Monthly Archives: December 2020

Learning how to like my own life

10/10 would recommend buying yourself pretty cards just because.

10/10 would recommend buying yourself pretty cards just because.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something a coworker said to me the day after my breakup. “I promise you will like your life, too.” It is hopeful but realistic; I don’t know that any of us go around loving our lives. After all, there are doctor’s appointments and bad hair days and bills to pay and that one ex who still texts you “Hey stranger” even though you never respond.

In 2019 I learned that not only could I like my life but that I deserved to like it. I was fresh off a breakup and a death in the family when the worst semester of my academic career began, catapulting me into a routine of sobbing in a heap on my couch nearly every day after school, unable to deal with anything in a meaningful way because there were cases to read and papers to write and jobs to look for. I learned that I could like my life that summer as I wandered around Kansas City on the weekends (convinced as ever that anything is walking distance if you simply believe in yourself), did legal work at my dream nonprofit organization, sang karaoke and made new friends while reconnecting with an old friend, too.

Yet again, I have been thinking about what it means to like your own life in the aftermath of a devastating breakup I didn’t see coming. As Hanif Abdurraqib so gorgeously explores in his column “On Breakups” about HAIM’s “I Want You Back,” “The thing I never learned to understand about breakups is that, even at their largest, the moment of the break itself might not be the hardest part. If you have no children together, or no assets worth squabbling over, or no other reason to hover in each other’s lives, the breaking itself can be sudden, with an entire world of grief to stumble into after.”

The breakup came in the form of a two-minute phone call I didn’t see coming on a random Wednesday night. It’s hard to even know how to begin putting yourself back together in that situation. This particular ending had at no point seemed like an even remote possibility to me. Continue reading