I cried the other night during an episode of Schitt’s Creek. If you’ve never seen the show, just know it’s objectively unsad. Subjectively hilarious. A show we—my husband and I—specifically selected to start watching because it’s funny and light and distracting and basically perfect for a time such as this. Yet there I sat, in bed at 10:30 on a Thursday night with tears rolling down my cheeks and a lump in my throat because David was awkwardly sweet and kind to his boss’ stepdaughter.
That’s when I realized, huh, maybe I’m not okay today.
For 3/4ths of you, this probably seems baffling—that a person could literally have tears rolling down her cheeks as the first sign that something is amiss in the emotions department. But some of you know exactly what I mean. You know what it is to stuff down, to pivot, to give a wide berth to your feelings because we have things to do today and crying isn’t one of them. The yawn of the emotional abyss is too threatening—feeling anything seems like a gateway to feeling everything, so we’ll feel nothing, please and thank you.
One question though: How’s that working for you in 2020?
I’ll answer for myself and say not great. Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’m still pretty good at sidestepping my emotions. That’s what 37 years of practice will do for a girl. But things are … amiss. Like the fact that I’m not sleeping. I have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep and basically the whole sleep situation is not really a thing right now. I’m exercising and vitamining and drinking a little more water with no increase in REM hours, so I’m beginning to suspect The Feelings are to blame.
As we’ve already discussed, I’m prone to inexplicable crying mid sitcom. I’m also snapping at my family when they don’t like the dinner I serve them, my weekly cocktail is now more like daily-ish, and sometimes I leave the house as soon as my husband gets home from work, drive my car to an empty parking lot, and just sit there, in the quiet, until I get a text letting me know the kids are in bed and the coast is clear.
I’m not an expert in human behavior, but I think maybe these things mean that I’m not entirely okay. And if I’m not okay, and we’re all living different versions of the same hellish year, then it seems like there’s a chance you’re not okay either?
We don’t have to talk about it, of course. If there’s one thing I’m sick to death of in 2020 it’s effing talking about it. We could never ever talk about it again, and that would be too soon. So just, I don’t know, blink twice or something if you’re not okay either.
Assuming you’ve blinked, we could sit shoulder to metaphorical shoulder. We could turn on a better crying conduit than Schitt’s Creek (I like Queer Eye or Steel Magnolias or Little Women, personally, but I’m open to suggestions). And—here’s where I get a little crazy—we could feel something.
Not the whole of it, of course—God, could anyone handle the whole of it right now? But for the space of a makeover or the minutes in the graveyard with M’Lynn and Ouiser or the moment when Jo wonders if she made a horrible mistake by saying no to Laurie and now she’s going to be alone forever … we feel it, just a little. We let a few tears roll down our cheeks, and we don’t swallow the sob right away. It’s too much, too dangerous, too open-ended to be sad for us but to be sad for them? We can be a little sad for them.
So we sit, you and I. And I know you’re crying and you know I’m crying, but we don’t have to talk about it. The knowing is enough.
Because maybe I’m not okay today, and maybe you aren’t either. But I see you. And you see me. For all that I feel that I can’t name or know, there’s one emotion I note by its absence.
I don’t feel lonely. And that’s because I have you.