Schopenhauer & His Porcupines

Arthur Schopenhauer writes about what he calls the “porcupine dilemma”: a group of porcupines draw closer to each other in cold weather to share body heat and endure the winter together, knowing that the key to survival lies in each other; however, by drawing closer they prick each other with their own quills and cause each other much more pain than if they had stayed separate. The harsher the winter, the closer the porcupines draw to each other; the closer they draw to each other, the more pain they cause each other — more, even, than the pain of enduring the cold alone.

The dilemma, of course, is an allegory meant to illuminate all of the things that prove so challenging about human intimacy. One of the saddest ironies I can imagine is the irony inherent to how hard it feels to be with another person and carry something together, if that something is greatly meaningful. If you ask me, Schopenhauer’s porcupines carry us through even into joy; for so many of the same reasons it feels terrifying to draw near each other in the depths of winter, it has often felt terrifying to me to partner with another person to carry something joyful together, for fear of ruining either a circumstance or a relationship.

Earlier this spring I wrote a lot of words about the grief of losing my first pregnancy, which was ectopic. I lost many things — my first baby, the right half of my reproductive system, and any sense of certainty with respect to motherhood chiefly among them. The pain of last winter and spring — sharp, constant, scary, sad — has given way to a different sort of pain this summer: melancholy, more than sad; transient; and characterized by a sort of dull ache that feels like re-remembering, every so often, that the world seems to have moved on without me. Oh, I imagine them saying. I hadn’t realized you were still sad about that.

I have been thinking about these porcupines a lot this year. I have been thinking about how unexpectedly difficult it has felt to admit to being tired, and quietly sad. A few weeks ago I went to a new dermatologist and right in the middle of a laundry list of routine first-visit questions from the med tech it felt like I’d missed a step: asthma, allergies, lung conditions, heart conditions, pregnancies, thyroid problems. I was cold to him and I wish I hadn’t been. He left and I wanted to explain this is not who I am, except that the problem is that this is, now, exactly who I am.

I try, during moments like this, to come back to Whitman and his multitudes, and the idea of both/and. Yes, I am sometimes cold to med techs in waiting rooms, and I am warm and kind to the people that love me. Yes, I am sometimes too sad to do a good job asking for help, and other times I can do it on my own. Sometimes, I have learned to ask gracefully for what I need. Still other times (the most precious, I suspect, of all), I have learned to describe, gracefully, whatever I am carrying, and to let that be enough. Example: I am sad. Example: I worry often about the future. Example: Today feels hard.

Sometimes, I have learned, I don’t need help at all, other than in the most basic sense; sometimes, what I actually need is just to feel like the dark, quiet parts of me have been heard.

“…there is not an ending, really,” I wrote four months ago, “other than to say that all of the sadness and grief I experienced over this loss exist now alongside all of the joy that came before — and, probably more importantly, also alongside all of the joy that has come since.” The best way to summarize the reality I am slowly living into as summer wears into fall is that the other side of the yes, and is a slow creeping sadness that has settled comfortably into all the spaces in my life I hadn’t realized were there.

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When I first read about the porcupines it felt like an allegory, not an illustration. It was difficult to see myself in a story about how difficult it can be to draw nearer to the folks you love most, during the times that feel most difficult. When I first encountered the porcupines I dismissed them as the sort of story that felt like it described people other than myself. What I know now is that the missing piece was never personal disposition, but the degree to which I’d experienced loss.

The things that felt hard to me when I first learned about the porcupines are not the things that feel hard to me now; indeed, they are not even the things that felt hard to me in the deepest valleys of grief. What feels the most difficult for me now is finding the language to explain myself as a layered human: a human for whom August is joyful and exciting and a human who lost a best friend to suicide in a way that felt quite sudden during the month of August; a human whose favorite time of the year is late summer and a childless human who was supposed to become a mother in late summer.

Yes, and.

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I am vast; I contain multitudes. This has been helpful to me — I mentioned it earlier and I mentioned it in the spring, when I first started speaking grief into the world. The clearest way I can describe the yes, and feeling that comes with being a happy woman carrying grief is found in a Jack Gilbert poem called Waking at Night. The poem, in its entirety, reads:

The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.

The answer to this wonder is wrapped up in the same sort of startled realization that makes a person want to say this isn’t who I am in the same breath as realizing this is exactly who I am, now.

When my best friend died I was 25 and for a whole year after I was so angry about the beginnings and the endings. I was angry about the innocent part of my life ending. I was angry that I had to bury my best friend and, even more elementally, I hated that the world had made me angry against my will. I was angry that the part of my life characterized by suddenly crying was beginning. I was even angry about when it happened; I was angry that in the hustle and bustle of late August — children playing in the street, students returning to school, crickets and sprinklers and birds and dogs — I had been left behind to become a new person in the middle of all this life.

Conversely, my baby died on January 21, in the middle of winter with snow on the ground, when I was 28. I took ten days off work quietly and unceremoniously and my house was still in a way I had never heard it before. Jack Gilbert’s words threaded through me constantly: I wonder if this quiet in me now is a beginning or and end.

Distance has shown me that it is both; every ending is a beginning is an ending is a beginning is an ending. If the out-of-time acuteness of grief is characterized by blunt, unsubtle preoccupation, then the long slow fade back into reality is characterized by everything bleeding into everything else. For example: for the last few weeks I have cried every day when dropping my dog off at daycare. A few weeks ago I cried about it more than once at (!) work (!!) in front of other people (!!!). At the end of the day I sat down and wondered, very honestly yet with no trace of self-awareness, why I wasn’t more sad about my due date having come and gone. In this strange blurry middle part of grief (I hadn’t realized you were still sad about that) everything is too loud, too bright, and made up of everything else. More poetry, this time from W.S. Merwin: Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color.

I miss my baby, I’d murmured on the phone to my husband while trying desperately not to be the kind of person that cries at work over my dog. The gracious hindsight of a few weeks now makes me want to wrap my old self in a blanket and pat her on the back and murmur back, Well, no shit.

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Back to the matter at hand: porcupines, and how easy it is to feel quietly sad in contrast with how difficult it has been for me to raise my hand and declare this sadness aloud.

I published and shared my first essay because it felt too heavy to walk around in the world with such a large part of me invisible. I am publishing and sharing this one because so many people responded to the first with some variation of “thank you for talking about this” and at the end of the day the heart of the matter is that it feels dishonest not to check back in four months later and report out that 1) this shit still sucks pretty hard, pretty often, and feels, always, wildly unfair and 2) the way I’m experiencing it has changed. The hard part before was raising my hand to say, you all think of me as happy and instead this horrible thing, the worst thing, has happened to me that feels very private and isolated and also sometimes I am happy, but very often I am quite sad, but don’t worry, I’m happy too. The hard part now is raising my hand to say, you all think of me as happy and instead absolutely nothing is currently happening to me and very often I am quite sad. Still.

Time has lent an air of defensiveness to my sadness (see above: “Still.”) and an almost compulsory need to qualify. Still sad, but not all the time. Still sad, but also really grateful and joyful. In the end, though, it would seem that if I am going to call myself “both”, then I better actually be both. So far, I think I have done a better job at owning the parts of my life that are still joyful than the parts of my life that are abjectly sorrowful.

I guess the takeaway for this “middle” part of grief is balancing yes, and with the porcupines. It has been really, really difficult to learn not to qualify. It has been really difficult to simply describe a single bright shiny point (“holy shit does life feel hard today”) instead of attempting to name an entire constellation (“life is so hard but so great! I’m so glad I’m alive! I really wish my baby was too but at least I have a roof over my head and good friends, you know? Some people don’t have that. And also wow, man, I don’t know why life feels so hard today. But it’s okay.”). I have learned that qualifying is a way to make reaching out feel less vulnerable.

When I think back to how many stories I bore witness to after losing my pregnancy and how many times people called me brave or thoughtful or vulnerable it made me re-commit to telling stories — specifically, my own. So, here is a story: I am, so often, still sad. It’s not my entire story but it is a story unto itself and it is a story worth telling. I am hopeful that in telling it I will summon the courage not to shy away from those drawing nearer to me in hopes of enduring the winter together. I think that’s a skill that’s helpful to practice.

A weird thing that has happened is that as grief has become less stabbing and acute, it has become more exhausting to carry. I know that in this world what we have is each other. I know that the only way we can earn the honor of carrying each other through the hardest times is to allow ourselves to be carried. Finally, I know that to know a thing must be done means, in some meaningful way, an obligation to do it. I suppose, then, in my heart, I know that this means that now it is time to let others — occasionally — draw closer.

Do you see how much work I have ahead of me with respect to unlearning qualifiers?

Here is a thing that I know: it is time to let others draw closer.