I hope this missive finds you well. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing lots of reflecting on not only personal issues (the story below is one thing I did) but also about my life as a creative.
My life as a creative is undergoing a renaissance as of late. For example, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this newsletter, what I wanted it to be, how it can help people, and how it can fuel my creative life. I know that the name will change soon (I’ve been noodling on some thoughts. Tell me what you think of the new name.) and how to focus on this a bit more. There’s been lots of reflecting and journaling about this, and hopefully, I’ll be able to put some things into action.
For his week’s newsletter, I wrote about happenstance. It’s about finding the life lesson you need when you need it. It’s about stories (when isn’t it always) that deserve and need to be told.
So, this week I want to tell you about my interaction with a stranger at an event I attended and how their story helped me with the theme of trust — something that I’m struggling with now. Please enjoy it below.
How to Trust People: A Story About a Moment
I will admit I was late to the event. But if you know me well, I don’t think I’d be on time even to my own funeral.
The Human Library was an event that I still needed to go to. On my campus, this event was always a big how-to-do, everyone went, and the experience moved people. The ability to check out “books,” people who will tell you part of their life story where they have overcome big obstacles or challenges, and then ask the books questions, was something I couldn’t pass up easily.
I was going through my own challenge. After Nick and I broke up, I found it challenging to regain my footing. This break, unlike any in my past, was different. There was love there. I love him, and my love was an open wound. I loved an open wound, and it loved me back. But my love wasn’t enough to heal it. Not that I expected it to and not that I realized how open that wound really was.
So, I wanted, no, NEEDED, were stories. Stories are who we are, how we pass on knowledge, and how we, as a species, survive. We pass down stories like inheritances, handbooks to life’s lessons. And damn it if I wasn’t in survival mode and needed a lesson to get me through.
When I arrived, I read the titles of the books. Each one was on a laminated book spine and Velcro-ed on a board. There were so many to choose from. One, in particular, was about being Afro-Caribbean. While that appealed to me, I wasn’t seeking a mirror. I was seeking a guide.
The title “Unholy Matrimony” caught my eye. We searched for the summary of the story, which was in a binder right outside the entrance to the event. We flipped by several summaries of books. Each sounded so interesting, but my book wasn’t to be found. But even though the summary wasn’t available, something told me that this particular story was the one I needed to hear. There was a lesson there, I felt. There was something I needed to hear.
The person who sat in front of me was calm and serene. Her medium-length twists were beautiful, and I was a bit jealous of them. My own braided hair had long needed retouching. When she smiled, it was the most truth I had known all week. It countered every thought my anxious brain hurdled at me that week — how my former love’s leaving was somehow tied to being not good enough or too much of one thing or another.
She started the timer — 15-20 minutes of conversation — and this was the story she told me. Abridged as I can never tell her story better than she told it to me that day:
She had married her partner of five years. She was a mother of two with a third on the way. She swore to love him today, tomorrow, and for a lifetime. It was, in that way, a happy union.
Until he left his email open on his computer one day.
That is where she saw emails that changed her life and everything she knew about her husband. It wasn’t so much the cheating but the role-play — a slave/master role play that she, as a black woman, was uncomfortable with her partner, a white man, enjoying. It tested her, her faith in her husband, and destroyed her self-image and confidence. But she swore to love him today, tomorrow, and forever. And so she stayed. And she tried to please her husband in his ideal partnership.
But then, a moment came when her husband held her and said, “I want to be the person to make you cry and the one to wipe your tears.”
At that moment, she left her marriage and divorced him. Healing was a long and difficult path. It took from 2016 to 2022 to tell her story without crying. But she told that story to me with more empathy than I have ever had for myself.
That’s when my eyes welled up. With my nose starting to run and my eyes filling with tears, I asked my first question.
“How did you learn to trust again?”
The answer was another truth I heard that day —- she trusted God. She trusted God would put people in her life that would be good to her and for her. She trusted God would take people away that wouldn’t be good for her.
And she trusted God during the heartbreak, during the mending of that heartbreak, and during the struggle to continue. The break and the years in the aftermath of it were something she needed to go through to create a new reality for herself and her children. She went to therapy and learned more about herself. She healed in a new way, and when she looked up from her healing work, she discovered that the world still held beauty and possibility and that she was finally ready to see it.
I don’t know about your faith, Reader. And I’m not here to preach or convert. Where you are in your designated faith or spirituality is your business. But when I tell you that when I heard that and how trust worked for her, it was what I needed at that very moment. See, while I loved my open wound, he didn’t love himself enough to think he deserved it. And while I tried to help him see that he did, I put my trust that he’d catch up to me in emotional intelligence and acceptance.
He couldn’t. He didn’t. I trust God.
In my own path toward healing from my love, this was the first stepping stone. I knew it then, and I know it now. And so, we go forward. Onward! To build a new life.
What am I listening to this week?
I’ve been listening to so much lately — podcasts, music, etc.— but what I’m really jiving to this week is my friends’ podcast InkWell. The podcast is hosted by writer friends Jasmine and Lupe Mendez. This week they talked to another friend, Reyes Ramirez, about his short story collection “The Book of Wanderers.” Listening to this episode, I remembered how much I love being a creative and how the process of creation really is a personal awe-inspiring thing. It’s a gift that I have been relishing lately.
What am I reading this week?
Can you believe I am still reading “Novelist as Vocation”? I am, and it is still lighting me up on the inside. I’m a bit slow on reading that book because I had to emergency read “Second Firsts: A Step-by-Step Guide to Life After Loss.” Recommended by a friend, this book has been so helpful as I continue my grief process from my heartbreak. I highly recommend this and the exercises in the book.