Jared and I are at Gallery Row, and Jared is engrossed in this work project he has been working on for at least a solid two weeks straight, and for once he was thrilled to call our date a “working date,” despite the fact that most of the time when I want to bring my laptop to Gallery Row to write, Jared says he doesn’t need his laptop; that he is happy to work off his phone.
Which, to understand that, Jared has a Google Pixel Fold, so he does actually have massive phone screen real estate when he wants to and needs it. And, arguably, he is one of the few people in this world who does, actually need it more often than not.
I am up to page 160 in “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, the chapter called “Letters.”
The book is sort of quaint even if it is still applicable to a writer’s life; it is a little window into what being a writer in 1994 would have been like. It’s hard to remember that life really was like this in my early high school days. She talks about writing on her word processor. She talks about distractions like someone calling you on the phone, or random regular procrastination-like distractions. I would like to see how she would update this book to account for social media and texting and the level of arguably world-changing distractions we have in 2026.
I just finished the chapter on finding a writing partner and I like that idea and I do run what I write by Jared, but Jared isn’t really that invested in the work; he is invested in making sure I am happy. So his advice is mostly placating and “uh-huh, Sweetie, that is nice.”
I do actually have an ideal writing partner whose opinion on my work I would deeply respect, but that person is unavailalbe for a variety of reasons and likely not interested in the gig. So, I go at it alone other than Jared’s cursory glances at whatever I’ve written. I’ve suggested the prospect previously to the individual in question to crickets. Rejection is hard.
The truth is, I write to process my world. That’s the whole reason I write. The idea of writing fiction is wholly unappealing; I don’t really do well on letting things go in my history, obviously; either.
And the truth really is stranger than fiction, I’ve found, personally.
But sitting here in Gallery Row on a Saturday night instead of our usual Friday night, I am finding that I really am settling into being a boring, settled, middle-aged wife. And, I like it.
Last night was our semi-monthly Costco run and we might as well have been sitting at an upscale restaurant than that Brookhaven Costco, with me savoring that strawberry-vanilla swirl decadent ice cream under the flourescent lights and the umbrella over our table. The thing is, at age 46 I do lament so much of what happened in my high school and college years. It is easy from this vantage point to sit here and think “What in the world was I thinking?” in reference to a lot of different experiences and relationships and things I did willingly.
But, if I hadn’t actually participated in those relationships and experiences, would I have recognized the safety Jared represented in 2003? I’m really not sure I would have.
Jared had to tame me. I was really like a wild animal, with quaint belief systems and thoughts about how the world and relationshps should be.
Jared says he plays a long game. Sometimes he alters that to say he plays a “long, long game.”I don’t know that he could have predicted taming me would take 23 years of knowing me, though.
Jared would say he hasn’t tamed me at all. I don’t think he thinks I have mellowed with age.
And I wonder what 24-year old me would think of the past 22 years. My small social circle is entirely different. I have become a near-hermit after being a social butterfly in my early 20s. To be completely honest, it is a near-miracle that I survived my early 20s, on so many fronts.
It is a miracle for different reasons that I survived my 30s and early 40s, bringing two children to adulthood.
I think I have tamed quite a lot over the last 20 years, though. And encounters with a past individual and experiences involving that person over the last couple of years have made me grateful I was able to retreat to Jared’s safety at home, after exploring attempts at closure in one situation.
And I did get that closure, even if it didn’t look exactly like I thought it would.
I’m pretty sure it looks exactly like Jared thought it would though. He was never going to tell me what to do but he knew that person wouldn’t respect boundaries. I’m still grateful for the experiences anyway.
Now that I’m eight months out from last contact with that individual, it feels like a story I couldn’t have written as fiction any better. I’m really not sure why some people have self-destruct modes, or why some people’s self-destruct modes look wildly like incredible success on the outside.
But, I got an inner look to that person’s self-destruction in slow motion in an up-front seat during a couple of very abbreviated sessions, and I came away from the experiences feeling like why yes, karma is real, and the universe is one giant balancing act and equalizer.
And I am grateful the past played out the way it did, even the recent past.
The quiet after mass-blocks on all the drama-causing individuals from my past is rather jarring, though, and the room it leaves in my brain is like a vacuum that I am struggling to fill with anything other the ghosts of their stories.
The thing is, which ghosts to tell? In what order? There are so very many of them. Sometimes those ghosts wake me up in the night, prompting me to fold myself deeper into Jared. Sometimes they invade a sunny afternoon, prompting me to lose hours to doomscrolling because distraction is better than facing that there are stories begging to be told.
And then, because there are blocks and mutual decisions for forever silence between me and these people, I find there are things to say and I have no one to talk to but the ghosts. And Jared. And thankfully, Jared has yet to get tired of me saying these things.
But I say them to Jared in an effort to escape putting them into writing for the world, too. Because some of what I have floating around in my heart feels too big to capture. Too dangerous. Some of what I feel like saying feels like I might lose my very soul if I capture the truth of what I really think and feel in writing….the rage, the heartbreak, the sorrow, and yes, even the love that exists to this day.
Even if Jared says a more accurate term for the word “love” is to substitute more appropriately “trauma-bond.” I say it is overly-simplistic to reduce years’ worth of relationship dynamics to simple “trauma-bonds.” Life is not that neat, unfortunately. Life is not that simple even when entire relationships were built upon emotional manipulation by a suicidal individual who I was not equipped to help at age 15, and actual sexual assault in a dorm room at age 19, and actual captivity in the blackness of the night at age 21.
And even so, the universe is an equalizer. I see that in the ghosts I’ve blocked, and I see it in other ways in my daily life still present.
So, I try to be more present in my marriage on a daily basis. Periodically as I write this I glance up at this man I have known of for a couple of weeks’ shy of 23 years, and I love that I think I have mellowed and he is not so sure. I love that we have three children, two of whom are now adults now. I love that we are raising three very driven individuals who have goals and aspirations and dreams just like we have had.
I love that even though we will have no one at the high school in the Fall, we will still go to band practice on Thursday nights. I love that our youngest will want that.
I love that I have goals myself now, after so many years of feeling like literal wastes of space aside from the identity of mother.
I love that routine is in reach, it is taking its rudimentary forms even before life changes in ways it will never retreat back to, when both our big boys go off to college in the Fall.
And, I truly never thought I would be one of those women who, in my late 40s, finds herself thinking that she would never go backwards in life to experience younger days. But instead, I find myself excited about the future, excited about the current state of my marriage, and excited to spend more time getting to know my children as big kids and adults.
But, the ghosts are there. And there are stories to tell. And even if they are trauma loops, they are my trauma loops, and in processing them maybe there are kernels of wisdom; warnings for other women to maybe learn from so that we can all heal a little more than we are today.
Because what happens when one of those perpetrators goes on to wild success and no justice? What happens when I get confirmation that yes, even wealth does not buy morality or a heart or respect? What happens when I find out for sure that it has not bought that individual love or freedom?
What happens when another perpetrator goes on to near destitution and deep drinking and psychological problems? What if this person was someone you were sure you were going to marry, when they were your high school sweetheart and life was quaint and there were no real problems?
But….then…..there were no real problems for me aside from scoliosis and teenage angst and recent family tragedies. This person had to go work in a strip club on school nights, in the kitchen in Atlanta because his mother thought it was the best money he could make as an 18 year old.
What happens when I learn that maybe trusting my brain was never the problem? What if I just stop and realize that we’ve all done the best we could?
And the last two years, finding closure in myself with the wealthy individual, has taught me that some people just seek out drama and that person seeking out that drama isn’t always me. Some people are magnets for it.
And I know what is wrong with that person, too, because his childhood and coming of age was equally tragic, if more privileged: tragic for entirely different reasons.
And so, I do the best I can. And I look up at Jared occasionally, immersed in his coding project for work that has made him so invested in his work lately and energized, and I am grateful. I am grateful for my life, I am grateful for our children, I am grateful for our home, I am grateful that I imported this man from Nebraska who had never so much as stepped foot on Georgian soil before he came to see me for the first time in September of 2003. I am grateful that I got homesick in 2007 and came running back and I am grateful that my children have each gotten a stellar education.
I am grateful that we are weird people, that we have strange inside philosophical family jokes that probably make no sense to other people, I am grateful that our children like philosophy like we do, even if Jared and I do lean more easily into the theology-related philosophy than our children naturally do.
I am grateful that I can rant about my past, I can write, I can talk, I can cry. I can also say, “Sweetheart, I am spiraling,” and Jared will bring me back to the present in some way or other or encourage it as best I can let him at the time.
And so: there are nights like tonight, where we find ourselves at Gallery Row: each of us writing for entirely different reasons, each of us equally satisfied. I find no answers, I avoid talking to the ghosts another night, and all is well with the world.
