A Crack in Everything

Fucking Leonard Cohen, am I right?

“There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” —Leonard Cohen

Dear Writer,

A few years ago, when I was still married to my ex-husband and he was gaslighting me something fierce, I remember going to the grocery store and just wandering the aisles, petrified and isolated and living in a world I didn’t recognize, because my reality was being distorted around me, like that watery mirage that shimmers over hot asphalt on a sweltering day. I felt like I was being cooked slowly, from the inside out, but I still had to go fucking grocery shopping and that was not fair.

I wandered down what I call the dollar store aisle. Everything there isn’t a dollar, but it’s the kind of stuff you find in the dollar store. Plastic baskets. Off-brand lightning chargers. Stuff that has been seen on TV. That kind of thing.

In that aisle, I found a little boogie board reusable notepad type thing that someone had written something shitty on. I cleared the board and wrote, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” and put it back where it was, then numbly stumbled through the rest of the store and went home, where I would live in that calm space between the earthquake and the tsunami for a few more days before my life collapsed around me.

The last few weeks have been… well, you’ve been reading this newsletter. You know I’ve been living on the ragged edge of OH FUCK for this last little while. I’ve been overwhelmed and feeling inadequate to all of the tasks I have ahead of me and scared of the Delta variant and mad that my work is making me come into the office when I don’t see a damn soul there all day and could do my entire job from home. I put my house on the market, I’m writing two books, I moved my kid back to school, and I’ve got two furry little assholes having literal pissing matches all over the house that I am trying to sell.

Yeah. And that’s just the stuff I’m telling you about. There’s more.

There is always more.

But then I started writing this week’s Dear Writer digest and I felt it. A crack. I suddenly wasn’t so tired and stressed anymore. I wasn’t worn out. I had energy. I made a joke. I laughed. I was rough around the edges and my fucks did not activate, so I allowed it and continued on.

And then I felt the light come in, and I was like, “Oh, yeah. This is fine. Everything’s fine.”

I mean, I hate to be one of those ladies who’s so in love with her work that you’re like, “Okay, that’s a bit much,” but I’m kind of a bit much in love with my work. Writing makes me feel better. It makes me feel whole. It cracks whatever is making me feel trapped and loosens things up. It loosens me up. I stop thinking about all the ways in which I am being thwarted in my various ambitions and I just exist in a space, here with you, and I write to you and everything just fucking relaxes.

It’s like exercise. When I exercise, I feel better, but I’ve got a million other things that need my time and attention, so I don’t do the one thing that will give me the energy to do those other things. And that makes sense to me, somewhere in the part of my brain where I look at my energy meter and say, “So what happens when you go past the E?.”

When I write, I feel great, but I don’t do it because there are other things that need my time and attention and I have to make notes for this podcast and I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do at the end of my car lease and oh my fucking god what am I going to do when Still Pretty ends and… and… and…

But now, I’ve made this commitment to you and you are paying me for it (thank you for that, by the way) so now the writing is actually justified and required, so I start writing and…

…crack.

Which is what made me think of the Leonard Cohen quote, and that day in the grocery store all those years ago when I thought that I would never, ever survive that oncoming tsunami.

But I did. It wasn’t elegant and I’m still coughing up the last of the water I breathed in when it hit, but I survived it. I’m stronger. I’m better. I’m smarter. I know what’s real and, most importantly, what is not.

There’s a crack in everything, but it’s not just how the light gets in. It’s how we get out. Writing is… if you’ll pardon a phrase that sounds so inappropriate and tone deaf that I’m definitely going to fucking use it… my crack.

I think about death a lot lately, partially because I’m getting older, and partially because the man I love is fucking obsessed with it. At least once a day, it’s, “Well, we’re all going to die anyway so what does it really matter?” But mostly, I think about the value of time, of every second that is going by, not in the panicked OH MY GOD I’M GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY kind of way, but in the, “How I spend this precious second matters. What am I going to do with it?”

And… I’m not gonna lie. Sometimes I’m going to put on an episode of Ted Lasso and play Hearthstone Battlegrounds with my time, and I’m okay with that. But if I only have so much time left, I need to spend it putting cracks in things. I need to let the light in, and I need to poke my head out. I need to see the world, I need to breathe the air, because someday, my last grain of sand will drop, and when that happens, I want to release my last breath knowing that all of that sand was well spent.

Time to make some cracks.

Everything,

L