Edinburgh reports that I am experiencing postpartum depression.

This isn’t much of a surprise, considering how I feel: as if everything is echoes of itself.

My depression is not so intense that I am a risk to myself or others. And it is not so total that I can’t feel the joy of Wilder’s gummy grin when I sing, Zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going to the moon! Zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going really soon!

It is, however, intrusive enough that I am referred to a perinatal counsellor for eight sessions which are covered by healthcare. In our first session, when the counsellor asks what feels heavy lately, my voice breaks. There is more heavy here than I realized, I tell her and she nods. Apparently, this is a common thing to share.

Inevitably, the counsellor asks me about self-care. We’re on a video call and I tilt the camera downward so she can see what I am wearing. When the camera levels back out, she waits for me to explain.

Getting dressed, I tell her. That’s all I’ve got right now.

Tell, she says gently. Tell me.

What the Edinburgh assessment cannot quantify is the ways in which things like grief, IVF, pregnancy, and postpartum, just to name a few, reveal the limits of your self-language. Each takes you to the borders of what you can articulate about who you are.

Each requires that you rearrange your alphabet, find new configurations for your identity. It is not so easy, this process. It is not as if you can go dig new language from the dirt out back.

When I was pregnant I realized my sense of self was stuttering. I honestly wasn’t sure what it meant to be inhabited. I did not know how to fold all that longing for pregnancy into the facts of pregnancy. I did not know where I was even going. Was it toward meeting my son? Was it toward more loss? All this uncertainty, plus a very healthy dose of rapidly changing hormones, drained me and left me unable to say how I was, let alone who I was.

But when I got dressed there was a little current of recognition. I’d do a small head tilt and nod in the mirror. I‘d take a photograph. I’d leave the house buoyed by the energy that comes from seeing someone you know.

Getting dressed has given me a tangible way into discovering a new self-language precisely because it has given me physical referents for the abstraction of expression.

From another angle: it’s a matter of taste.

Taste, as I am meaning it, is being sure of my internal judgement: I know what I like and don’t like. It’s not fettered by what others like or what I think I should like or what I want to like.

Taste is personal.*

For me, taste turns getting dressed into an act of meaning. Taste takes an outfit and makes it a coherent communication of who I am right now because taste is borne entirely from within, made of and formed by all that has brought me here.

The thing about taste, and language, and clothes, is that you almost always have what you need already. It’s just about finding a way to put things together in ways that communicate the meaning you are reaching for.

New does not necessarily mean more. Much of what has been revealing myself to me already lived in my closet. I like this because it’s good to remember that it’s not as if you’ve disappeared.

You’ve always been here. You just need to know where to look. How to say.

* I have a lot of thoughts on taste but I want to be clear that I believe at its core, taste is about the confidence of the individual to trust his or her judgement, which is the definition I offer above, and that this by extension means taste is not brought about by the influence of money / access / education. For all the will in the world, those things cannot make you trust yourself in a way that is distinctive from what is institutionalized by money / access / education. Those things may offer replicable systems for taste but they are inherently limited by their impersonality. True taste is inseparable from the individual.

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I’ve been asking people to tell me about their mornings. But let me tell you about mine first:

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Are you getting any sleep?

So asked the community health nurse before W received his first round of vaccinations at two months. J and I both laughed.

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We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

— Anais Nin

**

**

The February we leave the hospital with our son, it is sixteen degrees. Absurd, all the light. I don’t need a jacket.

**

The one week wellness check at the community health clinic is in snow. Frantic, small pellets sting our skin. The community nurse is young. Black Converse sneakers and olive green cargo pants. She mistakes me for a doctor because of an air of authority. But whose authority is it that she’s picking up on? Surely, that can’t be mine? Me, the woman collapsed in the vinyl chair, clutching my searing midsection, swiping at tears brought on from struggling out of the car and across the iced-over parking lot.

For this appointment, I’ve kit W in a striped wool sweater my friend Julia carefully knit for him. It looks so small until I pull it over his head. The world is huge on him. It hangs down below his knees.

**

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Before the baby arrives, J and I go to therapy. We book in-person because it seems unlikely that we will be able to go in-person after. This is how we speak of the baby arriving. After.

We settle on the couch of RJ’s office and ask him what we should know. How to prepare. Oh, us and all our feints towards this particular After.

When we say our fears, what we are trying to prepare for and against, mine is collapse. The fire. I name it and J flinches.

It was a bad time for us, I say and J flinches again. He has gone very still on the couch beside me. It’s your fault it was a bad time, that is what J hears even though it is not what I think.

Our time with RJ does not go well.

Sixty minutes harden J until he is a red-faced knot and my arms are locked around my chest. RJ spins from side-to-side in his office chair. He has another appointment after us and his anxiety about letting us go home in active conflict buzzes around his yellow notepad, a dark, heaviness at the throat of the one porch light still on after dark.

Of course, we fight in the car. You said. You meant. You are. Streetlight slits the car-dark apart.

**

The greatest clue to the inner structure of any dynamic process lies in its reaction to change.

— Christopher Alexander

**

The next session with RJ we lug in our burdens —

He said.

She meant.

He is.

We bluster. Huff and puff. I’m gesturing wildly with my hands. J turns concrete through his upper back and shoulders.

You don’t have to feel so hurt, RJ tells each of us.

OF COURSE WE DO, we counter. DO YOU HEAR WHAT HE/SHE IS SAYING ABOUT ME?

RJ shrugs lightly.

You can choose to feel differently, he tells us. You don’t have to make what the other says about you yours. You don’t have to pick it up. You don’t have to take it personally.

**

Rather than a harmonious, holistic tapestry, the garden is itself always in a state of vexation: a weaving-together, but also a coming-apart.

— Catriona Sandilands

**

There is a decision to be made between what is said about you in conflict and what you feel about what has been said.

What you decide, RJ tells us, will influence how you feel.

Unfortunately, neither J nor I experience a decision-moment between what is said and what is felt. It’s 0 to 60 in .00002 seconds or less. It’s the express train to how-dare-you every time.

RJ is unbothered. Part of the work is first identifying that there is a decision to be made.

You can choose how you feel about what’s been said, RJ says. And if it feels like you can’t, you have to slow down, create a pause.

But how? we wonder. It seems impossible.

**

Perception is like a hand measuring the depth of a stream; something is always displaced.

— Tony B via Are.na

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There is a difference between your character and your personality.

Do you know what I mean?

The basic-average-man sitting across from me at the cafe that is now permanently closed did not know what I meant.

I explained, as the server who always worked at the cafe when I was on dates slipped me a few extra ounces of house white, that the way I term it, your character is rooted in your values. Or, character is your cardinal direction(s).

What are yours? I wondered.

Yours? he echoed, but his was a longer intonation. Yooooouuuurs?

He was at a loss. He didn’t know. The server swung by our table again.

Did we want a food menu?

The server had dark, boisterously wavy hair and while we had never discussed her keeping me safe, that is what she would do.

I’m good, thanks, I told her and she smiled, drifted away but not so far away.

*

I continued to talk at the basic-average-man. Before this, he’d had a full hour on his start-up therapy business created exclusively for men, a breathless sixty on the benefits of therapeutic techniques for men (emphasis his) that seemed so remarkably fringe that I wondered if those techniques were considered ethical or permissable? Wasn’t psychology practice held to a regulatory body?

He hadn’t asked me a single question and he wouldn’t. He was, like so many, not a bad person but terminally uncurious.

Your personality is the parts of you that you want people to see or it even the parts of you that appear when you are perceived by others. It’s an external presentation of yourself and it both influences the world and, is in turn, influenced by it.

The basic-average man wondered if we didn’t want to order a white bean hummus?

*

If the basic-average-man had asked me, I would have told him that usually my personality tends to be decisive and direct. I love a hot take. I’m quick on my feet and in mind and, at times dismissive of delay. Impatient even. Productive, always.

I tend to most often be in my personality when I’m at work — not when I’m writing — but when I’m in jobs. This often leads to moments where my personality carries me away. I might be moving quickly, tossing out decisions and opinions with clarity and certainty, but once I slow down, once I’m driving home, I begin to question myself:

Why did I say it like that? I didn’t entirely mean it as I said it. Did people understand that? Did they understand me?

It’s taken me some time to realize that this period of questioning, which for many years in many jobs, was a daily occurrence was, in fact, arising from the delta between my personality and my character.

*

My character arcs toward the tender and discerning. Prone to a sharp read. Bent towards nuance. Soft, even.

I am most in my character when I’m at home, whether that’s physically in terms of location, or spiritually, in terms of company. When I am in my character around others, it’s rare that I experience a period of questioning after the fact. On those drives back, I usually experience calm — a sense of fulfilment. Living in alignment with my character, my values, has this effect of ease. Of peace.

This is not to say I need a new personality. My personality gets so much done.

I love the point of view, the hot take, the sense of humor, even the leadership that my personality allows me to access. But when people take my personality as my entire self, they misunderstand me, typically, to be more rigid that I really am. And as a result, I feel misunderstood! which can lead me to a kind of defensiveness that J calls ‘prickly’ and so suddenly a loop forms where I become the thing I worry people believe I am.

*

What I am trying to do these days is bridge the delta. Take my character to work. Bring my personality to drinks. I’m trying to be more aware of when I am in one part of myself and when I am in the other. Reform is not the purpose but rather reunion.

I don’t know yet what I will discover in and of myself the closer my personality and my character draw together. What will arise of their new and nearing proximity? But it feels important to me to discover. Even understanding the difference between the two feels essential to greater understanding, from others, and from myself.

*

As it turned out, I did not want the white bean hummus. I wanted the bill.

Outside the cafe, I stepped quickly toward my vehicle. Goodbye, I said to the basic-average man. Good luck, I said.

I left so quickly I caught the basic-average man’s lightly confused Okay, bye? only at the periphery, like a trailing scent in the air. When I looked back, he stood in the middle of the sidewalk. He looked unsure. A man who had no idea what direction was his.

He had told me everything he knew about himself and somehow, both of us understood absolutely nothing about who he was.

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Loomed large…

COVID-19.

K’s death.

Blood clots and a stent in my body.

Writing these letters.

Wanting to die.

First fiction publication.

First book.

Leaving teaching.

Kissing J in a photo booth.

Making a house into a home.

Wanting to live.

Marrying J while the house burned down.

Getting a new puppy.

Trying and Trying and Trying.

Moving back into the house.

Undergoing IVF.

A positive pregnancy test.

Counting baby kicks.

**

Not heard…

Slappity-shuffle-slide of his insulated slippers against the apartment’s carpet.

Muffled-thud of his electric piano’s keyboard as he played.

His best name for me.

Taylor Swift.

Rustle of his markers against the tracing paper.

His morning sniffs.

**

Learned in therapy…

The freedom of forgiveness.

How to accept help.

To listen first.

To cry.

To say the hard thing softly.

To continue, against the odds.

To say Maybe.

**

Came to believe…

Acknowledge loss.

Tenderness > > >

Write anyway.

Ask for help.

Acknowledge joy.

Forward is a pace.

Time is the only luxury.

**

Taking forward…

Grace.

You.

Thes…

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Today, the deer are out on the river ice. Picked their way through the stalks of rust brush branches and then settled among them.

Their ears, huge.

Catching at all the sounds of the city rushing around them, the water, still running in the wide part of the river that has not yet iced over, though now there are floes free-floating and stripes where the water goes dark as an underarm around the lighter strips of warmer water.

Some of us will grow old enough to see that our ears never stop growing. We will pick our way gently through the later seasons of our life with huge ears too.

I haven’t seen the deer all year but today, here they are. Absence, of course, cannot be avoided this time of year. I dream about the last album he heard. I unpack holiday decorations and realize how many have not returned from the fire. I drift back over what has been.

*

J and I spent a portion of this year living in temporary housing because our house burned down on the day of our wedding and then he and I largely spent the next portion of the year consumed by IVF.

These kinds of events are exhausting emotionally, and draining in terms of time, but they are also expensive. Of course, there is privilege in being able to access fertility treatments, and of course, there is privilege in even having a home to return to, and there is also financial strain.

For the most part, this also means this had been a year of pennies, of small piles of them, of holding their little brass weights and wondering where those weights should go. At times, the reality of what the fire took for itself, of what IVF demands of you, the checks and balances of accounting drained our world of something—everything turning a little flatter, a little more desaturated.

We’ve had days where we feel as if we are dragging shadows around and then, inevitably, one or the other of us will wonder: Does it just feel like it’s all work, work, work, and worry?

And we will look at each other and realize, a lot of the time anyway: Well yes, that actually is it. That’s what’s happening here.

*

We’re good at the romance.

J said this to me this week. We were driving home from some errand or another. He sipped on a black coffee where the top note was strawberry (he would have preferred caramel) and I clutched a green sencha (perfectly warm).

It was true, what he said and also a little eerie because he had no idea that I had been writing this past week about this very point. I’d been trying to pin when exactly we began to romance our world but all I’d been able to grasp what that it was somewhere in the midst of those moments, desaturated and shadowy.

*

At first, we started by romancing the four blocks surrounding our home, as well as our home itself. This was not particularly difficult because, after we moved back into our renovated home post-fire, EVERYTHING was romantic.

The hidden garbage and recycling bins? Romantic.

The electronic locks (instead of cold keys that had to be fumbled with in -20 degree winter or left on top of cars and then lost to the slush?). ROMANTIC.

The familiar array of cracks in the pavement stones leading up to our home? Romantic.

The dogs that we recognized, passing by our window that looked, once again, out onto the train and the river? Obviously, romantic.

But from there, as the shadows began to creep back, as they tend to do, we began to romance other aspects of our living —

Trying one of the six different ways one can tie a scarf, as we head out for said walk around the blocks of the house. Deciding that the Parisian isn’t for us, or our hair, tangled into birds’ nests by the time we return.

The crackling of thin ice as it tightens on the tree branches.

A super-tart lemonade.

Maltesers in bed.

ANY DOG WITH THEIR SWEET LIL SNOOT AND/OR HEAD OUT THE CAR WINDOW.

Reading past dark with the windows open.

A very small bar with very low lighting such that I can barely see you and you can barely see me. Ordering only 1 thing off the menu that you, thank God, can barely see.

Sitting on a bench in an art gallery and eating a soft, salty pretzel.

FRESH FLOWERS IN A BLOWN GLASS VASE ON THE TABLE, PARTICULARLY IF RANUNCULUS OR ROSES (NOT RED) ARE INVOLVED.

Stringing our little patio with soft-white lights and actually turning them on at night.

Cards for no occasions.

Sitting on the same side of the table and close together.

Calling a pal and hoping they pick up. Or were free for a walk.

Black tea in a double-walled glass mug.

Little romantics, as I have come to think of them. Small but remarkable feints against the shadows. I offer them to you, in case you might need them yourself.

They are, the way I see it, all ways into discovering the name of the things we see in our lives daily. Those things that we see, and we see, and we see. It takes time, romance, and if we are lucky, we will have enough of it. These little romances are ways to stay in one season long enough to realize that now, a different season will come. Has come.

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Darien’s series 3 Things: Short Prose Talks” is a Substack Live where short prose authors talk about writing and the creative process. Each guest shares three things: 1) a selection of short prose, 2) a prompt, and 3) a writing tip.

Paid subscribers receive access to the full replay, along with:

• Complete video of our 60-minute conversation

• Readings of seven chapters from Here After

• My “enabling constraints” revision method

• Our discussion of structuring memoir through proximity and white space

• My approach to writing ethics and protecting privacy

• Analysis of how fragments create meaning through juxtaposition

• The role of Substack in my writing practice and grief journey

• My answer to a question posed by a participant: “It sounds like you got an agent before you were published. If correct, how did you get an agent?”

• My writing tip and generative prompt

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When I was 21, at uni overseas, I lived with two roommates in a tall, skinny, stone house that shared a party wall with the tall, skinny, stone house beside us. The three of us, for the most part amicably, shared a room with a bunk bed, a single bed, a tall bureau, and one window that overlooked a green square of park. Across that green, someone in another stone building would play the cello in the evenings. At specific hours, there was the sound of bells. At all hours, there was the sound of sirens.

I adored that house, those roommates. This is not to say we were the same. My roommates and I were all studying, but we spent our time differently. One roommate ran all the time and loved kooky vintage t-shirts. The other tended to her dreadlocks with such steady care that the memory of the soft buzz of her strands knotting together still makes me feel at ease when I think about it. Both my roommates lovingly stepped over the dishes I left on the floor all the time, making me the roommate to be tolerated, and the lucky one.

As for me and my time, I spent most of it hunched over my computer — writing papers or a blog for my friends and family back in Canada. I have photographs of me, perched on the single bed, elbows propped against the mattress, spine a veritable cashew, hair piled in a knot on top of my skull, grinning — oblivious to the neck and shoulder pain this particular posture would later guarantee.

It was amid this gloriously oblivious time that I found the Enneagram. It’s a bit more mainstream now, but in 2010/2011, it was still just a little corner of the Internet. Yet another personality test. And since taking personality tests IS essentially my entire personality, I was intrigued.

I made my way through the long version of the test, wending my way to a set of numbers at the end. One was the primary personality number, I understood, and the other was something called a ‘wing.’

Part of what made that time at uni so wonderful was the distinct sense of time expanding. In every direction, time felt like a rich possibility. This allowed me to go down all-night investigations of things like the Enneagram — an education within my formal education.

There’s a lot I could say about the Enneagram (possibly too much. Just ask anyone who’s ever been the recipient of one of my multi-hour Enneagram downloads). But one of the first most revealing revelations it gave me at 21 was clarity on how I know things.

*

The Enneagram teaches that there are three “Centers” of intelligence: the Gut (Types 8, 9, 1), the Heart (Types 2, 3, 4), and the Head (Types 5, 6, 7). While each Center encompasses more than just decision-making—motivating emotions, reactive tendencies—what struck me most was realizing (in the mirror of the Enneagram) thatI’ve always tended to make decisions (particularly major ones) through a gut feeling, a sense of ‘this feels like the choice for me.’ This doesn’t mean I don’t research or ask others for their opinions—I do—but those factors are not the deciding factors for me ultimately.

Until I began to learn about the Centers (I, as I am sure it is becoming obvious, am a Gut center), I hadn’t understood that this kind of internal knowing was not universal. Not everyone, I began to realize, could access an internal sense of direction or instinct. Not everyone made their decisions through an embodied sense of direction.

Take my partner J. He’s a Heart Center. When he asks for my help deciding between, let’s say, A or B, I’ll say: okay, but first, how do you feel about A versus B? And inevitably he will answer by telling me about how A will affect Relationship 1 and/or Relationship 2, and/or how the ripple effects will affect a system of relationships all directly and often also tangentially related to Option A and B.

Even now, knowing that he’s a Heart Center, sometimes still, I’ll listen to him talk and enter a distinct sense of bafflement: Why are we talking about relationships when I asked how you feel? Why do these relationships matter when I’m asking about what you think you should do?

This is the thing about Heart Centers: the relationships are how Heart Centers know what to do. J knows things relationally. His sense of what’s the path for him is mediated through connection. So when I ask how he feels, he translates that into: what are the relational consequences of this decision?

And when I push further—no, but what do you feel?—he’ll shake his head. He doesn’t know. He might have flickers of feeling but nothing concrete, nothing that feels reliable.

*

For further contrast, a close friend is a Head Center. When they’re faced with a decision, they’ll start a detailed review: data, evidence, more data. It’s familiar to me, this research deep-dive. But the difference between them and me is that for them the data is the authority. It is what they look to to guide where they go next. For me, the research is a point of reference, not the point of reference—for me, that is generally how I feel, the gut instinct.

Of course, like anything, we all access all three Centers. But depending on your Enneagram type, one Center tends to lead. And when you know which one leads for you, it’s a strangely clarifying understanding. It gave me a way of mapping myself, especially when I was feeling unsure or stuck.

For me, the work since 21 has been learning to differentiate between gut instinct and anxiety: a difference that still often only becomes obvious to me with hindsight.

But this framework—this knowing where your Knowing begins—has consistently helped me navigate moments that I’ve felt trapped in, without any idea of where to go next. It’s helped me return, again and again, to the truth that even when I don’t know how I feel, I know where to start looking.

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A man is outside with a metallic shaker and he will not stop troubling its many metallic sheets. The rattle produces a shimmering sound that is so loud. His child listens to this without making any sound himself, which means the father only shakes harder.

I am inside but the rattle defies any kind of barrier. Inside, there’s no air conditioning in the cafe so the air is woven from so many thick strands that wool over my mouth. I’m also hungry, which I don’t know explicitly, though I do realize the existence of a faint scrim of nausea seasicking behind my bellybutton. There’s a man standing so close to me that his mats of dark arm hair almost touch me. He loudly lectures his wife. The volume he’s exerting is necessary in order to part the din.

Another wave of people presses into the cafe. J is in this wave that is really a line. The metallic shaker makes its way inside now too and everyone’s voices, even the hiss of the milk foamer, rises to combat the metal layers’ conflict. The…

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Years ago, I began to feel strong. I was training for a half-marathon, a whim that slowly began to take over large aspects of my life—influencing how I ate, how I drank, how I arranged my days, even causing me to begin to seriously pursue weight-lifting and high intensity training.

I woke up at 4AM, 5 times a week in pursuit of strength. And that was just the weights. I would also run after a full day teaching at least 4 times a week too—hours beside the river, all sweat and salt and whatever music I was into at the time.

It was during this season that I would notice strength in small ways — easily hauling bags of groceries to and from my car. Walking up multiple flights of stairs without any shortness of breath or burning in my legs. My neck, which is always problematic, was quiet for months on months. I held a certain confidence in approaching physical tasks that I might have avoided before.

And while there was never a particular moment where I declared the word as one that belonged to me, there was, in that season, a diffuse and pervasive sense of strength.

Now, I have always been lucky to experience good physical ability and I am grateful for this. But alongside this lifetime of healthy physicality, I have admittedly struggled to feel strong. Even in youth, I couldn’t ever do a pull-up or a full, proper push-up. It’s always been hard for me to build muscle and even harder to maintain it. This physical fact is also exacerbated by a lifetime disinterest in weight-lifting.

My penchant has always been for the long distances, the hours of repetitive movement — the strange, emptying that long-distance swimming or running provokes in my mind. But the experience of lifting heavy things? Of straining against gravity to inch my chin above a bar or pull a weight above the earth’s hold? It’s just never called me.

Even in the year of 4AMs, what propelled me out of bed was not the activity itself but the cameraderie I felt in the band of 4AMers, the way we cheered each other on, filled each other’s water bottles, stood by the TRX ropes and clapped for each other to do just one more rep. I love to be a part of a team, and I always have, so the strength that began to layer itself into my arms, my legs, my core, that was all just a useful and welcome byproduct of the community I found in those small hours at the gym.

After I would run the half-marathon, things would change. I began to suffer horrific exercise-induced migraines that effectively ended HIIT and running and shortly after this, K would die and the world, in COVID, and my own world, in grief, would grind to an eerie halt. The physical strength that I had worked so hard to gain would quickly erode. Another loss in a dizzying time of immense loss.

Now, a strange part of the universe of strangeness of grief and the ways in which people tend to interact with grievers is that while I was physically the weakest I had ever been after K died (not just due to inactivity but also to the collapse of my health), I have never been told more often in my life about how strong I was.

You are so strong.

Grievers, including myself, hear this all the time. It comes from a good place, most of the time. People tend to be shocked by what has happened to you and this makes them feel scared, and in turn, a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit weaker. They look at you, in a nightmare that is now barely touching their lives by their proximity to you, and they cannot fathom how you are standing in front of them. They tend to attribute this to strength.

I’ve always found this hard to hear because in my own grief, and in the conversations I’ve had with others in grief, no one feels strong. The amount of times my body physically collapsed beneath the weight of panic, sorrow, and overwhelm after K died is so many I gave up counting.

Recently, I had someone call me strong, once again. It was in loose reference to the five year anniversary of K’s death which was 3 days ago. I asked them what they meant? I told them no one is strong in grief. That I would literally never attribute strength to my being here, five years after his heart stopped.

When I said this, the person I was talking to wondered what I would attribute to my continued existence?

I offered to them what I wish to offer to anyone in grief, supporting someone in grief, or in a time where you feel unable. I told them that when K died and my health shuddered, both pulverized my own idea of strength. I was brought into undeniable confrontation with the fact that I was not going to make it on my own.

So, I asked for help, I told the person I was talking to. I asked for a lot of help and when I was lucky enough to receive it, I accepted it.

Wouldn’t I see that as a kind of strength? countered my conversation-mate.

But I wouldn’t yield.

To ask for help, I contended, you have to admit that you actually can’t do it on your own. And when we accept help, the harvest that we reap is so much more than any idea of what capacity a person has to withstand great pressure. When we admit that we can’t, and that we need others to help us do what we cannot, we enter an abundance of what I call shared tenderness, and while it is powerful — I don’t think it can be limited to only strength.

The alley behind my house is a small river of rain right now but the weather report says despite how much rain there’s been, it’s no more than last summer.

In three weeks and three days, it’s five years. Time fillets and opens into the fact of now and the fact of then—sometime after he died, staring at a small computer screen while a woman told me the first phase of grief, acute grief, was about five years long.

My fingernails gripping the edge of a couch, hard enough to cause pain. The despair at the length of time. The impossibility of making it so far into what was then a sheer and unrelenting rock face of time. So much time.

*

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There’s a devastation of goslings outside the window. I watch one die, black webbed feet startling until the mother-goose turns and leaves the gosling’s side which is how I know, just seconds after the mother-goose. Someone stops and asks a lodgepole pine why it has chosen this particular place to live. That’s in another time but lately I’m losing track. Longing has its own time. Grief has another. And I’m somewhere in the tumble of both.

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This past Sunday, the marathon runs through the front window of our house. Sweat silvers every person’s shoulders, and there are so many ways to run. Some run with gravity in their heels, seats sat back and low. Others tilt so far forward it is as if they are falling into gravity. Tutus, and short-shorts, one man in a full zoot suit. Another man skateboards by, part of the marathon but given his own lane. His arms and legs have been amputated, so he pushes at the street with his residual limb-leg. He’s in a bright red hockey jersey and he’s flying. Zips through my window and onward, toward the looming buildings of downtown.

Any one who chooses the marathon knows that we must learn how to endure. I suspect they also know that there are so many things we will need to endure without choosing them. Choosing to practice endurance then is a privilege and a practice, but neither of this changes the fact of its brutality.

Years ago, when I was training for a half-marathon, I kept faltering at the seventeenth kilometre. It wasn’t my legs, or even my lungs, that were tripping up, my coach explained. It’s your mind.

She set me on a course of training the hard points. Of practicing barreling into the moment of quitting and then, just even for a second or two, gasping my way deeper into it. Sometimes, she told me, there is no getting past it. You must learn, first in small ways, that you can endure the hard moment.

*

Have you ever forgiven anyone?

RJ, my therapist has been touting forgiveness for years. Every time I end up in his office, virtual or realized, and we get on to the topic of a person, here or there that brings up in me an awful feeling, sticky, and a little helpless, but angry too, all of it swirling in a nauseous and brutal brew, RJ tells me the awful feeling is likely shame. That it is one of the most pernicious and difficult to shift emotions. That if we steep in shame for long periods of time, it can turn into a thick sediment. Choke up our arteries. Slow living down. Make shifting or changing seem impossible.

I come by the feeling honestly. This person or two, there’s been real pain inflicted. And, as I tell RJ, on the bad days, I’m afraid of these people and on the good days, I’m angry with them. And on the days in between, I wonder why they won’t just leave me alone.

Always, the gentle nod. The listening scratch of RJ’s pen on his yellow legal pad. Then, the inevitable offer —

Forgiveness?

For years, my shaking head. My flat palm in the air.

I don’t want to hear about it, I tell him. Give me another way.

*

I am walking the river a lot these days. Blisters on the soles of my feet inside my Vans. J and I hike the wooded slopes and the city falls away. Only the faint rumble of the train I lean on in my living can be heard. We get so lost that we are bushwhacking through gnarled bushes, their stalks thick like trunks, but spiralled into each other and so many. There’s spiders in my hair.

We choose the path through the thickness. Or, I should say, we choose to plunge into the thicket of growth and make our own way. I am not having a good time. I imagine spiders clicking their four pairs of heels together at the entrance to the cavern of my ears and going on an adventure of a lifetime. The magic schoolbus of spiders burrowing into my ear canal and wondering at the wax museum of my interior.

J is certain that if we continue, eventually we will find the path that’s meant for people but as my Vans, which are held together by literal will, the seams at the toes entirely pulled away from the fabric, my socks flashing with every step, skid down the slope and I have to grab the thin, spiralling arm of a tree (or is it a bush? there’s no trunk? why does my mind skip like this when I am afraid?) to slow my descent, I tell him: Enough. Let’s hike back up the way we came. Let’s find another way around.

Everything requires discernment. Sometimes, you have to train your brain that you can continue. And sometimes, you have to train your brain that it’s okay to stop. Admit there is a limit and you have reached it. And MY WORD what it takes to know the difference.

*

I reached my own limit of a kind, teetering at the edge of the new year. The final exhaustion of hefting around The Bad Feeling.

All right, I said to RJ. Let’s try it your way.

*

His way was simple: a statement to be repeated anytime I felt the feeling starting to swamp me: I forgive ——— because I want to live free. That was it.

I left his office and before I was at the parking lot, I’d already needed to repeat the words three times. I forgive ——— because I want to live free. I forgive ——— because I want to live free. I forgive ——— because I want to live free.

*

RJ makes it clear to me that the forgiveness practice is not one of permission. Forgiving someone, he explains, does not mean that what they did to you was acceptable or right. It does not mean a repair of relationship. Forgiving someone, he insists, has nothing to do with their behaviour and everything to do with yours.

You do not have to live shackled to the Bad Feeling, he tells me. Forgiveness can set you free from it.

But what they’ve done — I say.

It’s their burden to know how or if they can live with that, RJ tells me.

He is gentle when he assures me that forgiveness also does not negate the facts of what I have had to experience. To endure.

But you don’t have to stay there, he says. You can live with those facts differently.

*

Some days, I say the words a hundred times a day. But inexplicably, after a few months, I begin to say them less. And now, I realize, it’s been at least a month since I’ve said them at all.

*

It’s inexplicable, RJ tells me when I tell him that I am furious because the words worked.

Why? he asks.

How does it work? I want to know.

He shrugs.

I didn’t even WANT to forgive anyone, I explain. I just said the words because it was simple and I was in pain and I really didn’t think it could work.

He shrugs again. He doesn’t know either.

But you feel—

I nod.

Yes, I say. I do.