#what do you mean she died bestie? the play literally ended at their wedding anniversary

[lizzizzie-blog]

d) all of the above

Today is a the anniversary of a significant event in my life. I am resultingly (I might have made this word up but I’m sticking with it) emotional, and instead of baking cookies or wrapping presents or taking a shower or doing laundry or actually getting caught up with my work-work, I am feeling my feelings and I’ve been reflecting on what has been an incredibly intense year. 

Things that happened in 2017:

In the last few days of 2016, I fell in love so hard with a TV show about Norwegian teens. I’ve made friends as a result who I talk to regularly and are super important to me. I’ve taken two trips to meet them (Boston and Philly) and I’ve planned my first real international trip/vacation (Oslo, Norway, January 2018) as a result. Honestly, nobody saw this one coming. 

January: I officially started my new job that it turns out is really really hard and stressful and exhilarating and kicks my ass. I mostly work from home (an adjustment in itself) but also travel frequently. This year I’ve been to: Monroe, Louisiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Atlanta and Newnan, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; Bay City, Texas; Austin, Texas; New York City; Freehold, New Jersey; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Las Vegas - some more than once.

In February, I experienced hot springs for the first time in Colorado for my sister-in-law-to-be’s bachelorette party.  

In March, I turned 30. My husband and friends threw a perfect, stupid, fun, whimsical, casual party for me and I felt so lucky. There were Harry Potter puns. There were buttons with my bitmoji on them. There was a dinosaur beer luge ice sculpture and many delicious beers. I got to play and dance to “I Feel It Coming” twice.

In April, I officiated the wedding ceremony of my brother and the aforementioned sister-in-law, in Maryland.

In May, the husband quit his job and we bought a record store. I mean, what?! What!!!

In June, the husband almost cut off his fingers in a hedge trimmers vs. hand incident, resulting in us missing another wedding. That was fun

In July, I married another of my best friends as a co-officiant with another of our best friends, in Michigan.

In August, I saw the total solar eclipse in St. Louis! It was the coolest, spookiest, most amazing thing. Bizarrely moving. During that trip, I also:

Met and held and loved on the baby of someone I grew up with/a childhood bestie, for the first time. Wow. 

Felt a fetus kick inside of a human tummy for the first time ever, and it happened to be my very best friend. A small moment of magic.

In August, I got a tattoo. My first. Possibly only. I’m not sure.

In October, I told myself, and then my husband, and then the internet / People of Facebook, that I’m pansexual, because it’s not a secret. And I was met with all the both incredible support and curious and/or confused questions that people who do that sort of thing are met with. This has been bizarre. 

A few times, I wrote things about myself and published them in a blog and told actual people I know about it. This one is still a struggle too. 

And that’s not an exhaustive list. Plenty of other significant and joyful moments happened with other people I love, as well, including 30th birthday parties and pregnancy announcements and engagements and even a anniversary / birthday / retirement party for the in-laws. I also learned that another of our couple-friends are getting a divorce. The point is... it’s been SO much of significance in so little time. I’ve never been so stressed and scared and tired, but I’ve also never been so thrilled and inspired and in love with other people. I’ve never felt more overwhelmed with life, but I’ve also never been this accepting of myself. It’s been a lot. It’s still a lot. It always is. When I was little, I think I thought that joy and love were the antidote to grief and pain. Or that sadness and stress negated happiness and laughter and light. That these things were mutually exclusive. Now, I’m still constantly struck by how MUCH life is. How many different things I feel during any given year, month, week, day, or moment. But when I reflect, I think I actually learned this early. Joy and pain don’t cancel each other out; they complement and amplify each other. They make each other real, and the reality of life is that we will experience both, and feeling one doesn’t invalidate feeling the other.   I learned this in October of my senior year of high school when I was having the time of my life with my friends in band, dance team, show choir, and the senior play, and then my cousin died, out of nowhere. It was awful and I was confused and angry and devastated, but life didn’t stop. It didn’t stop me loving my friends or having fun in my various activities or falling in love with a boy over the next several months. It was all of that, all at once. It affected me profoundly, every day, but life didn’t stop. My junior year of college, a friend of mine had a really intense health scare that involved passing out followed by emergency surgery, and eventual diagnosis with a genetic disorder that made it very dangerous to operate on her and would mean precarious health going forward. She was my “Partner,” as we were co-Morale-Captains of the Red team for our college’s Dance Marathon event in April, which raised money for Children’s Miracle Network. Planning and organizing for the event began with weekly meetings in the fall, and this committee was incredibly close knit, with Partners put together and assigned colors based on specific shared traits. So, this happened in February, the night before my boyfriend’s birthday. We found out during our weekly meeting, and we left to go to her apartment, where all her sorority sisters were, and essentially held vigil until the surgery was over. It was days before we really knew if she was going to be okay, including Valentine’s Day. I ate a Dove chocolate heart with the message “discover how much your heart can hold.” And that resonated with me so much. I was feeling so much. I kept the wrapper. Taped it to a piece of index card. I still carry it in my wallet. I turned 21 in March, while she was home recovering. I was so sad to be without my Partner on the committee and so worried about her. She, somewhat miraculously, did get to come to Dance Marathon, in her wheelchair. I was so happy she was there. It was such a relief. She got better, and graduated and got a job and got married and bought a house and got a dog. Then, years later, she had another complication, and after multiple attempts to save her, she died. This was a week after my wedding and the day after we got home from our honeymoon. It was horrible, of course, and right in the middle of one of the most loving and joyous times in my life. Again, it was all happening at once. More than I thought my heart could hold. (She was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. Her humor was clever and quick and biting. So charismatic. Her attention made you feel special and people adored her.) To conclude this meandering, self-involved mess, I need to flash back again. To my senior year of college, fall semester 2008. Dance Marathon had finished the previous spring, and I’d tried out to be my college’s mascot, and gotten it. It was amazing. But it was a secret. Part of our tradition was that nobody is supposed to know who the humans inside the costume were. And so naturally that leads to much speculation about who they are, and we had to be careful to avoid being found out. I was dating a person who’d been the mascot the year before, and we didn’t have any reason to know each other in real life, so we were dating in secret, essentially, as well.

He happened to be best friends with a girl from my hometown, who I’d been friends with in high school, who also went to our college. She’d graduated that spring and was in Cincinnati for her master’s. She invited us down to see her perform in a play for the church she’d joined there - serious production value - 9 years ago today. We were going to stay with her for the weekend, too. At the play, she was flying around suspended on a harness high up in the air for her role as a wise man. Maybe 20 minutes in, at the end of a song, she struck a pose, her hardness malfunctioned, and she fell to the floor. I don’t remember much of what happened next, but our seats were very high up and we could not see at all what was happening. Somehow they stopped and everyone filed out and they called an ambulance. Somehow her friends found us and we got to the hospital with them. We waited hours. Eventually her parents arrived, met with doctors, and asked us to leave. We drove all the way back to our college town and crashed. A few hours later, her friend called my boyfriend, waking us up, to tell her they had removed her from life support and she had died. It was, of course, traumatic, tragic, and devastating. It was such a bizarre time. So hard, and so painful. Some of my worst days ever. But at the same time, set during the backdrop what was objectively the time of my life. I was a senior in college and I was the mascot. Literally living a dream of mine, having an absolute blast. Then this, in the middle of finals …  having to tell my professors what had happened and why I needed extra time. I skipped my only mascot event the night of the day we found out she died.

After that, mascotting became an escape from it. A place where I could go for a few hours and forget my shit. I could focus on entertaining others, on nothing but being an anonymous vessel of enthusiasm and joy and love, on the eventual physical exhaustion of it. A way to clear my head. And then Christmas was happening, and right back to the next semester. Life didn’t slow down. It was everything at once. Horrific and traumatic and devastating, but the love I experienced in speaking with other people who knew her after she died, of meeting people she knew who looked up to her the same way that I did, the joy of living my dream and escaping reality as the mascot, the way my boyfriend and I somehow got each other through that time ... all of it was real and valid and happening, too. Looking back on that time 9 years ago, I don’t know how I survived. But, that’s sort of what we always do, isn’t it? We love the shit out of each other and we get by. And the weird thing is, December and the holidays are still the same now… the circumstances are ever-changing, of course, but there’s always the painful melancholy of missing people that you love, coupled with the stress of it all, then combined with so much warmth and comfort. It’s a lot. It’s all of it at once. And we’re doing it together. Life is rich, y’all. <3

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”  ― The Perks of Being a Wallflower