Issue #4 Untangling Kinks in the Hose
On grief, joy, and letting it flow
My writing process lately has felt more like quilt-making (
’s work brought this to mind). I tend to write in bursts and return, at a certain point, resolute to see what the whole might reveal. The following is a reflection of current status, an entry from many months ago, and backstory on my most recent song release stitched together with a yarn of feelings I’ve been trying to untangle.
“You can’t close yourself off to grief without closing yourself off to joy,” my therapist said. “Imagine it like a kink in a hose.” And I realized every attempt I’d ever made to stop the flow of my despair, anger, and fear – had stopped the flow of my bliss at the same time.”
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I’ve been thinking about grief and joy a lot lately.
I’ve noticed I can inflict a stifling pressure on myself to feel wholly one way or the other at a time – as if they come from different spickets. In these moments, I pull myself apart, fractured and disembodied in order to compartmentalize and end up feeling nothing.
As Matt and I plan our wedding, get settled in our new space, and talk about our hopes and dreams for the continuation of our life together I hear myself thinking, “This is a joyous time, feel joy.” Like a controlling parent, I command my entire Self to feel the singular emotion and find fault in her when she is unable to perform it correctly.
I’ll do it on the other side, too. When grieving, I feel obligated to cut myself off from joy, guilt-ridden for feeling pleasure in the midst of pain — especially when my despair is related to other’s pain.
I don’t necessarily think guilt is an emotion to avoid, though. Rather, it’s another to allow through and channel, another kink to untangle.
While watching fireworks in Tennessee on New Year’s Eve with my nieces and nephews, all I could think about were the bombs that have been dropped on children in Gaza. I tried to act amused, but hearing the firework shrapnel hit the barn roof made my blood run cold.
Witnessing genocide unfold in real time – and watching our government not only dismiss it but facilitate it – should feel alarming.
This conditioned impulse to try and separate my feelings, I suspect, is just another venomous effect of conditioned patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. Acknowledging pain and feeling it in our bodies throws a wrench in keeping up the facade. It’s an avoidance of acknowledging that the power and comfort of the privileged so often comes at an enormous cost to others.
The more I study history from the lens of the oppressed (instead of you know, the oppressor) reading books like Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, the more I am faced with the guilt of my own complicity, the anger of feeling lied to, and the despair and rage surrounding injustices, past and present.
Since embarking on deconstructing, I have noticed how inconvenient these feelings are to those who have a vested interest in defending the status quo. Most often, I’ve experienced either silence and avoidance in response or an effort to minimize my feelings and make me, as the feeler, out to be the problem.
And though I like to imagine this gaslighting is more often unconscious than not, it is the play book for upholding systems of oppression.
Feeling it all forces us to confront uncomfortable truths and our role in them.
The fireworks bothered me not just because of their triggering nature but because there was no acknowledgement of what was simultaneously happening in Gaza. There was an unsettling separation. Joy was expected, grief was silent.
Matt recently came home visibly shaken, he’d just gone to see the movie The Zone of Interest. He said it was bone chilling and used the words “pathological compartmentalization” when describing the main characters: “A Nazi commandant who tries to build a dream life for his family near the Auschwitz concentration camp.”
I’ve been asking myself, “how has history let such atrocities happen? How are we letting them happen now?” I think maybe that’s how, “pathological compartmentalization.”
In my untangling, I’ve worried about conflating other’s pain and my own, or my guilt with my grief, or other feelings that “shouldn’t go together.” But the more I feel into all of it, the more I think it’s all connected. And the more I think we’re all connected.
’s words resonate: “No matter how far removed I am from Gaza, I don’t actually feel separate from the grief erupting there. It isn’t that I want to center myself or piggyback onto the pain of others, or because I need to project my own undefined pain onto something specific. I think it’s because you and I are earth, and because your pain is my pain.”, while also discussing the genocide presently unfolding in Gaza, recently wrote about the importance of “not looking away” and later offered a call to “let it all move from your head into your heart and see if you can really feel into the grief.” Both feel pivotal.If we don’t, I think we fracture and break off pieces of our humanity. If we don’t, I think we risk becoming dissociated, or worse, pathologically disconnected. Numb.
If we don’t, I worry we might end up like the family in The Zone of Interest eating on confiscated silver, pathologically ignoring the screaming from the other side of the fence.
It also makes me wonder if this is why joy is so closely related to grief, as Andrea Gibson points out. Maybe joy comes through with grief as a way to sustain those willing to feel into their pain and the pain of others.
A friend of mine recently wrote on Instagram, “2023 was the year we learned grief and joy can coexist.” Knowing the context — her wife’s dad died a few weeks before their wedding — the weight and wisdom of her words shot straight to my soul.
In December, I released my latest song “Airport Beer” on account of how the holidays have a way of demanding we make room for this cohabitation. Celebration and togetherness have a way of pinching the nerve on what’s been lost or what is missing.
I started the song in the winter of 2021 – a time when I was barely keeping my head above the waves of my own despair. One of my best friends called to talk while sitting in an airport waiting for a cross country flight home to bury her grandmother.
When we hung up, I felt angry – at myself for feeling sad about whatever I felt sad about, at “them,” whoever they are, for not preparing us for loss, and for my friend because she was hurting, and I couldn’t fix it.
I grabbed my guitar and fumbled through my feelings, recording the idea on a phone voice note.
I later returned to the song idea in early 2023 after hearing a friend from college had lost her dad. He died of cancer shortly after she gave birth to her first child.
Again, my words fell short. Again, I felt angry that I didn’t have more to offer. I felt angry that she’d lost her father too soon.
It prompted me to finish the song with the help of producer Sam Bierman, who encouraged me to add the final verse about losing love. I recounted an old memory of leaving an ex’s apartment for the last time. I’d flown across the country to visit with hopes of starting a new chapter together but instead was faced with goodbye, and a flight home.
Having stitched the song together this way, I find myself returning to the line “I need … a friend to hold my hand.” I wonder if the song wanted to show me that we really aren’t meant to be alone in our grief. We aren’t meant to compartmentalize and keep it to ourselves, but rather made to mourn with and alongside others as to heal, together.
The song brought to my attention something else, too — fear. It revealed not only empathy and grief but also my own fear around future loss, loss I have yet to experience but sense is inevitable. Ironically while on an airplane last May, I found myself viscerally confronted with this.
[Summer 2023]
I woke up from a nap, mouth agape, groggy and disoriented to the sound of the pilot’s announcement.
Calm and gentle, she informed us there was a mechanical issue with the plane’s hydraulics. They had attempted to fix it before take off but the problem, mid-flight, persisted.
We would be rerouting to land in Seattle, a diversion that required the plane to turn around.
My mind immediately went to logistics. “How would we get home to Los Angeles? We needed to text Ellie.” She was watching our 9 week-old puppy, Binny, 10-week-old kitten, Phoebe, and our cat, Flea.
Then it hit me, “We’re about to make an emergency landing.”
As the fear set in, I felt my stomach turn, I looked for the barf bag just in case. I couldn’t find it.
Instead of vomiting, I started to cry. Surprised by the steady stream of tears rolling down my cheeks, I sat there quietly with an odd sense of gratitude that my body had learned to emote in this way. A few years ago, I would have held my breath and had a panic attack instead.
The pilot informed us we had 35 minutes until landing.
Matt was sitting next to me, and immediately went into action sending texts to our loved ones. Just in case.
I’ve been on hundreds of flights – a privilege to travel as much as I have in my 31 years of life – and not something to brag about (cough, cough carbon emissions). And though I’m a seasoned flier, I still send the evangelical equivalent of a Hail Mary every time I feel the slightest hint of turbulence.
Having left the church and deconstructed over the past few years, it’s one of the few instances I pray to Jesus. Just in case.
Never once have I been on a flight that landed at the wrong airport.
Matt kept saying, “It’s going to be ok. It’s going to be ok.” Attempting to offer reassurance for us both.
I nodded my head while simultaneously bracing myself for the end. Staring out the window at the clouds, I felt a momentary sense of peace imagining the afterlife might feel like dancing on top of them – light and blissful. I then sent prayers of gratitude for all the life I'd already lived into the hopeful unknown.
Then a contrasting thought arose. “What if we crash and catch on fire?”
“What if Matt dies, and I survive?”
“What if I die and never see Matt or my family again?”
A therapist once told me that catastrophic thinking only causes anxiety and does not actually mitigate suffering. But in these circumstances I seem very capable of convincing myself it will be better if I go ahead and prepare for the worst.
Thinking about Matt, my parents, my nieces and nephews, my siblings, and God I began to pray to distract myself.
We started our final descent, and as we approached the runway Matt said, “Hold onto me.”
Eyes closed, my head on his lap (probably a terrible position if we did crash) the wheels hit the runway, and I knew he was right. We were going to be ok.
Two fire trucks and an ambulance waited on the runway – protocol, I’m sure, and somehow a reassuring sign that I was in fact not crazy for being so scared.
As we taxied to the gate people began to clap.
By this point I’d stopped crying but felt the feeling welling up again. This time, out of relief. I wasn’t going to die today. I was going to see my puppy and cats again. I was going to sleep in my own bed again. Matt would be ok. I would see my family again.
After informing our families we were safe, I texted my friend Aly who is a pilot. He assured me that if the pilot is talking to you and there is a plan, everything is ok. “When they’re not telling the passengers what’s going on, that’s when you have to worry,” he said.
Two months later, I boarded a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. This time, I was traveling alone.
Waiting on the runway for over an hour before take off, the plane wreaked of jet fuel. The passenger behind me said, “It smells like a barbecue in here.”
The woman across from me clutched her cross necklace before lifting her hands to her forehead, quickly bringing it across her chest and shoulders in the sign of the cross: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Fighting with $39.95 Delta Wifi, trying to distract myself from thinking too much about plane mechanics, I wondered if she was religious. Did she go to Mass and believe Catholic doctrine? Or maybe she has flight anxiety like me, and it’s the rare occasion she prays.
I used to judge the latter. Taught to be “on fire for Jesus” and warned of the dangers of being a “lukewarm christian,” I subconsciously looked down on people who opted in only when it was convenient.
It’s fascinating to me how big a role fear plays in religion, especially christianity.
I’ll admit I miss believing in Jesus when I hit turbulence. Or when I or a loved one gets sick. Or when I get claustrophobic on an elevator or in the subway.
We need something to call out to more powerful than ourselves. I pray all the time. Not to Jesus anymore but to something bigger than me.
I don’t, however, miss believing in hell.
Some fear is instinctual and life saving. Some fear is crippling and unhelpful.
I got to a point with my faith in God where I realized the only reason I was still calling myself a christian was out of fear – the crippling and unhelpful kind.
But when I braced for an unknown fate on the plane headed for an emergency landing, my biggest fear wasn’t damnation. It was having to say goodbye to people I love.
I wasn’t calling out to them to save me, or to beg for mercy. I just wanted them to know how much I love them and how much I know they love me.
It is out of fear that I deprive myself full surrender to love. It’s a coping mechanism, a tendency to stop myself from feeling the extent of my happiness in order to protect myself in case I were to lose it.
As I make room for grief and fear, I start to feel the bliss come through, too. I savor the sweetness of a morning kiss from Matt. I lean into the excitement of looking forward to our wedding day. I notice the warmth of the sunlight in the breakfast nook and listen to the sound of children playing at the nearby Montessori school. I delight in the way the lemon tree sways in the breeze. I laugh at how Phoebe cleans her paws in my water glass when I’m not looking. I take pride in how Binny has learned to sit patiently in the mudroom while I wipe his muddy paws.
I think there’s only one spicket. And I think it’s connected to the source of our being. Like maybe we’re vessels meant to stay open to allow the flow of it all as a channel to water ourselves and each other and earth. After all, “You and I are earth.”
I think untangling the kink is vital. Perhaps even life depends on it.
Listening to “Sadness As A Gift” by Adrienne Lenker, “California” by Chappell Roan, my friend Kenny’s earth shattering cover of Brandi Carlile’s “I Belong To You”
Watching Fair Play, Priscilla, Anatomy of a Fall, The Crown, Harry Potter (for the first time!), Isrealism, Saltburn (duh!)
Reading You Are the One You've Been Waiting For (Internal Family Systems) by Richard C. Schwartz, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Following Bisan