A Quick Chat on Healing

Mary Oliver must've been getting a divorce.

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

—Mary Oliver

I’ve thought often about including this poem at the start of a novel. In the stories I write, where characters start out surviving in spite of some personal darkness, before ultimately discovering how to thrive because of it.

But this Mary Oliver poem guides more than just my writing. It’s been a sort of promise I’ve counted on in my life—that even as I stare into a box of darkness, there will come a time when I’ll find a use for it. When I’ll see the gift in it.

In life though, unlike in fiction, you can’t track the journey to see how far you’ve come or what’s still left ahead.

This particular period has been one of the most challenging I could’ve imagined…though of course, I’d never actually imagined it at all. None of us do, at the beginning.

So, today, I’m reflecting on all the unimaginables we withstand simply because there’s no other option but to survive. I’m reflecting on love and loss, and all the mess along the way.

Life’s incredible gifts.

And its crushing darkness.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness, and I’ve carried it with me ever since. Then, just days ago, he tried to hand me another. In a sterile courtroom full of strangers, I listened as he wrote me out of twelve years of what I’d once believed to be a love story. He devalued me. Mocked me. Erased me.

But this time, when he stared me down, and extended his darkness, there was no one there to receive it.

I was already gone.

What a fucking gift.