiful. The worst thing becoming a good thing. Slowly and painfully and not at all how I would have chosen it for myself. But better somehow and richer.
So thank you, Audrey, Elizabeth, Corinne, Charissa and Maddie for tracing the scars with me.
And thank you, readers, for reading.
Until next time.
SJ