No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

My obsession with my shoulds had me living my life as if it were a shared Google doc. I was paralyzed by the idea of what I should do, always turning to friends, family, and complete strangers at the nail salon who look like they have it together to see what they thought about my potential next steps in life. My own opinion has often come last, or not at all.

stayed with boyfriends I was incompatible with because I thought I should have a boyfriend. I accepted jobs that I should have wanted and built an entire career I was never meant to have, and a life I never meant to live.

Kids will not pause for grief, even if you ask them nicely.

There are not enough PowerPoints in the world to distract you from this kind of loss, and my body refused to keep a schedule that would be compatible with any desk job.

My discomfort made them uncomfortable. I was a living, breathing, publicly crying reminder that their own lives could go off the rails at any time.

I should not be on antidepressants and having panic attacks in my car! I should be showing off beautiful Phoenix feathers, preening publicly about my rise from the ashes. I should be the poster child for what it means to move on, to get over it, to live your best life! I am happy. And I’m really, really fucking sad.

Detachment was not a form of Zen, but a form of emotional stagnation I’d been dropped into. One where I could recite my life script as if I were talking about a complete stranger:

knew that some very sad things had happened—I was sad about them, I swear!—but I couldn’t access that sadness. I didn’t have the security clearance for it yet. I was removed from the world, and from myself. Feeling desire was at least feeling something, and I wanted to feel.

because I think pop music is a true art form, and that the artistic merit of any song is measured by how it echoes through the experiences of your life.

I was broken and dead inside. I wasn’t worth planning a life around or throwing a life plan away for. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going. Five minutes or five years, I wasn’t worth the wait.

The first time a boy broke up with me, it broke me. This sounds dramatic, and it should, because I was sixteen years old.

We dated for a year, and it was emotionally turbulent because I was emotionally turbulent and he was a sixteen-year-old boy with limited emotional capacity and I wanted to marry him and have a thousand of his babies and he said he loved me and doesn’t that mean, like, forever? Your first love feels like it is destiny. It feels perfectly logical to kiss a boy on your parents’ front steps and think, “I am done looking, I have kissed the last mouth I will ever kiss. I am going to marry this mouth and the boy it’s attached to.” It feels absolutely right to imagine what your kids will look like, and dream of a far-off day, when you’re both old—twenty-two or twenty-three, maybe—and you can get married and have all the sex you want and really start your lives, you know? That plan felt perfectly logical—to me, at

Once you’ve been loved by one person, how can another person in such close proximity feel the same way about you?

The only measure for a successful relationship was that it lasted forever, so what did that make every relationship that had an expiration date? A big failure. A waste of time. A reassurance that I was for sure as unlovable as I thought I was at age sixteen.

want to be a person with no past, the human equivalent of a goldfish, completely unencumbered by anything you’d ever seen and experienced, all of your history evaporating from your little goldfish brain, placing you blessedly and perpetually in the present moment.

But when you see enough people recoil in horror at the facts of your life, you start to feel that the only way to be worthy of love is to be footloose, fancy free, and devoid of any traces of trauma, grief, or even basic human emotions.

After Aaron’s death, I found myself gravitating toward people who wore their miles proudly, who showed up with whatever they were carrying and just laid it out there. Not polite people, or perfect people. Just . . . people. The kind who tell you the truth when you ask how they are, who don’t even think about lying and telling you that everything is fine.

Aaron’s love and Aaron’s death are my foundation. They’re my standard for love and marriage and strength and bravery. They are not a hurdle to overcome, they are the stable place I get to build from. This is what I know, what I’ve learned from life. I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.

I was comfortable being on the move, between places, on my way to somewhere, but not quite there yet.

a semicolon where I needed a period.

I was being raised to believe in a series of saints, and to pray a rosary. I was not being raised to believe in astrology, but is it really such a leap between the two?

I grew up to be the kind of woman who prays to God, and who lights Palo Santo in the mornings to set my intentions. I grew up to be the kind of woman who believes in spiritual pluralism, a sort of cafeteria approach to faith and religion that puts about as much stock in my star chart and my own self as I do in a benevolent (and probably female) God. It’s all just different ways to make sense of the world around us, and our place in it. We are who we are maybe because of some big, omniscient force, because of when and where the planets were in relation to when and where we were born, because of our own choices and actions . . . because of a lot of things that nobody can really know for sure.

Time seemed always to be moving too fast, and I felt perpetually behind. There was a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it.

Waiting for the perfect conditions is a waste of what limited time you have on this earth.

a toddler doesn’t know when you’re swimming in a sea of self-doubt. They don’t know when you’re at the end of your rapidly fraying rope or when you are duct-taping your world together and hoping it holds for another day.

I wanted the comfort and safety of perspective. I wanted to open my eyes and be five years into the future, to know that whatever happened next was going to be different from my current reality,