But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits

by Kimberly Harrington

And what if you discovered all the ways you rationalized changing yourself over time because you thought that would make you a better person but, instead, all those changes just made you less you?

It was as if my parents just expected me to know things.

And eventually I learned some things.

God forbid this legal process might’ve had an emotional silver lining or two for me—a drive to communicate clearly, a desire to find meaning and explanations for why things happen, and a fundamental acceptance early on that most adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

I am not unique. I am not a survivor. I am just a person who was shaped by other people’s decisions and behavior, as we all are. This is how life works. I was left to figure out things for myself for a long time and I am surprised to realize all these years later I still am. Is it ever too late to attempt to blame your childhood for absolutely everything?

I never doubted I was loved. I still don’t. I know I am loved. But I’m not sure I ever felt particularly cared for, especially when caring for me felt challenging and when it would’ve mattered most. There is a difference.

I wonder now if perhaps the happiest you can ever be is when you don’t know too much, when you don’t know what’s happening right under your feet, when you trust everything is just as it appears.

Why do people love to complain about how hard their lives are then seek out novel ways of making them harder still?

Many things don’t last forever—including our own lives—but they can hardly be automatically characterized as failures. I have been witness to many, many marriages over my lifetime that have continued under what seems to either be a sheer grudge to stick it out or an inability to embrace change.

Those are not the happiest people I’ve ever met. Those relationships do not seem like successes to me, or at least not how I choose to define success.

But I was willing to do just about anything to have a shot at being loved.

And in order to be loved, I learned early on, I could not be myself.

Everything I wanted had been in direct response to what I thought I lacked. I had been working from a perceived deficit.

But if we’re talking evergreen content, it would be tough to beat the passage of time. Melancholy over how regular life unfolds.

I had been alive for less than twenty years and was already fluent in nostalgia, constantly revisiting the past, longing for what had already happened. I wonder now if that obsession was how my anxiety first began to express itself. The past was comforting. I already knew what had happened. The future? The unexpected? Not very cool.

But I’ve always been a melancholy soul, drawn to lowercase sadness. When

It tells you that you enjoy the adrenaline of low-key, low-stakes grief. The type of grief you feel from simply being alive. I rarely place my one small life in the context of a big and tragic world. I consistently dismiss my relentless good fortune. I constantly look back, noticing how good things were then and now look. Look what I had made of it. Look what I had lost. Look at these mistakes, all of them, scattered at my feet. What a loss. What a loser. Only to look back a few years from

now and reflect on how good I had had it. Those were the days.

This is what Ed from Wisconsin had to say, in part: We create our grief by expecting life to be different than it is.

I thought he would always love me. I thought I would always love him. What was the point of thinking otherwise? I thought we would have more over time. Less was never even on the menu.

Minus true grief—the wrenching work of mourning—my daily grief is fully inside me and within my control. I conjure it into being with my expectations. I feed it and let it course through my veins. I say I don’t want to feel this way, but sometimes I do. It makes me feel something.