Turns out, most apocalypses are invisibly tucked away inside our own bodies.
Last week at General Assembly, I came late to an after-session which focused on story-telling. A dear friend turned to me and said "I'm glad you got here late. There was a really hard story earlier." In my experience, that can usually means one thing: "So it was about sex crimes?" My friend knows the story of my own apocalypse: when the well-constructed universe within me began to warp after finding another secret email account meant to hide determined infidelity. When the fault-lines of my personal bedrock began to slip and grate after having another of my belongings smashed in rage. When a shock wave of grief scrubbed me clean while I took my mother's phone-call and heard the recounting of my ex-husband's confession to sex-crimes.
But my friend only knew my story, because like the woman whose story I missed, it was an apocalypse made visible to the eyes of others. I couldn't bear to be Pompeii buried in ash but never found; I refused to be Atlantis sunken to the bottom of the sea but never discovered. I couldn't contain within my thin skin this rupture of spirit and body. For some months, I went to work and raised my son and paid my bills and ran vacation bible schools, but to keep my cataclysm private was to die.
So I wrote. I opened up a window so that my pain wouldn't have to be privately held, and learned the obvious but impossible truth that I walk by hundreds of apocalypses a day. Since the moment I began to write, when I laid bare my own suffering, strangers and friends alike began to reach out and do the same. Divorces, betrayals, rapes, addictions, and losses too complex to nail down with simple words or gestures, shared over and over and over. Once, I would have told you that apocalypse looks like Nuclear Winter or Rising Tides; but now I know that shattered buildings and mass casualties are usually only the final visible cataclysm, the late appearing lesion of terrible pain and loss that was already present beneath a well-curated skin.
I've learned to look closer at the people around me, to see the tiny signs of inward upheaval which reveal a private dystopia:
...the wince at the pregnancy announcement...
...the lack of eye contact when an engagement is shared...
...a man holding a service dog close during a firework show...
...the declination to ever watch a prison-themed TV show...
...the haunted gaze around cancer patients...
...the couple who grimly hold hands as they escape a room of small children...
Not everyone chooses to write like I did/do. But almost everyone attempts, once in awhile, to crack open the thick skin of their private pain to show you what is unbearably true every moment of every day. That the placid story on the surface, the one the world demands they perform without fail, is only tenuously based on a true story. Walt Whitman said that humans contain multitudes, but rarely do we realize that almost always one of those multitudes is the sole survivor of a loss so profound that their soul limps.
I don't limp like I used to. Time can bring healing, though it can rarely erase scars. The stories I have to share are different than they would have been 5 years ago when I began. But the stories we share together matter, whether they be apocalypses or lullabies. Whether they are history or utopian projection, we have to tell our stories to each other so at least we can learn to see more clearly. To see real sorrow and loss; to see on micro-levels rather than to obsess over macro-events. To begin to have compassion for our neighbors, whether they have authored their pain or not. We have to share our stories, if for no other reason than giving a stranger the chance to say, "I'm glad it's not just me."
No dear one. I know how it feels. But it has never been just you.
