Translator: Dan Meyer Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
As a writer, I've spent my career thinking about stories and how they work.
I've fit dramatic pieces into narrative puzzles,
and I've thought about what feels true versus what simply feels good.
But I never realized how much I bought into the idea
of beginnings and endings
until I started trying to make sense of the pieces of my own story.
This is the beginning,
but it's not really the beginning.
On a Monday night in August 2009,
my ex-husband confronted me with a shotgun
and trapped me in my garage.
He had been struggling with prescription pill abuse.
He'd lost his job.
He'd lost his wife.
He'd lost that thing that keeps us tethered to this world:
the ability to see tomorrow.
He said to me, "You don't know how hard this is ..."
And only moments later, he took his own life
so then I would know how hard it was too.
In the wake of devastation,
those who are affected can fall into a trap
of believing the universe has punished us based on our worth as a human being.
And if we're now good enough,
if we learn our lesson,
we'll be rewarded.
This is what books and movies and so many tragedy narratives tell us comes next.
In the wake of my own devastation,
I came up with a list of things the universe could bring me
that might make things right:
a Best Actress Oscar
for a role I like to call a human woman pretending to be okay;
(Laughter)
a call from Oprah asking me to be part of her book club;
and finally -
this is the most important one -
George Clooney as my boyfriend.
(Laughter)
So I fell into this trap for a while - of waiting for what comes next.
I made vision boards, I read self-help books,
I went to therapy, and I tried to learn my lesson.
What I was looking for, of course,
was something to make sense of the past,
some equal, yet completely opposite reaction
that could bring a traumatic story to an end.
I had the idea that maybe this phase of tragedy could be over
if only some happily ever after came along.
This is the structure of the stories we're raised on,
the cinematic sweep of epic films,
the narratives that take a person from rock bottom
to glorious heights of success and love
and all in less than two hours.
This is what happens in movies I like to call "misfortune porn."
Don't Google that by the way.
(Laughter)
No.
Misfortune porn is a movie where you have this sad lead character,
and they get screwed non-stop for at least an hour and 45 minutes.
And then at the end they get their reward.
The cinematic reward for tragedy is having your dream come true
or making a big play
and getting carried off the field on the shoulders of your teammates,
getting carried out of the factory by the leading man,
someone starts a slow clap,
everyone cheers,
credits roll.
The End.
We want the cinematic climax to be the structure of our own difficult stories
(Sighs)
So I entertained fantasies about things that could save me
because I felt I needed saving,
cinematic happy-ending saving.
I wanted the things people promised me in their messages of condolence,
the things we say when we don't know what to say:
"This happened for a reason."
"You will find happiness again."
"You deserve something wonderful."
But the terrible truth is
that even the biggest thing you can dream up
is not the secret to healing your grief.
What arrived for me, for a while, was a case of chronic disappointment,
a certainty that I must be doing something wrong,
I was failing to learn my lesson.
I needed answers,
and I made looking for answers my full-time job.
I looked for answers in the suicide note
my ex-husband had written only moments before we were in the garage.
And it didn't give me the answers I needed or wanted.
Notes like these rarely do.
He had written seven words:
"I'm so sorry. This is very hard."
One winter day a few years ago,
I was sitting at my kitchen table writing about what had happened.
I was looking out the window past the bare trees
toward this vast expanse of peaks and valleys in the distance.
It's this amazing view
that I forget about completely when everything is in bloom.
Now by this time, I'd written thousands of words
in journals, and blog posts,
and in letters to people who could never read them -
all in this attempt to understand devastation.
And when you got down to it,
really, what I'd written was just a longer version
of "I'm so sorry. This is very hard."
And on this day it struck me
that we cannot wait for the universe to bring us some amazing thing,
some equal yet opposite event that will make up for tragedies.
And we cannot wait for a grand reckoning
that will explain what is unexplainable.
Because no good thing can be big enough to erase loss from who we are now,
not even George Clooney,
who, I don't know if you heard, but he got married, not to me ...
(Laughter)
I don't know why.
So I decided to stop saying,
"This happened for a reason."
"The next thing that happens has to be great."
"Something or someone will save me."
I decided to allow myself to say what is true:
"This is very hard."
While "Once upon a time" and "Happily ever after"
are the structure of so many movies,
"sorry" and "hard" and "okay"
are more akin to the structure of life.
So this is the ending,
but it's not really the ending.
Everything is going to be okay.
I know this now.
And it's going to be hard again too,
and then it'll be okay again.
Good and wonderful things will come along,
and difficult things will find their way in too.
At the heart of any story,
what you find beyond the attention-grabbing highs and lows
is this battle for balance between hard and okay.
This is where we live.
It's not cinematic.
It doesn't come with a dramatic score or cheering crowd,
but there is something beautiful about how we survive it.
We begin to heal when we give up the idea that a tragedy is a beginning
and if we're good enough, we'll be rewarded with an ending.
We don't need a Hollywood ending.
We only need to regain our equilibrium as often as necessary.
When we stop asking "What next,"
we can find our way toward accepting "What is."
We do this by acknowledging our struggle and our regrets,
and we allow these things to have a place in our lives,
not as roadblocks to something better,
but as essential elements of life structure.
In this way, in tiny increments every day,
we can make peace with our own stories.
Thank you.
(Applause)