The Braiding of Joy and Grief

About a year ago, I was recovering from major surgery and simultaneously preparing to release a memoir that recounts my experiences of abuse and religious harm. I felt vulnerable to be this cut-to-the-bone transparent about my pain, unable to hide how trauma and illness have marked me, transformed me.

I often come back to geology when I try to understand it. This sedimentary life—layers of experiences compressed under the water of time. No one gets a clean slate. We are dissolved and eroded and built up again, a cycle of living and dying.

This past year has been a braiding of joy and grief. I did not know how people would receive my story, and I think many memoirists like me fear we will receive backlash or criticism of our life choices or mockery from nameless readers.

And yes, I had my fair share of trolls. But they are overpowered in my memory by the extraordinary generosity I felt by hundreds of people who reached out to tell me my story meant something to them, who came to bookstore events, who shared the book with their friends. I found so much hope in the faces of strangers who genuinely wanted to connect with each other and build something better than the religious trauma we were given.

Grief, though, was with me too, and I will probably write about this more next month, but while I was feeling healthier and traveling again and celebrating the birth of my first book, I was also experiencing a deep, multilayered grief. Beginnings and endings always run together, I suppose.