Subtle Loss (Part 2)

And now a passage from Fredrik Backman’s novel Us Against You, demonstrating the loss of intimacy through subtle shifts in language.

Children notice when their parents lose each other in the very smallest ways, in something as insignificant as a single word, such as “your.” Maya texts them each morning now and pretends it’s to stop them from worrying about her, even though it’s actually the reverse. She’s used to them calling each other “Mom” and “Dad.” As in “Mom didn’t really mean you were grounded for a thousand years, darling,” or “Dad didn’t demolish your snowman on purpose, he just tripped, darling.” But suddenly one day, almost incidentally, one of them writes, “Can’t you call your mom, she worries so much when you’re not home?” And the other, “Remember, your dad and I love you more than anything,” Four letters can reveal the end of a marriage. “Your.” As if they didn’t belong to each other anymore.

When do you remember words changing in your story? When did an affectionate nickname cease to be used? Or an adjective change from fiery to stubborn or from strong to pudgy? When was an inaccurate gender pronoun used in mockery or an accurate one refused to be spoken? What subtle shift in language is signaling you to name a loss of belonging in your story?

Subtle Loss (Part 1)

I often tell close friends and clients, who come from “tidier” stories than my own, how deeply I respect the difficult work they do to name subtle loss in their lives. The inventory of my history is full of what I call “headline” words: abuse, divorce, adoption. These labels mean I’ve always had ample, justifiable evidence for deep dives into seasons of healing. It’s those I know and love who lives are filled with more covert abuse dynamics, emotional neglect and well-masked trauma who often wrestle for decades to find the words that describe their story.

Fiction writer Fredrik Backman is masterful at painting the subtle shifts of loss in everyday life. In his book Us Against You, he describes the physical and verbal evidence of a deteriorating marriage. This week I’ll share a passage about the physical drift of intimacy and next week a verbal example. Though these excerpts highlight one type of relationship, they are lens through which we can imagine what loss looks like with any person in our life.

“A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don’t even know where to start looking for them. The way she usually touches him, as if she didn’t mean to, when he’s washing up and she’s making coffee and her little finger overlaps his when they put their hands down on the kitchen counter together. His lips brush her hair fleetingly as he passes her at the kitchen table, the two of them looking different ways. Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it become something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together. One morning they don’t make eye contact, their fingers land a few inches further apart along the counter. They pass each other in a hallway. They no longer bump into each other.”

When have you experienced a loss of physical closeness? When did a caregiver’s illness, a move at a young age, a natural disaster, your developing body or the fickleness of a friend steal a comforting and secure experience? What clarify of grief comes when you consider a physical drift of intimacy in a current relationship? If Backman were describing a scene between you and this person, what picture of subtle loss would he paint?

Full Catastrophic Self

“When we ask human beings to show up without their full self, without their full, catastrophic self, with all of the messes that they are, with all of the discomfort, when we deny that we hold certain belief systems from our childhood, that we created those belief systems to survive the challenges of our childhood — what we are cutting ourselves off from is the very source of much of our creativity, much of our innovation. We actually become less productive, less imaginative. We lose our spontaneity and laughter and humor, because we have cut off, if you will, limbs.”

~Jerry Colonna, founder of Reboot Inc.

ca·tas·tro·phe

• an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering

• a disaster

When I first heard Jerry Colonna speak the phrase “our full catastrophic self” a deep and historic place in my soul that had been holding its breath for a long time released a long exhale. How did he know that deep down I am a catastrophe? And yet in his On Being podcast interview, I heard no hesitancy, apology or shame in his tone of voice. Rather than whispering from inside a musty, dark confessional booth, Jerry Colonna was declaring in the town square a reality many of us suppress.

What does your ‘full catastrophic self’ look like? What belief systems does it hold from how you survived your childhood? What creativity, spontaneity, laughter and humor might be recovered if you released your full catastrophic self?

Minimizing Degradation

“It seems less degrading to give one’s self than to submit to compulsion.”

In her memoir, Harriet A. Jacobs writes these words in defense of what she considered an immoral act. Instilled with a high standard of purity through her grandmother’s strong Christian faith, she cunningly thwarted the relentless sexual assaults of her married, white master from ages 11-16. It was not until her master began building a cottage for her on the edge of town that she compromised her convictions in order to ensure her future children would have a chance at freedom.

Afraid of becoming defenseless against the rape her master would use to propagate his slave population through forced motherhood, she gave herself to an unmarried free white man who had gained her affection through kindness. Though published in 1861, her piercing truth defends all of us who have survived the violence of our stories by “choosing” to give ourselves to things that offered a greater measure of dignity and control.

What choices have you made to survive harm in your story that left a residue of regret and shame on your soul? What did you give yourself to that seemed to offer greater hope and freedom? What would it mean to reframe these choices not as merely “immoral” but as brave efforts to minimize the degradation you were experiencing?