I can’t say my brain is doing super well.

I’m still recovering from getting dumped in January and the marital fallout of going to Barbados in February. I’m still working on this book, which I started in 2024 to process my feelings about my impending divorce, that then morphed into a meditation on destructive commitment, addiction, and the social role of wives. The project changed because the situation changed, because my first husband drank himself to death in his apartment while I was at a writing workshop in New Mexico. It feels really narcissistic to say it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, because for fuck’s sake, it didn’t happen to me. And yet. Sometimes language is an insufficient technology.

There’s a dance party in Berkeley in a couple weeks, at a bar I went to with my first husband in our early dating days. My ex girlfriend mentioned it to me, because last year we attended another party thrown by the same organizers at a different location. Once I would have loved to go to a dance party with my girlfriend at a bar in the shadow of the apartment building my husband and I lived in.

I’m revisiting a lot in memory right now, going over memories that would be lovely to have except I know how all those stories end.

I usually consider myself an adaptable person. I am pretty good at rolling with the punches. Car breaks down? Get it towed. Store is closed? Come back tomorrow. But that’s all little shit. Some stuff I don’t know how to get over. My husband deals with war-related PTSD and we were talking about this, how when something terrible happens to you, there can be pressure from people who care about you to ‘get back to normal.’ People tell you that you’re going to recover, but what they really mean is you’re going to return, to go back to being the person you were before The Bad Things happened, because they don’t understand that The Bad Things killed the person you were and you have to birth yourself into something else instead. The Bad Things survivors’ club is enormous, a members-only silent rave thrown in an underground parking garage. You don’t know it’s there until you’re in.

I think that’s where I am right now—I like my life, I like the choices I’ve made to get here, I like the person I married and the place I live and my friends and my family and so much of the externally visible stuff. But I don’t like my self very much right now. I miss the person I was before Brad died. I miss a lot of things.

So what am I trying to do? Steer toward what’s still good. Notice when there are opportunities for joy. Work is shockingly fun right now, after several years of just gritting my teeth. I like the people I work with a lot, and after a couple years of mostly managing and writing a little bit, I’m writing and managing about half-time right now. I’m working more than I used to, but it’s a good change. I like making things. I like feeling like I’m contributing to a product instead of just enabling other people to contribute. I like feeling like I work at a startup again.

And I’m writing more. For all I said up top that this book is brutally hard to write, the mechanisms of writing it feel familiar and good—the muscle is the same, even if the task I’ve set the muscle to is an unpleasant one. I’m trying to publish on this newsletter more. I’m even letting myself experiment with ultra-short-form text art (sticker designs for Burning Man (and to bring a little subversive public art to my podunk small town)).

And I’m trying to notice what used to work for me that isn’t working anymore. I’m angrier than I used to be, more defensive, more guarded, more cynical, more depressed. But I don’t need to bring that with me everywhere. I need to start putting it down. I’m trying really hard—to soften more, to fight less, to let go. To accept. To cry instead of snarling. It’s hard. I’m bad at it. But I’m trying.