when everything goes wrong again

unlocking something obvious and shocking

I didn’t always know how to be when everything goes wrong. Hope didn’t always sound true, mostly bitter and tinged with sadness. Psycho, priceless, no good in a crisis. Little did I know the horrors always bring along the miracles. It’s only at the very bottom of despair you’re left to really sit with this discovery. And then it’s almost worth it, almost doable, almost worth fighting for. This isn’t a post of encouragement or an indulgent self-help monologue, you know me better than that. Or is it?

What comes to mind when you hear the word kindness? Something owed to us and earned with relational proximity? Annoying therapy jargon? A pastel gradient quote reposted by a self-proclaimed empath who just happens to be the worst person you know? The best kindness, I’m finding time and time again, is an unexpected rupture — the kind that catches you off guard and pulls you back onto the shore from way under the depths of your limit. It’s non-obligatory and accidental, randomized, has little if anything to do with deserving. An unconditional recognition of pain that doesn’t invite performance or imply reciprocation. Not sure if age is making me softer around the edges or if it’s the fatigue post one too many bad nights, but I’m seeing little priceless acts of unanticipated kindness all around me lately, aligning in constellations and pushing me forward even as I keep pressing self-destruction buttons. In New York, at airports, in Ubers, in clean lounges and on dirty sidewalks. What is perpetually surprising and new is the different shapes kindness takes, ones I seem to never predict or pay off — and find their way to me when I’ve made sure to hide from any trace of their resemblance. So reachable, somehow. So tangible and true. Kindness rests its head on your shoulder when you stop seeking and start noticing.

The tendency to get caught up in our own narrative outweighs the capacity to hold duality, accepting that there’s always good between the bad stuff. Not always pretty, not always lifechanging, but it is there. Hope is a two-way street I have to walk if I expect it from the world. It’s only when we zoom out and step outside of ourselves that we’re able to see how things are never truly terrible, never truly great. Preaching Taoism for amateurs to you. But let’s rewind a little first, I’ll paint you a grotesque picture.

i

It’s way before noon on the East Coast, entirely too humid and early in the week for me to be walking twenty Brooklyn blocks sleep-deprived and in tears, with mascara smudged across my face like warpaint, dragging a suitcase behind me that’s half my weight, three quarters of my height. How do I know this isn’t a Girls HBO episode even if it eerily resembles one? Because my hair feels greasy and my life feels over. There won’t be a cliffhanger or a title card, I just feel like shit. It’s day three in New York, where I came to feel big and important, but it turns disastrous with an anticlimactic friendship fallout that forces me to voluntarily and quietly pack my bags and go elsewhere. Fallouts are tough for anyone, but when you’re destabilized in a city that yells at you, they’re nothing short of earth-shattering. Born devoid of the Real Housewives gene to argue with hostility, I do what I do best: I leave. Before I make my way to a new temporary home graciously offered to me for the force majeure of this magnitude, I stumble into a coffee shop nearby. I’m keeping it together for the sake of me, failing even at that. An iced americano, please, I sniffle like a kid ashamed by a tantrum aftermath, tap my phone on the card reader, head low to spare eye contact and humiliation, and sit down at the corner table. When everything is going sideways, where do you escape? Unless the answer is under the nearest bus, I don’t want it. I suppose some things never change, and getting a coffee is an autopilot impulse no matter the catastrophe.

To die by Tuesday is to come back to life by Friday, with hope or reverence, and my thoughts are occupied with trying to find the best way to make myself feel even worse. Might as well. Perhaps I could drink myself into an abyss or get in bed with a stranger. God, please, if you can hear me, if you’re not OOO, I need an intervention. As I’m exquisitely planning out how to preserve myself a little longer before melting into a grey puddle, the barista softly taps me on the shoulder and hands me a nicely plated almond croissant the size of my head to go with my coffee. “On us,” he says softly and walks away, leaving me to it. God bless America, your pastries are humongous and your men are beautiful. He knew a tourist in a big city (the size of my mental and literal baggage gave it away) and a humid day are not a good combination. He knew I needed to be placated with something less collateral than alcohol poisoning or an STD. As I start to calm down, gnawing on the plastic straw like my death row meal pacifier, I make a mental pledge to also be somebody’s divine intervention as a way of paying forward. Now it’s me, myself, my wrecked nervous system, and my croissant all having a board meeting to discuss my potential coming back to life. I understand just what Richard Siken meant when he wrote the one person in the world who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be.

ii

Misery loves company, of course the horror doesn’t end here. Stating the factual: I’ve been excited about a guy. How many times have I said this in the past year? He’s just my current north star, plain and simple, I’m not embarrassed by the bait and switch of my own making. Something about his (I swear, this time it’s different!) delicious allure in my head is important, a high priority email, like one of those Swedish candy stores where you get overstimulated and spend entirely too much. Partially excited about having this much novelty in my life, but secretly wondering what I’d done to deserve another do you have siblings stage, I’m nervous — my body is telling me something my mind refuses to read, and my track record unkindly reminds me that whenever I get intense butterflies in one’s presence, they’re probably not right for me. Long story short, it all goes downhill after date one, and then my phone naturally doesn’t ring over the next few days, so now I’m an alien in a spaceship flying through Greenwich Village searching for me before she was a victim of excitement. Where is she?

“Love your fit, can I take a picture?” I’m stopped by a twentysomething with a camera. I’m wearing black knee high boots, black tights, a silk button-up, and sunglasses that cover most of my face. The outfit is lackluster because I never pack strategically, but what do I know, reckon she likes the monochrome. As I stand there, porous and vulnerable in my shortcomings, the sinking feeling couldn’t sink any lower, I let the flattery seep in. To marinate in sadness without the need to filter out the good stuff is a dying art. It doesn’t really matter what that photo was for, and I didn’t ask, and I’ll never see it anyway, and this feels like a joke because her outfit is ten times better than mine. A street photographer seems more excited about me than the boy ever was, and that’s the cruelty of a city for you. The one person in the world who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be.

iii

Stepping off stage at Tender Summer, exhilarated and restless, feeling the weight of it all. This dopamine-fueled gratitude mixed with the aftertaste of damage at the hands of disappointment by everyone and everything I’d been dearly relying on. The sadness of two empty seats in front of me that begs to take first place and steal the spotlight of a magical night. I won’t let it. Looking out into the crowd, I see flickers of ethereal light in the eyes of everyone who, much like myself, just keeps walking, giving kindness, receiving it, giving some more. They take me as I am, I take them right back, they know me better than I know myself. We’re playing tennis with gestures, it’s flirty and sweet. Each story in the room is as unique as it is universal, with a signed mutual understanding and quiet awareness of the mess and glory that comes with what we signed up for when we chose to feel this life in multicolor.

Truth is, surviving every worst day of my life has been made possible by the accidental, almost ephemeral, expansive kindness precisely from the unexpected routes, finding me against my wincing and flinching. The means of surviving is lodged into tiny glimpses of generosity from places where generosity is neither expected nor guaranteed. It washes over me now: the girl from school I barely knew making me a playlist after my dad’s passing, a liminal digital space where sad and bitter were allowed. Being taken to the hospital abroad with no insurance and the nurse being patient with my ten thousand questions in full panic. Calling Anna for breakup advice at two in the morning well before we were close friends, though it’s hard for me to recall a time we weren’t. Spending a week in nature with a family that isn’t mine but loves me after bleeding out onto Parisian streets by a cupid’s arrow I swore would give me tetanus, while the mom keeps telling me I’m too interesting for him anyway and refers to him as stale bread. She’s on my side no matter who was in the wrong. Fleeing my country with one suitcase and no estimated time of return, no hope for things ever getting better, with everyone from cab drivers to Airbnb hosts I met that surreal whirlwind month helping me glue myself from pieces to normalcy again. My manager sending a small “We’ll take care of it, please don’t worry” text when I’m caught up in a questionable work visa situation, and he meant it. There’s Mimi with her soothing words and Sarah with a gossip session and the coworker I’d been quite certain hated me showing compassion, honey-flavored second chances and silky honesty in trying. The world never fails to pitch in with something small and simple, a meal, a conversation, a voice note, or a hug, and sometimes even a grand gesture or a solution to your trembling prayers. And what a gift it is to notice all the lifeboats. I’ve been too sad at times to see it make a difference, but it’s what kept me alive. It comes back to me in stages, then all at once: everyone who’s ever been kind in places where I felt too weak and broken to keep my eyes open and my voice from quivering. It was unconditional, it was unexpected, it was graceful, a sonnet spelled out on a golden plate. The one person who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be, but it’s the one you needed it to be.

Suppose I’ve always known what they meant by we’re all just trying our best, but could never sit with that until now — not fully. Marked by the innate selfishness of the human experience and tunnel vision, we’re all just ingenues to kindness, glossing over what binds us together on this shaky earth. There is your worst ex and your former boss, your estranged friends and family members, and everyone who’s ever colored life the shades of living hell, circumstances vile and gory like a car crash, burning the skin and leaving lasting trails. But there’s the unexpected empathy offered to them on their worst day, too, not just on yours and mine, the gentleness a human needs to survive with brilliance. We need that gentleness. We breathe it into others. Villains and heroes alike. It’s Jungian, it’s disruptive, it’s human, it’s utterly mystical.

Hardship and I, we go way back, and she’s no stranger to me. She has me on speed dial. I used to think the world was just so cruel to me all the time. Looking back, I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t even say despite the horrors — there’s kindness because there’s hardship. I see my purpose much more clearly now: not relentless ambition, not my undying hope for Hallmark love, not pinnacles of relevance, not even my craft. It is to be of help to someone when they need it most, throwing a lifeline signal into the void, expecting nothing back and leaving ego out of the equation.

Can we earnestly say life is unfair? Sure. It bites and scratches and ultimately wants to kill you. But there’s the unexpected good around us if we’re willing to look up from our phones or stop awaiting miracles from everything that bitterly rejects us. So go out there and make some more mistakes, fall out with more people, and storm out of more meeting rooms, knowing well there’s always just a glimmer of ammunition you didn’t quite see coming. That’s luck, my dear. And if you look at it that way, if you glance at kindness with no camouflage, isn’t it true that we’re all in this so viciously together? We help ourselves and instinctually help each other, no guidelines or a framework for which simple, mundane act of ours is a divine silver lining on somebody else’s worst day. The one person who loves you isn’t the one you thought it would be. Big deal. The love’s still there, beaming. If all else fails, I have an almond croissant we can split.