I’ve been reading Bittersweet, and it has been at turns revelatory and affirming, just as Quiet was before it. Entering into our pain, and going a step beyond to make a creative offering of it, isn’t something our culture–even our genetics, often–gears us to do, but I am so here for it.

Longing, grief, brokenness, pain, sorrow–these are the black keys on the piano of life, the feelings that are more than feelings that we try to opt out of, avoid, because of their perceived negativity which is really just dimensionality–fullness. There is a weight to these states that must be grappled with; once encountered eye-to-eye, they can’t just be blown off. My nature, apparently, is to grapple. I am at home among these black keys, and the music they make is at first odd and mournful, and then, always, hauntingly beautiful.

It’s the odd and mournful part that comes first, though. And even if you’re willing to sit through that, not everyone around you will. Which is also fine with me, because I’m not a fan of crowds.

Last week at this time I was climbing a mountain. Or a hill. Or some inclined natural structure, one-point-five kilometres to its summit, the last third of which was, according to the sign warning/tempting me away, “unformed and steep.” Thoughts of ticks and snakes and dingoes and rapists (isn’t it fun being a woman? #blessed) pinging around my brain, I ascended, much of the time on all fours, pausing to turn back approximately two thousand times before arriving at the peak, sweaty and proud. It had only taken me about thirty minutes and forty-four years to get there.

There was a small town fifteen minutes from my son’s overnight school camp. There was three hours from our home in Sydney. There was a country of which I am now a citizen that happens to be ten thousand miles from another country of which I am also a citizen. There was through the wilds and glories of my son’s additional needs, brought to you by neurodivergence in the form of autism, and through the wilds and glories of my own additional needs, brought to you by anxiety and all the other little quirks of my own brain. There was a rental with two other friends who understand, and to some degree or other experience, all of this.

There was a spot on a mountaintop on a coastline filled with beauty I never would have seen had I not been forced onto those black keys my whole life, making music of a sort I’d never planned. There and here are the same now, this searing beauty always hand-in-hand with difficulty, difference, divergence. They are inextricable, and now I am inextricable from them.

The Kid made it through both days of camp and stayed with me at night, and this was neither disappointing nor perfect, but something beyond both–something called exactly how it should be. For him, right now. For us. For the minor keys we inhabit, the ones that require a bit of nimbleness because they aren’t each neatly beside each other but scattered about in their own pattern, producing a song that contains every note that matters.

“…he has developed the capacity to simulate deep calm while experiencing none of it. In his core, Mervyn Glass is a frantic man.” –Damon Galgut, The Promise

There are some things you don’t learn, would never suspect, about other people until you are thrown together by life in a way that is more collision than cocktail party; multi-car pileup than Pinterest. And there are similar things you don’t learn and would never suspect about yourself until the same sort of “accidents.”

I have always been able to fake it (ie, live politely in a world that demands constant positivity), but such pretensions lead unfailingly to frustration/anger/quietness/eventual shutdown. I retreat to the more honest part of myself and hang out there until I find the people who will join me and talk about digestive issues or heartbreak or devastating disappointment rather than the weather. This is where I’d always rather be (unless sitting on my own couch alone is an option): digging deeply into the rubble of life’s experience and, sometimes (read: always) being surprised to find hope, and company, there.

Last week I met a couple of friends for lunch on a beach I hadn’t visited since before Covid, and for four hours we sat there, talking about our shared experiences delivered through our quirky kids. Roads, not identical but close enough, that we never expected to walk but on which we found each other. And this is what I’ve never stopped finding to be true: that there are people I never would have known were it not for the things I never would have chosen. And people I did know, but came to know in an entirely new way.

Mark that for the “This Is Everything” pile.

Tomorrow (though when this posts, it will be yesterday), The Kid goes to a two-night sleep away camp with years five and six from his school. They’ll stay in cabins and bring sleeping bags and eat camp food on their own mess kits and it is all just too much for me. (Don’t ask about my digestive issues in response.) Two friends–mothers of their own quirky kids–and I will be renting an airbnb nearby in case we are needed, because we know how things like this can either end triumphantly or go tits-up within minutes. My face looks calm but my entire body is a live wire, but then I sat down this morning and read this:

“He is not simply telling us to get over our worry. He is reminding us of the way the world actually works. Worry and anxiety take us out of our present moment and into a world that does not exist. When we worry, we put our feet on the shaky ground of a future (or past) constructed in our own mind.”

I have definitely done some world-building through worry. But…

The other day, Little Brother was asking if other countries besides the US have Independence Day holidays–he was trying to equate that with Australia Day (which is…not accurate? And also, kinda problematic). When I explained to him how America came to have an Independence Day to celebrate, light dawned on his face and he said, “So you don’t get to have one unless you weren’t free and then you are?”

There’s so much there. So much that you don’t get to have unless you were first not who/where you are now.

After I dropped the kids at school this morning (complete with a pre-camp rundown with TK’s teacher), I headed to the beach and stuffed myself into my wetsuit. The pain of the first minutes gave way to the rhythm of my strokes which gave way to a series of waves that upset that rhythm. I gazed downward toward the sandy floor that never moves because I did not create it, and kept swimming until I reached the end: the end of one small story held in a bigger one whose ultimate ending is kept safe no matter what.

I’m always running from something
I push it back, but it keeps on coming
And being clever never got me very far
Because it’s all in my head
And “You’re too sensitive”, they said
I said, “Okay, but let’s discuss this at the hospital”

On a walk the other day, I passed a couple walking a small dog. Their pet was wearing a jacket that read, simply, NERVOUS. Clothing with an ID meant to warn others to take care–and I thought to myself, I need a jacket like that.

I run to the song above, its chords sounding through my headphones as I pass by our corner of the Pacific Ocean and its harbours, and in this I feel seen too: musical strains that put notes to my particular form of…whatever you want to call it. Brokenness. Flaws. Challenges. Shortcomings.

Or maybe, as I told the boys this morning on the way to their basketball camp: design? Since, as we happen to believe, God doesn’t make mistakes.

This was harder to believe when I was younger. I walked around the world out of place. Like my “papers weren’t in order,” Dani Shapiro writes in the book recommended to me by my own co-author. “Wherever I went I felt like a foreign correspondent on the sidelines of my own life.” This feeling marked my own wanderings and, against others’ better judgment but not my own, drove me northeast until I hit Manhattan, where everything began to fall into place, or into the place those particular pieces–faith, friends, husband–were meant to be.

While there, and when only the corner pieces of that puzzle had been assembled, I moaned over my singleness and listened to a lot of music from the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack.

I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving
And I’m standing still…and the world spins madly on

Maybe it didn’t hit me while I was traversing those streets on repeat, but at some point, because of New York and the feeling of otherness that drove me there–the being an observer in my own life, my differences relegating me to another corner of the country than the only one I knew–I realised that, within the hand of grace, what’s wrong with you becomes what’s right with you.

Now, instead of the world spinning madly on while I watch from a window, I find, like Shapiro, “a day that holds me, connects me to the spinning world.” Days that start with ocean views and end with bodies piled on a couch, a dog at our feet, and in the middle of these days are all the tears and triumphs that come with working our ways honestly through ourselves: the brokenness, the flaws, the challenges, the shortcomings. The designs.

It’s Little Brother’s greatest fear: getting lost. Or, more specifically, being left behind, forgotten. I don’t know if it comes with the terrain of being the youngest, but it’s a pressing concern for him–an off-limits topic of jokes for one who loves to joke.

Yesterday, we met friends at the stage show of Mary Poppins and for an instant (real time: three seconds) as I approached the concessions stand with The Kid in tow (he is not one to wander when popcorn is involved; neither am I, when it’s champagne), I turned and couldn’t see LB. “Where’s Will?” I asked his brother, who only had eyes for buttery salty goodness, and in that second I spotted him: LB with his furrowed brow, eyes in panic mode. He saw me, ran over, buried his face in my side. Found.

Sometimes you just have to look around. It’s good advice that’s hard to follow when the walls close in on you: look around. The trick is knowing whether to be still or move while doing it.

Last week The Husband and I saw Top Gun, and the nostalgia was almost as good as the popcorn (and champagne), and a couple of days later I listened to a podcast about a plane that went missing in the 1940s. Dead reckoning as a strategy was mentioned: using your previous location, plus factors like speed and direction, to determine where you are now. In biology, it’s called path integration. In Moana, Maui describes something similar–wayfinding: knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.

All of this is only helpful, of course, if you admit that you don’t know where you are. That you’re lost. Thankfully, I lost all my dignity (feigned or otherwise) associated with knowing where I am and what I’m doing long ago. Shrugging my shoulders is both a perpetual act of honesty and a great way of relocating them from their anxiety-positioned home around my ears.

I remember stepping out of the subway in New York and just moving before I figured out which corner I was on because I didn’t want anyone else knowing I didn’t know. This led more often than not to backtracking, repositioning, circling a block not to be seen. Kind of pathetic. Sometimes, moving isn’t the answer.

It strikes me that these tactics–reckoning, way finding, path integration–well, first of all, they don’t always work. But also? They require information beyond what we know; a source of guidance outside of ourselves. A reorientation of our own position, or someone else’s.

Also in New York, I found home in TH, about a year before he figured out the same of me. It’s not always the lost who have to be still and wait. Being found doesn’t happen on our own time.

But it does happen.

The boys did a basketball camp last week. It was TK’s first camp ever, and there was much to discuss after. And before, like when he ran up to the coaches at check-in to enquire whether they are nice to autistic kids. Or the next day, when he asked the coach not to touch him while teaching him. We give our kids a home, a place, so that when they’re out in the world they know where they are by knowing who they are. His teacher told me the last day of term, how adept he is at advocating for himself, at saying what he needs. I think of this one thing I’ve done right that I never could do for myself when I was his age, and in that moment I am found: I am right where I’m supposed to be.