Listen to Your Mother

I was listening to a podcast that was talking about how when we get really down/depressed, etc. it’s usually a sign that we aren’t creating anything. That feels true to me.

I had my first rehearsal on Sunday in San Francisco for the Mother’s Day reading I’m doing with Listen To Your Mother. I got kind of freaked because it seems like the people picking the cast maybe made a little mistake.

We sat in a circle to read our stories. Everything was going kind of OK, then people started telling their backgrounds and the first woman to read told about her twenty-something daughter who had died, which was totally sad, but all I could think was oh shit, the first line of my story starts out “Sometimes I wish my family would die.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Breathe. So I read my I’m a terrible person death wishes wanna be cancer survivor story and it wasn’t too bad.

Then, we go around the circle a few more people, and this beautiful lawyer reads her story about having a double mastectomy just like her mother who died after her own double mastectomy.

Oh shit. Move along around the circle to the last person who reads about her beautiful fourteen-year-old son who died in a hiking accident and I’m ready to crawl out of the room like the worm I am.

The thing that sucks about first impressions is that these ladies probably think I am the biggest ass hole ever and think I have no clue what true suffering is. Which is true in some ways, but to be fair, I have had a lot of loss and I actually have a lot of empathy for people who are grieving. You wouldn’t guess it from my story that I’ve just read, but I’ve actually spent the last twenty five years obsessing over death and loss. I’ve been tiptoeing to this weird place where I was feeling kind of almost excited and happy, like things were kind of going well. And now I feel like the universe is punishing me for trying to feel happy.

Is it OK to feel joy even when other people are suffering?