Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

friendship

what to say to someone in pain

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The dog park is better than TV. It’s where we veg out, our pupper digging in holes bigger than she is under five or six of those generous oaks that define Charleston. It’s our getaway when we’re too tired or stressed to do anything else. All the dogs smile and it makes all the humans smile back.

I sometimes wish we were one of those life-of-the-party couples, but instead we both give off a tell-me-all-your-problems signal, and this time, it happens at the dog park. We are blindsided by the woman telling us of her grief at the death of her boyfriend. I don’t think of people, three weeks after a death, going around and doing things, but here she is. You wonder how many people you’ve met who were three weeks out from a death. She says she is looking forward to going back to her grief group. She says grief wraps all around you where you can’t get out. Part of me just wants to go back to enjoying the evening breeze and not think about death. I imagine her, going around in an inescapable thick cloud that silently repulses all the people she meets, sidestepping her with well-wishes so as not to catch the grief. Then I imagine her at her group, huddled in a circle where everyone has a cloud and everyone’s cloud is touching and maybe by rights that should be horrifying, but actually it is where the clouds mingle that their colors are softer and they are not so suffocating. Only the clouded ones are not afraid of each other.

It is similar, I am finding, with chronic illness. People are curious, but they don’t know what they are asking. “I hope you get better,” they say, and they mean it, but they also mean, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” You don’t blame them; it’s not interesting or easy to talk about. But you also end up hiding part of your life, just to spare other people from witnessing your pain; and you really, really don’t expect them to want to. But you stay home more, because hurting people don’t belong at parties—not until they’re better.

Must I list all the other kinds of pain? We all know traumas; and we have all known the shame of having minimized another’s pain before we came to understand. People who have the courage to say they are in pain should be believed.

Here is another thing: you do not have to glorify suffering to acknowledge the truth that running away from it never really works. And it is not demonizing anyone to recognize, on a sort of flip side, that pain has made some people hard, bitter, even grotesque.

There is no good time or place to be in any kind of pain, but 21st-century America might be a particularly bad one. Once, towns were small, and everyone knew that everyone had illnesses, deaths in the family, financial losses. Now we call these things private. Now there are so many ways to go numb, it can take all your energy not to let the netflix binge or the scrolling glamours of other people’s lives take over, night after night, until you are never home with yourself, never doing your own work. It is too easy to avoid your communities, to manufacture escape in the dark.

But what is worse is the unspoken expectation that if you have done your work in whatever way, you will heal quickly and correctly. Around here we measure people by work done, progress achieved, goals accomplished, status unlocked; so when your trajectory is nonlinear or nonexistent, people tire of you. They blame you. You know they do, and you blame yourself. In the end so many of us are walking around in our clouds, trying to pull them tight around ourselves, letting them poison us if only they won’t touch anyone else. If only we can appear normal or strong or rational, if only most of ourselves can be allowed to live while some other vital part of us suffocates: the part that bears our pain.

Look, my friends, it doesn’t have to be this way! I think there have been times and places where people in pain knew it could make them wise and generous; where others knew how to value them without needing to know how to fix them. But in this time and place, do not look to any cultural institutions for these secrets; they are only within some of the bravest of the sufferers, themselves.

They are the ones who have made friends with their clouds, most days, and that’s why they’re not afraid of others’. They are the ones who have let someone else into their clouds, and that’s why they know the urgency of reaching out, even to the roiling, even to the ugly ones. Does that mean sharing the pain? Yes, in some way, it does—but that is how burdens are lightened. That, I would argue, is the whole work of Christ. It is the suffering who “know what to say” to each other:
Your suffering is allowed. You do not have to be more than you are. I do not have to understand. Blame does not matter and will not help. We can bear this.

We have succeeded when we continue, together, to be.

I am lonely and it is OK.

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There is a thing we do not always like to tell people who are graduating from high school or college, with the result that they hear of it in whispers and snatches—a specter they, too, try to ignore. And some of them escape it; they go home, or they go to graduate school, plopped down into a new life with a readymade cohort of like-minded young people. But most of us go to jobs in cities new to us, seeking adventure and success, and we find them, but we also encounter that specter. Its name is loneliness.

There are different kinds of loneliness, but we do not have names for them. It would be nice if we did. If we could throw out an offhanded comment like, ‘I’ve got a bit of the usual topodoloria that one expects three weeks after moving somewhere new,” instead of having to stay mum or else burst out: “I wish one single thing felt familiar in this place besides the coffee mug I’m carrying around obsessively because it reminds me of home.”

We need words for the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, the unreasonable rage at happy, cuddling couples when it is still weeks til you hold your person and something finally unknots inside of you. The ache of being single and wanting not to care, but thinking you would do anything to avoid one more engagement photo in your feed. The effort of trying not to weep at a party because you only wish you had people to feel safe with. The disappointment of a perfect summer evening when you have no one to give a beer on your porch.

Why does saying “I’m lonely” feel like admitting weakness, like if you had to foist the news on people that you had a disease? In a culture so far removed from the tribes and villages that have held most humans in history—a culture designed for loneliness—we don’t know how to talk about it. (I imagine this conundrum is even worse if you are male.) So we eat food or watch porn or shop to assuage the emptiness. We scroll social media looking for the rush of momentary connection. We hit the gym or log extra work hours because if we can’t feel fulfilled, maybe we can at least appear successful.

Well, everybody, I’ve done all those things and they were hardly even momentary fixes and I am done being afraid of it. I’m lonely. And it’s not because my existing friends (or my husband) are inadequate; and it’s not because I am abhorrent; and it’s not that I am inordinately needy. I fall well within the normal human range of neediness. Here is why I am lonely: because I moved. Because people my age move constantly in my culture and no one is supposed to make a big deal out of it. But you don’t find and love and trust your people overnight, the people who make you snort-laugh and tell you when you’re being dumb and are good at giving you gifts. It takes a lot of friend dates, awkward party situations, mild rejections by people who are too busy for you, testing of sense-of-humor waters, weekend nights hiding with Netflix because it’s all so exhausting. What it takes, like anything worth building, is time and effort.

Meanwhile, you will be lonely. At least some of the time, it will occur to you that you’d like to share something with someone, and there will not be anyone, and it will ache.

Here is how to live with the ache:

First, you must ignore your feelings. Not the ache itself, but the momentary feelings that keep you from making and being a friend. Read this article. Trust the rational voice in your head—the one telling you that calling a faraway friend is what you need when you’ve reached the end of your feeds; or that that one person deserves a third or fourth chance even though you’ve already grabbed a magic marker to label them annoying; or that drinking alone is unhealthy and it would be better to walk, bake, or color through that ache.

Then you really must put on your confident pants and go to the damn party. (Or the church, or the meetup, or the networking event.) Yes, you will be out too late and spend several awkward minutes standing alone next to the food table. Yes, there will be obnoxious people and fake people there. But the people you’re wishing for aren’t going to come knocking; they’re putting on their pants to go to the party and maybe make small talk with you and maybe accept your invitation to coffee or trivia. Think of your beautiful friends walking around other cities and going to other parties. Your people are out there.

Trust the process. Be patient with friendships in early stages. Grow a plant from a seed. Be faithful to the little tasks of tending them. Know that the ache, though overwhelming, will not overwhelm forever.

In the meantime, pray and pray and pray. Jesus was so lonely, dear heart. How often have you wished for the head space to reach toward him? Let the ache push you to God. Be still. Pray for others. Is this not a gift, to ache for connection, to feel the gaps in the universe where we have been broken from each other? Grow more tender and more grateful. Become a person with names for lonelinesses, and give the gift of recognition, and look the lonely in the eye and share something with them. We are already more connected than we can know.

how to actually be happy on social media

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I was laid off from my day job a few weeks ago, and so were four of the five coworkers in my department. Now, suddenly, we have all found each other on LinkedIn. We are recommending each other’s work and making up words for the skills our boss took for granted. Savvy people are on LinkedIn all the time, even when they are employed, but we all had to resurrect our accounts from graves of various depths. We are not savvy people; we are English nerds of the highest order. Book people.

So I have a barely-updated LinkedIn account and I’m thrilled to have a new website, too, but I’m not always sure how to talk about it.  Every time I do so I mean to say something grateful and happy, because that’s genuinely how I feel. The new site does feel more like home; it makes me want to write, and write well; I am proud and excited about it. But I worry intensely about it nonetheless. If the Internet is a layer on all of our lives, my layer is a piece of paper with too much glue: it wrinkles, smudges, sticks to my fingers when I try to smooth it out, and never, ever lies snugly next to the other layers.

People get really irritated when someone preaches about the evils of technology, so I’m not here to do that. The Internet does plenty of wonderful things, from informing you about stuff you’re afraid to ask about, to fostering very real connections between people. That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? It does that stuff just often enough to keep us all dripping it into our veins for hours every day; and the hope of providing something like that to someone else keeps most of us contributing to the stream. Photos. Words. Videos. Links. drip. drip. drip.

The Internet, then, has given us all an audience to manage. Precious few of us have ever run a PR campaign or even a Glee Club quarterly newsletter, but now we are broadcasting to hundreds or thousands. We post so Grandma can see baby pictures. We post so Mike From High School will change his mind. And we post, most of us, most of the time, for the Monopoly money of little hearts and thumbs-up. drip. drip. drip.

If you’re not promoting a business or whatever, you might not think about all this in very analytical terms. I hear people say my phone has taken over my life or I feel like I have a big responsibility to interact on social media or Facebook makes me anxious or I’m not sure whether to post pictures of my kid, but aside from quitting social media entirely, we rarely have tools for answering these questions very well. One reason: our phones and our networks are designed to make us feel like the center of the universe. But that leaves us confused when the universe turns out to be so very far beyond our control. By contrast, social media consultants and Instagram stars have a lot fewer of these dilemmas, in large part because they are focused on two things.

First, they know their goals. For businesses, bloggers, and Instagram celebs, those little hearts and thumbs aren’t Monopoly money, and they’re not adrenaline shots or personal validation stickers. They’re real gold: engagement with their posts translates into dollars. Maybe the things you want from social media are a little less measurable than theirs, but it’s still worth it to write them down. Every time you log on, you’re seeing content from people who have identified what they want you to do and invested a lot in getting you to do it. Even if it’s something as simple as a refreshing coffee-break distraction or a glimpse into your friends’ lives, shouldn’t someone occasionally be checking in on your priorities? This coffee break isn’t refreshing anymore can be a powerful realization.

Once a social media master knows what they are aiming for, their Internet choices become a lot more objective: these people need a better picture of the universe if they’re going to succeed. Their second focus, then, turns from being the center of the universe to cultivating an obsession with their audience. At its worst, this turns into tailoring every moment of your own daily life to others’ tastes. But at its best, the question who am I posting this for? can bring clarity. Your audience isn’t yourself—if you just want to save something, there might be a better place you can remember and access it later. And your audience isn’t your sworn enemies—they’re never going to admit you are right or feel chastened by your successes. You probably don’t have the time or the headspace to interact with them and the people who actually like you.

There’s one final thing the consultants likely won’t tell you. To succeed on the Internet, yes, you have to know your audience. But to be happy on the Internet, love your audience. Be a giver. Be a liker. Be yourself. Pray for your (political) enemies. Give out the recipe.

Don’t let this love be a shallow thing. Let it be wise. Know when to share the strong words, and when to tell it slant. Know the difference between #grateful and #gloating. Be vulnerable, by all means; but NO ONNNNNE needs a picture of your (literal or figurative) open wounds.

Most consultants won’t tell you to love your audience; it won’t get you attention through manufactured controversy and it won’t get you dollars that people shouldn’t spare. Maybe love isn’t really even what this stuff is designed for. But maybe, I’m realizing, we each have layers we’ll always have to wrestle into the contours of a love-shaped life.

when singing is hard

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Dear bestfriend,

I knew that you knew that I knew that I failed to call you after the election out of nothing but sadness. Acedia, the desert monks called it, and later sloth: when you know what needs to be done and you just don’t. You wake up sad and let the long day ahead flatten you before it even really gets going. Most pitiful and boring of the seven deadly sins.

A tiny part of me tried not to think about you for too long, in the week after the election, because your work with refugees has always overwhelmed me with a fierce protective pride and I knew and I saw on facebook how deeply sad you were. You go every day and you chip away at the mortar between bricks and you slowly bring down the walls between these fleeing people and their new lives. We sat on the phone this weekend and wondered without saying it how so many could choose fear and blame and walls. We mourned for what our nation loses by rejecting refugees. And we fought down panic for those living in tents somewhere in between the loneliness of no country, in between a past of rubble and a future of more tents and more waiting.

We shared the little things we’ve done to try and move forward in the past month, but underneath all that, a terrible sense of smallness. Don’t just blame it on Trump, either; call it a quarter-life crisis. We have been doing our little things for a while now, and so much has only gotten worse. Maybe we should just acknowledge that we are suckers for trying to triage a world that seems bent on destroying itself. Maybe all we’ve been doing is making ourselves feel better about, or more righteous than, an objectively shitty place. We could be excused for deciding to leave behind our idealistic youth, over time knowing less and caring less and just donating a comfortable amount to charities that flatter us in their promotional materials.

Some days that seems like the only sane way out of despair. And here it is, the darkest time of the year, when it feels like we have more obligations than ever to people who don’t make us less lonely. How do you catch your breath when you can’t stop, and when every quiet moment threatens to drown you in visions of walls and wars?

I think what you do is you go see Messiah. It is one thing to be spiritual and go for walks or pray or bake things and try to meditatively get through whatever next thing. It is a more important thing right now to seize upon the miracle that Advent is here in a great grab at the most tangible celebration you can find, namely a three-hour symphony performance that you don’t get away from without worshiping Jesus. I can say nice things that you already know about Jesus coming as a baby, but what you really need is to sit yourself down to hear the angels proclaim the damn fool’s truth that that baby is the King.

This is no longer the time for a subtle piety, my darling. This is the time to declare ourselves the fools, the poor, the babes. This is the time to give out money to people on street corners, to spend an evening wrestling Christmas Snoopy onto the lawn, to stand still and weep at carols we’ve always known. Maybe in the past, those little things we did felt like nice auxiliary ways to be faithful alongside the real work of the important people and pragmatic programs that would ultimately make the world measurably better. Now that they might be all we have, we find out whether we ever really believed those acts of madness meant anything. Whether, really, we ever believed this ridiculous manger-story. Did we really think the Redemption of the world and the cosmic defeat of the Roman empire came as a wrinkly red baby to a teenage girl, his “reign” announced to farm hands and the bumbling old mystics of some sketchy-ass religion?

You go see Messiah, friend, you will believe. When someone sings you half the Bible you sit up and notice that we’re still in that story. Fill up with music and take heart, let yourself imagine that we really are halfway through one of the tales Sam asked Frodo to remember. If God came as a baby then the greatest lie is that the humble unnoticed doesn’t matter. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. And that is all that matters in the end. Go hear the story. Go as a child who never thought it audacious to cast themselves as Frodo. Go as a weary idealistic-but-cynical sucker. Go as the one who hungers to hear the prophet in that opening line, comfort ye my people. Sing through it, cry through it, hug the person next to you; remember that every time you waste your time in worship, give without getting, and let your heart crack open a little further, you are doing the holiest world-changing things that can be done.

When the powers that be declare war on the stranger and the least of these, the only way out of despair is to go a little mad. Look, love, this Christmas we could burrow into the comforting familiar and pretend like that will protect us from these long, long odds we face. But let’s not miss the chance to tell things on mountains, kiss the feet of peasant children, and thunder out like Zechariah, Who DARES despise the day of small things? He is coming, He is coming, He is coming.

a blank space, baby

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One day Nate and I decided to move from Plymouth, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina, and three weeks later we did it. I think I was about as ready as anyone can be for something like that. I think I was about 80% ready.

And usually with these huge changes, I’ve been a lot less ready—but someone else has been ready for me. Americorps, grad school, they had routines and duties and people lined up for me to throw myself into. I knew people who’d moved to new cities completely alone after college, but I couldn’t relate to them. I envied them their spending money and their professional-wardrobe jobs; only now can I even approach any understanding of the crushing loneliness they must have felt, dropping their keys every night in whatever tiny apartment they had found. Of what it’s like to feel a riptide pulling you away from your perfectly fine life, to follow it with some excitement, and then to ask the ocean several times when you’ll be there until you realize that this, treading water in this wide nothing, is it.

In our case, we went from spending, collectively, four hours a day commuting, to forty minutes a day. We went from having four or five groups of people we could make weekend plans with, to zero. From a little downtown church we liked to the land of a thousand (seemingly identical) churches. From a cozy little house that seemed made of windows to an apartment whose blank white walls seem to expand, retreating us farther into the dim building, overnight. I went from a bustling startup office space 40 hours a week to working from home 30 hours a week.

It’s been an eerily quiet few weeks.

—

I bought Shauna Niequist’s Present Over Perfect on a bit of a whim, and when I started reading it, one little chunk at a time, trying to drag it out and absorb everything, I was immediately disappointed. The writing was so lovely and funny and honest, the story so familiar and yet different from mine, but the whole entire damn thing is all about living a slower, more grounded life. About eliminating commitments and half-real relationships and tasks of imaginary importance.

To say that I resented being told I should do what I was being forced to do would be an understatement. My eyes would travel from the book to my blank planner to Nate, my only human connection within a four-hour drive, and somehow, knowing that millions of people would revel in this state of affairs only made me deeply, inexplicably bitter toward those people. But Shauna kept drawing me in. And I started cooking.

It’s our shared love of elaborate meals that will keep me reading every book Niequist writes until the end of time. If at every other hour of the day I hated feeling alone, unuseful, and boring, I was able to lose myself in cooking. I gloried in our new dishwasher. Our CSA shares started coming, baskets brimming with local food, and this, at least, made me feel that the ground of South Carolina was mine, too. I made bread. Nate made me breakfast sandwiches out of it.

And some combination of that near-daily ritual with Shauna’s gentle words—full of wonder at how lovely the quiet life can be—soon made me half-grudgingly, half-elatedly realize that this little window is a gift. Who in the world gets to make food for their family every day? How many people are ever offered such a blank slate after they’ve grown up a little, figured out what they really want? How often does anyone get such extravagant margins with which to decide how they will live? How many books would my favorite mama-writers have written in the amount of time I’ve already wasted?

These questions, though, they often take on the tone of your life. When I was still thinking of this time as an exile, they felt accusatory. Of course I knew I should be grateful. Of course I was inadequate to the task of making the most of the situation.

Until, as is usually the case with me, I started pretending to be the good person I wasn’t.

I just got tired of railing against the situation, and stopped. And then there was even more of the dreaded, horrible quiet.

And then there was a whisper: stop seeking. just wait.

And in that blank space, like floating in water, the beginnings of a life began to emerge, one little thing at a time. Not the things that are, like, recognizable as a life—a full schedule and a full travel mug of coffee and a car and people who breathlessly tell you how much they appreciate you as you pass each other rushing in different directions. Just, the realization that I am not only able but, in fact, driven to collect as many houseplants as possible. Just a little writing opportunity I wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for my new days off. A cascade of writing ideas where before there had been only overwhelm. A few  prayers besides the same frustrations, fears, and questions I’d been hurling at the sky the past many months. And a lot of fresh-vegetable meals.

This may not be anyone else’s definition of success, but this is my life. This is the life I get to say yes to, one little thing at a time.

a place to stay

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One way to become a minimalist is to have 15 addresses in 8 years.

Our house has gone from a total shambles to starting to clear itself up—all the traces of Nate and me soon to disappear. I am catching a breath on this last day in our first house together, a cottage in a pine forest that’s terribly far from anything useful and is the very definition of a little newlywed nest. We will miss it.

There was a time, maybe for the last year and a half, when leaving any place made me feel physically ill. Going on a weekend trip, coming back from the trip; it wasn’t that I ever hated my destination, just that I was dizzy from the revolving door my life has been since moving North. Between changing dwellings, visiting Nate, flying home twice a year, and attending weddings and holidays, I measured my life in time until the next departure. I was an expert at Greyhound travel and duffel-bag-packing.

I bought some of those big plastic storage tubs and lived out of them when I wasn’t living out of the duffel. A bunch of my stuff has just resided in there for years now; I know where it is and if I need it, I use it, then carefully repack it for the next move. I used the tubs as furniture. They have handles. They have kept my clothes and stuff safe in rain, in suspicious basements, on airplanes, with no tape and no box cutters. I love the tubs. For a while they were the most constant and dependable things in my life.

I don’t know if the place we’re going will be a place we never leave, but I know that South is the right direction. A year ago now, I took a month off to recalibrate my life, and it felt like everything that had ever been true was saying to me that moving North had been a good thing, and that now it is time to come home.

And so this leaving doesn’t feel like illness, but like healing. There are people who love New England, who think that even the bad things about it are, in the end, still the way things should be. I was never going to be one of those people; this leaving was always inevitable.

I’m grateful for our nest. I’m grateful for a husband who believes me when I say I don’t know what my career will be, but this move carries the urgency of a calling. I’m grateful to be moving towards establishing a place to put down roots and pick up responsibilities, a place that becomes part of us and we, of it. Something more than a place to stay.

These rings

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This ring still feels strange and a bit uncomfortable, a foreign object. So often, thinking about our future, I have semiconsciously scratched an itch on that fourth finger, yet the weight of it is still a new and unexpected thing. It’s silly, but I really did feel more like we were really engaged after the ring fit and was on me. The most valuable thing you’ve ever owned always glinting at you has a way of reminding you, of making you think.

I know that soon enough I’ll never notice this feeling; it will be like the high school ring on my right hand – also a gift someone sacrificed to put there. I’ve kept it on all this time because I loved my high school; I want to remember where I come from and the serious teenager I was. They are part of me. Now, soon enough, he will be part of me. We have promised to become a family.

wpid-img_20151010_203821615.jpgI asked him to marry me, too, and gave him a ring, too. I am proud that it fits and looks handsome on him even though I made it from a thousand miles away. He is hyperaware of his own ring, takes it off when he washes his hands. I like that we are both reminded, both taken, newly conscious, connected somehow by these gifts.

Dating is like one big question, a tightrope of opportunities to fall deeper into a harder, worthier love – and chances to say no. Always that possibility that someone might decide against forever, and the parts of you that have become intertwined will have to be slowly surgically extricated, or else shut up in a locked box labeled “past” that you hardly dare to open. But now we are preparing to cast our foolish lot with a promise that that will never happen, that the days of ‘no’ are behind us. I am glad, in the end, that the months before this moment saw me air a lot of fears, for I know now that I am sure. And I am glad that when the time came, it got to be both of us; we said yes.