endless crying (deborah)
9/17/25
Last night I couldn’t fall asleep. Falling asleep is one of my greatest skills, so it’s alarming when I can’t feel that soft blanket of slumber fall over me, that sweet state of drowsiness. I felt an inexplicable panic, a wave of existential anxiety (I’m thankful to remember, as a youth, I found novels about suburban malaise and existential crises boring — unable to relate, feeling incredibly uninterested and detached from things like American Beauty. I’m thankful that I understand them better now, and even love some books in this genre, such as ones by Jonathan Franzen). I knew it was probably jet lag, since we’d come back from Kauai and were still adjusting to the three-hour jump ahead, but I felt a bloom of dread as the clock ticked past ten, then eleven, then midnight. My friend N says the night draws out demons. I read somewhere a while ago that your cognition is different when it’s dark, not just the ancestral fear we have for nocturnal predators but that you don’t have the layer of reasoning that tells you that your worries are unreasonable, that you can’t summon a monster from the mirror; everything bad is possible in the dark. After J turned off the bedroom light, I lay in bed and tried a 10-minute Peloton sleep meditation, which usually sets me adrift right away, but I was completely conscious for the entire duration, for each gentle instruction. I put on Charm by Clairo, which is twinkly and soothing and a delight forever, but still nothing, even with its enchantments. I paged through my Kindle library, desperate for some comfort, scrolling through books at 1% and 9% and so many endless screens of covers of nothing I wanted to read. I’d just read two books about death and grief during vacation, not exactly beach reads, and everything else in my dimly lit device seemed too plotty and wrought with sharpness and tension. I’d started a reread of The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis, a top-tier childhood favorite, but there are lots of embedded anxieties there — the hardships of a quest, going on a journey into an unknown land, even if there are large owls to offer you a ride on their feathery backs; there’s a part where the children almost end up being eaten by giants, and must escape. No, I didn’t want to go there.
My eyes latched onto one book, though: some thank you notes, the first compilation of this very newsletter you’re reading now, which J sent out in January 2016 to the subscribers of his previous newsletter, drafts. Those ebook links are now broken, but you can instead view these archives and go back to the very beginning, in November 2015, almost a decade ago now. It was like slipping onto a life raft, unfolding a precious time capsule, re-reading J’s careful and sweet and funny remembrances of his days. I had been feeling so unmoored, somehow, probably a combination of the horrible awful things in the world and then also focusing intensely on hundreds of pages of two separate experiences meditating on the loss of a partner and then dehydration and mild hypoxia from the flights we took and some traumas resurfaced. The wounded small child within me. And then I read these letters and I felt so thankful for J’s thankfulnesses.
9/18
I’m thankful that yesterday morning, afternoon, and night, I tried to write more about how much I love J and his writing and what a kind and beautiful person he is and how much I adore him and I instead ended up sobbing, each time, the kind of crying where tears well up and then leak out and that I try to lightly absorb with tissues or a swatch of my shirt and instead the tears become a flood I can’t keep back and I am choked up and can’t breathe and suddenly just as congested and snotty as though I’m sick, which I guess is true because I am heartsick, from a joy and love so powerful that it feels like sadness and maybe is sadness, an anticipatory grief. I’m thankful that I googled “why do nice things make me cry” and the first result is a Reddit post about being overwhelmed by kindness and I realized that the post belongs to the subreddit r/raisedbynarcissists and I guess is a common experience for people unused to experiencing such nice things. I’m thankful that I can experience truly nice things every day and have for the 15 years I have known J. I’m thankful that I am crying now in my red light mask typing this and that Miso has sprawled out at the end of the bed, her head and snout nestled into the giant braids of my weighted blanket.
I’m thankful to remember when I first met J in grad school in late August 2010, he was a first year MFA student and I was a second year. We didn’t have many in-depth conversations early on because we hung out in different groups and there were a few parties that one or the other of us missed, maybe because I was sick or J had a workshop deadline to meet. But I was struck at how easy it was to talk to him, how instantly comfortable I felt in his presence, how much I wanted to keep talking to him and reading his writing. I was so smitten that I had a heart-fluttering epiphany of “oh no, I really like him!!!” one day just thinking about him. It’s funny that we basically started dating a couple of months later, how quickly we were attached and how much quicker we would’ve been if we’d just made it to those early parties.
I’m thankful that, last night when I was sobbing trying to write this, he was in the other room meditating or doing yoga with noise-cancelling headphones and I was trying to stifle my sobs, and that after I’d used up about five or six tissues I heard him standing up and I blew my nose and he came over to see what I was doing and hugged me. I’m thankful that he continued to hold me as I told him it was like I was stuck in a loop, that he held me until I quieted and I could breathe again. I’m thankful that he stayed with me as I closed my laptop and we talked about how our vacation went, how offensive the mediocre food and drinks were, especially the congealed lumps of rice that were served to us (”How can you get RICE wrong! In HAWAII!” – J) with shredded plain cabbage dipped in mustard that was called coleslaw, and the especially weak-ass flavorless cocktails one night at a sports bar and then, the overpriced cocktails that the next night at a beachfront restaurant, while flavored, were flavored with a coke syrup and something that was artificially and vaguely reminiscent of tropical Icee, and we rejoiced that we were back in our little city which is now our home (I’m thankful that we ordered Eem for dinner on Tuesday night and J said, “REAL FOOD!”). I’m thankful that we both appreciate and have discernment for different types of food, even if it sometimes keeps us from enjoying what we deem lesser and lower quality types of food. I’m thankful we also talked about how thankful we were for the sublime Korean shaved ice we found at the edge of a strip in another beach town, mounds of delicately shaved condensed milk ice draped with mango purée and a mint leaf with little stainless steel cups of cubed ripe mango on the side. I’m thankful for the fruit stand we walked past and where J bought four mangoes before we realized it was $10 per mango. We’re thankful that the mangoes were each of them delicious and that I could slice them up for us to have as both dessert and as a topping for our breakfast cereal. I’m thankful that J is so good at making conversation and gently teasing out new directions with comedy, that he pretended to be Katy Perry for a minute and then asked me to quiz him on the names of Katy Perry songs. I’m thankful to admit that, while I don’t care for Katy Perry generally as a person or as an artist, my favorite song of hers is “Teenage Dream,” which I listened to a lot when I was first crushing on J with teenage feelings at twenty-three years old. I’m thankful to have, in the moment, thought about a book that my therapist recommended to me about polyvagal theory and nervous systems, in which I read about the concept of co-regulating, where two people help each other regulate their emotions, and thought of J’s essay from even longer ago,
how two hearts can slow each other’s into a soft peace together.
I’m thankful to be married to a writer (to my favorite writer), who inspires me always, who influences me in the ways I’m writing this now, with his cadences and with his poetry. I am thankful to be on the other side of what I always feel like will be a bottomless pit of grief, “an endless well of sadness” as I’ve described it to my therapist. “I’m curious about what you see as endless crying,” she gently said today. “Because crying does have an end.” How to describe this abyss as deep as the unknowable depths of the ocean? Perhaps it feels endless because in the moment, when the tears flow and flow, I feel like I can’t stop, that they just pour out unbidden, that when I try to stop, it swells again, the trauma the fissure the injury underneath. I am thankful to be hyper-dramatic about it all although sometimes I wish I was regular dramatic. I am thankful that in therapy I described my difficulty with accepting compliments or nice things, that I find myself bracing when trying to accept a compliment. “What will happen if you don’t brace?” my therapist said. “Then I’ll take the full blow,” I said, laughing. I’m thankful to know that sometimes, maybe even most of the time, that there is no blow at all, no other shoe to drop. I’m thankful that, even if some people don’t, that people do say and do nice things because they care, and want to give care, into the world, to other people and to animals and creatures and trees and even rocks. I’m thankful for the idea of co-creating a shared reality, for inside jokes, for nicknames, for small little kindnesses. I’m thankful that when I told my therapist about my anticipatory grief about J or Miso dying, she said, “But what a gift it is to have that love,” and when I retold this to J he laughed because it was so cliché, and also because I couldn’t say that sentence to him without crying. I’m thankful that I can’t even say the most clichéd things to J without crying.
I’m thankful I overheard J’s first work meeting after vacation, the squeaks of his office chair, his emphatic pronouncements about mocking components and mocking hooks. I’m thankful for the jargon of programming. (I’m thankful to remember, when I first started dating J, my mother asked me if J had a loud voice, because my voice was louder now. I’m thankful to feel changed.) I’m thankful that I am not at work right now and can appreciate eavesdropping, rather than feeling distracted trying to focus on my own work meeting (I am thankful for noise-cancelling headphones). I am smirking because I remember one time texting J:
can u speak less about drugs i am about to enter a client call LMAOOOO
I’m thankful that J can loudly and authentically be himself at work.
I’m thankful that I feel, on the other side of feeling incredibly morose and morbid on vacation (more on that later), an abundance of relief and safety and creativity at home. I’m not thankful that this is against the current collective terroir of genocide and racism and fascism and transphobia and the cancer of capitalism but I am thankful to try to experiment and reframe my days with gratitude, in the original spirit of this newsletter. I’m thankful that when I discussed resourcing with my therapist — imagining a safe haven to retreat to, to ground myself when I’m becoming overwhelmed by a traumatic response or a memory — that she told me that for one of her patients, it was performing on stage. I’m thankful we both agreed emphatically that this would not be a safe place for either of us, but how interesting that it was this way for this person. I’m thankful to hope that this person can perform again soon. I’m thankful to share my thoughts with you and that I have much more to share.
I’m thankful for the sleeping forms of J and Miso in our bed. I’m thankful that, during the night, sometimes I reach out to touch her fur and, when I can’t locate her, I make a small sound of confusion, and reach out with my hands to feel for where she is, to pat the sheets and blankets and feel how they are different textures from the soft fluff of her body. I’m thankful that usually she’s curled up next to J’s feet, and then when I touch her or when J shifts his legs she growls and snaps and is annoyed at us for daring to disturb her sleep.
