In the End, We All Become Stories

So. 2020 has been quite a thing, hasn't it? If I'm being real, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about the deaths. The racial reckonings. The soon-to-be-former president. What could I say that Trevor Noah hasn't said better? There's no material for me in a year like this.

But as it comes to a close, I think I've found my niche—the one topic I feel like I can talk about with some authority: endings.

Moving on

The first definitive ending I remember was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. It was the year we came home from camp to see a moving truck in the driveway. Was that the real timing of it? Perhaps not. But it's the way I experience it in my memory. I went to camp with my friends and came home to an empty house and an open road.

Saying goodbye

The next ending saw me in a soccer field in the middle of the jungle, waving at a climbing plane and knowing that even though it was my parents who were flying away, it was their child who would never come back.

Burning bridges

Then there was the end of the marriage that never should have begun. We've all got one of those, right? I'll never forget that last night. Laying next to him in bed, knowing I'd be gone in the morning. "If I knew it all, is there any way I could stay," I asked him. "If you knew it all, you'd hate me." I suppose I didn't need to know it all.

Vanishing

Saying goodbye to him was easier than saying goodbye to me. That's the one that cut like a surgeon's knife. They tell you that once the cancer's gone you can settle into a "new normal," which sounds innocuous enough. It's the kind of phrase designed to distract you from the everything you're about to lose.

Moving on. Saying goodbye. Burning bridges. Vanishing.

These are things I know about.

Only you know what 2020 has done to you, what it's taught you about endings. But I hope you also know that when one door closes, another one opens. Just kidding! I would never say that to you. Because that's something definitive I've learned from loss. That minimizing or slapping a cliche on an ending is not the way to heal.

Do I know the actual way to heal? No. I suppose I do not. But I do know it's not as simple as one door closing so another can open. It's a process. Wounds becoming scars. Scars becoming stories. Stories becoming doorways—doorways that open into the past and the future. 

You learn how to bleed without becoming faint. You learn how to wear your scars with more pride than shame. You learn how to brave your way into telling the tale. You learn how to open a door both ways.

2020 is the story we're living right now, but it's a story rooted in our past and shaping our future. It's a story that already was and still will be—even after the calendar turns and the vaccine is readily available and the man in the White House is clapped in irons! Just a little wishful thinking for all you optimists out there :)

So for all the endings that were out of your control, all the endings that were inevitable, all the endings that made you angry, and all the ones that have changed you in ways you didn't want to change, I wish you doorways. I hope that someday, you can walk in and out of this time on your own terms, dipping into the well of your own blood to write whatever story needs telling.

Title quote "In the end, we all become stories." by Margret Atwood.