The second realization that started feeling a lot more concrete for me over the weekend is this: I have lots of friends who want to be my friends.
I know that might seem obvious to anybody who has witnessed the outpouring of support for me across the last seven and a half months since I lost Kellie. But let me explain.
A recurrent anxiety for me is the fact that this period of time in my new life is not “normal” by any means. At least the first two months, or four or six months, pick your time-frame, haven’t been anyone’s idea of the status quo. My emotions have been all over the place, and I’ve struggled with everything from cooking to hobbies (even reading, my steadfast companion since Kindergarten). I’m not the person I was back then, and that means a lot of trial and error has to happen to figure out what kinds of things this new person in this new life likes to do and has the capacity to engage with.
So I’ve had this enormous loss, and I’m struggling in all these ways, and so of course my friends have stepped up and been there for me. Across the board, I have felt their presence in a very consistent way. But the anxiety I spoke about goes back to the context we’re dealing with: I have been really worried that people have included me in their lives due to the fact of my loss, and that when that recedes in people’s memory and the regular everyday fact of their own ongoing lives reasserts itself (as it will), they will cease to be there for me in the same way.
The fear is that if my close friendships are because people want to care for me in my grief, then they will leave me and then I’ll be alone. And that’s a scary, scary thought.
The thing is, I know it’s not true of the people who have remained in my life. Realistically, nobody hangs on to a habit for more than seven months out of politeness. At least that’s not typical. I’d be shocked if most people continue to check in on someone for more than a month or two, if it’s just out of pity. My heart wants me to think that my friendships are temporary, and are bound to fade, but my brain knows better.
As I drove out of Ann Arbor last Sunday, I actually found myself believing that a bunch of my friendships are truly reciprocal ones. They want to be my friend because they like me, I think? And aren’t in my life solely due to feeling bad for me, I suppose?
Being able to truly feel that, as opposed to just thinking it, felt like a real breakthrough. I’m certain I’ll have plenty of moments of self-doubt and times when I feel just as isolated and lonely and cut-off from people I care about, because the person I care most about is gone from this world. So that’s natural. But my friends are my friends, and I can also feel confident about that, at least sometimes. And that’s a bigger gift than I have the words to articulate, so that’s going to have to be a good enough presentation of this newfound feeling for the time being.
Yesterday was a day full of peace and creativity and rest, which is a very important kind of a day for me to have. I spent my time working on small projects, reading, painting, and writing. My book of poems about Kellie’s life and death and things I have wanted to say about those experiences is finally coming into some kind of shape that I’m pretty content with. I don’t think that I’m ever going to be able to point to a body of work I’ve created and say, “Yes, this—this is the one transcendent expression of who I am and how I feel, and it’s really well-written and good and worthy of putting out into the world.”
I’m always going to have a lot of anxiety about anyone seeing something I’ve written, especially something I have a whole lot of feelings tied into. I think these poems are honest and vulnerable and show how I felt—and feel—and that they’re an accurate representation of many things I want people to hear. That doesn’t mean the anxiety is gone, but it does mean I feel more pressure to show people than to not show people, if that makes any sense.
I also have the added pressure on me of wanting to feel like this project is finished—or mostly wrapped up anyway—during Kellie’s birthday month, as an homage to her. I don’t know what “finished” means, since my intention is to self-publish this book and let it exist in the world without any expectation that anyone but me will buy a copy. But it’ll be finished, and I can then have a book that I can point to that I followed through on completing for the first time in my life.
I’ve written a lot of first drafts of novels, an autobiography, a book on clinical practice with suicide loss survivors, a book on clinical practice with the COVID-conscious population, and even another book of poetry. But nobody other than Kellie has ever read almost any of that writing, not because they’re bad but because nobody’s had the chance. I’ve just been too scared to put them out into the world. But that was my former life and my former self, and I’m someone else now. I think this guy finishes books, sometimes. At least writing them, since he finishes reading a lot fewer of them than that other guy. That would feel like a worthwhile trade-off, sort of?
I feel like the fear of losing my friends is similar in a lot of ways to my fear of painting a picture or taking a photo or writing a poem or novel and showing it to someone else who then has the power to say “Matt, this is really stupid and so are you”. It probably comes down to control or lack of control on some level. Fear of failure in social connections and fear of failure in creative pursuits feels like it rhymes to me. This new Matt is starting to feel less-afraid of both types of failure, and it feels strangely freeing to me.
Because there’s a real benefit to me of creating something. I can put my feelings into something that exists outside of myself. It’s a kind of magic, I think. But Kellie used to be here to be the viewer or reader or experiencer outside of my head and heart that gave me that feedback loop of saying “Thanks for conveying those feelings about something”. Without her to see it, I need to look for new audiences, whether those are very very small or not. So yes, I write whether anyone else sees it or not. This new Matt might be feeling better about someone else seeing it, though, and that’s a whole new world of connecting with other people. Not better or worse than my existing connections with them, just a different type.
And as I’m told pretty often by my friend Margot, it’s important to try that painting or that piece of writing even if it’s scary to not be perfect, because failing at perfection is what helps us to be okay with the messiness of creating. If we don’t ever paint something because of how scary it is to not be a world-renowned painter, then we never paint something. And painting feels pretty nice to this new Matt I’m becoming friends with, just like writing felt pretty nice to the former me.
Stay tuned for ways to read some of what I’ve been writing since my writing retreat at Pendle Hill back in July. I’m still deciding how to put that baby bird out into the world, but I’m gonna do it.
That book has gone through a few different forms. It started out consisting of a mix of personal essays and poems, and has since turned into a book that has a lot more poems and doesn’t include those personal essays. Those may turn up in some other form down the road, I think, but they no longer fit with what I’m wanting to say with this book.
It’s fifteen poems about life for Kellie and I before she died, fifteen poems about the period of time immediately after her death, and fifteen poems about my life a little further out from losing her.
I’m looking forward to failing at this project! Not because they’re not poems I’m not immensely proud of, but because every piece of expressive art is an imperfect conduit directly into the brains of the ones experiencing it. But those points of failure are still interesting and good and worthwhile. It WILL be done though, and soon.
Take care of yourself, and maybe consider joining me in figuring out how to fail at something important today?
Matt