hey y’all,

i come to you humbly on the other side of a two month hiatus, knowing the true meaning of metamorphosis. but first, i have to tell you about these cocktails.

i retreatred to the western north carolina mountains two weeks ago. i’m from the coast, so i’ve spent almost no time out there. my husband came with, and we stayed at a cabin nestled in marshal, nc. i bathed in the forest at night, i wandered museums and art galleries, i waded in laurel creek. on our last night, we got dinner on the roof at wildwood still where we had views all the way to the top of the pigsah. these juicy glasses were the “plumb intended” and a housemade ginger beer limeade (an off-menu mocktail). they were the perfect compliment to the fading sun on our faces.

i took this trip following a pretty significant mental health…spiral? episode? 15 years ago, they’d have called it a psychotic break on daytime television. i had no idea how bad i was doing until i reached the very bottom of the spiral. i had been walking steadily down a spiral staircase with no rails that descends into an underground silo. it happened so gradually that i didn’t notice the light disappearing above me. all of a sudden, i lost my footing and fell right down the middle to the stone floor below.

a month ago, my colleague died. we hadn’t worked together in a few years. the last time i spoke to her had to have been 2022. she and i were hired on the same day at an LGBTQ+ health center in philadelphia in early 2019. we were both community health workers and sexual health educators looking for our next career step. we’d both finished graduate school pretty recently and we’d studied similar disciplines. we had some shared connections in the industry. over the 3 years we worked together, we weathered a lot of storms.

there was pretty significant internal turmoil that we were unknowingly hired into. both of our predecessors had been fired, and in our co-workers’ opinions, unjustly. there was a nascent union in the process of active negotiations, which i became actively involved in almost immediately. our department director was both deeply loved and obsessively despised by our lateral peers. it was a trial by fire in the LGBTQ+ industrial complex, and she and i spent every moment of it together.

it would be dishonest to say that we were close. our relationship ended frostily. the toxicity of our work environment and the political instability of the 2020s had affected us both, and ultimately we stopped speaking.

in april, one of our coworkers reached out to me to let me know that she had passed. we had lived together for a time, and he wanted to text me directly. i’m no longer involved with the organization and he knew i had moved out of the philly area. i was shocked by the news, and deeply touched by this gesture of care.

i wasn’t sure how i felt about it at first. i had no connection to her but i had been thinking about her lately. it took some time for it to process. about a week after she died, i found myself sobbing uncontrollably at random hours of the day about seemingly nothing at all. in a routine and unremarkable therapy session, i shared with my therapist that a colleague of mine had died recently. it was the first time i’d really spoken about it to anyone. i didn’t feel like i could.

did i deserve to grieve someone who i was not on good terms with? is it offensive to her life and memory? in that unremarkable therapy session, the dam of numbness fell and a wave of grief washed over me: about my colleague, about the world, about the life choices i’d made. there is something sacred about the therapeutic relationship, to me. it is the only relationship in my life that i can say exactly what’s on my mind without caring about how he’ll perceive me. he asked me if i wanted to tell him about her, and i found that i did.

she was incredibly warm and generous, like all the time. she would share every snack and candy she was pretending to hide in her desk. she would sneakily show it to anyone who walked past her cubicle. she changed the letter board on her desk every month with a new encouraging saying. one time she asked for a suggestion. i said “do no harm, take no shit” and she loved it. i remember she kept it up for an extra week. she was an avid cross-stitcher and would be pulling a needle and thread in every department meeting. she wore the most colorful wrap dresses with interesting silhouettes, but still somehow wore the same black flats every day.

she was a romantic, about her husband but also just about life in general. she could romanticize anything with an earnestness that was contagious. she had a biting wit, too, and was never afraid to disagree with you. still, she would look for the silver lining in anything even when someone was determined to be a storm.

she ended up on the leadership team of the organization i left, in an almost identical role to my current one. i realized when she died that she is one of the only people i want to talk to about what the last few years have been like. she lived it with me. when we fell out, it was because i blamed her for an injustice i believed i had suffered at her hand. with time and wisdom, i can see now that the executive leadership team was ultimately responsible and that they were doing the best they could during a historically unprecedented national tragedy that has yet to end. it wasn’t as personal as my self-importance made it out to be. it almost never is.

i wish i could call her and tell her that i’m sorry for how i treated her, and that i was unbelievably naive and ignorant. i wish i could ask her what she thought about some of the things i’m navigating at work. i wish we could sit on the couch and have a glass of wine while commiserating about the impossible choices we have to make every day. i wish i could ask about her children and how she feels as a mom.

we were early 20-something’s navigating things that were way above our heads. i know that. i know that part of grieving is having grace with the versions of you that weren’t your best. you learn from it and resolve to do better next time. i think the worst part is that i had been thinking of calling her now and then for the last 4 years and never picked up the phone because i thought it would be too weird. i thought too much time had passed for it to be appropriate.

right after her memorial is when i fell off the stairway and into the pit. it took two months, but i’ve climbed my back into the sunlight. i very much want to keep basking, but i think that means that i have to bury the silo. it’s hard and scary, because that’s where i’ve lived. it’s contained and predictable and finite. utterly predetermined. up here, with a clear view of the horizon in every direction, there are so many unknowns. unpredictable factors. maybe even hidden traps.

but there are just as many possibilities. pleasures. experiments. when i was four, my kindergarten teacher asked me what i wanted to be when i grow up and i said a rock star. that was the most honest i’ve ever been, and it’s still true. it isn’t about being famous or important or above reproach. nothing like that. it’s about doing the things i love as often as possible, making vulnerable art that moves people, and pouring all the love i can into the world. that’s all it’s always been.

my coworker’s name was melanie.

when i knew her, she was an aspiring photographer. she took these pictures of me.

i used the second one as a headshot for years, but the first one is special to me. i didn’t know she’d taken it, and was surprised when she sent it to me. she said she wanted me to have it because i looked so comfortable in my skin.

xoxo,

kuya von