Meaning making

making sense of things and wishing i didn't have to

“I don’t know if it’s genetic luck of the draw or my upbringing or what keeps me from the depression that plagues my family,” I said. “But if I were to name one thing, it’d be this: meaning making.”

 My friend’s chin rested on his hand, eyes trained on mine. We ran into each other at a middle eastern restaurant in town. I came alone to drink tea and write as a nice, reclusive Friday night. He’d come to sit and eat. Neither of us planned on finding company. He hadn’t mentioned it yet, but he’d just come from a memorial ceremony for a friend he’d lost. And lost suddenly.

“Meaning making” recently came into my vocabulary. I’ve been reading voraciously this week, sifting through scientific papers and literature on psychology, spirituality, grief, resilience, and this new phrase: “Meaning making.”

A quick Wikipedia definition is that, in psychology, “meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.”

In May 2020, on the eve of my zoom-hosted “graduation,” I wrote. I wrote, trying to make sense of the loss of COVID, the loss of normalcy and friendship. I woke to a thunderous crack in the middle of the night after writing this. An earthquake, 3.3 magnitude at 3:33 in the morning.

Looking back at this writing now, it may be my best attempt to encompass meaning making and resilience.

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I don’t claim to be perseverant.

Actually, let me rephrase.

People have told me that I’m ‘perseverant’ as I faced whatever event was cracking the foundation of my life. My parent’s divorce, moving continents, facing poverty. Da’s death. Quentin’s suicide.

After each rumble and shaking of earth, my home still stood.

The loss of celebration, of last moments with friends and revelry in my successes... it’s disappointing, and at times the heartbreak is poignant enough to bring anyone to tears. But I can’t call it unfair, I can’t call it theft. It’s circumstance, as uncontrollable as the weather.

As with all mourning, it’s mutable, and I can’t say I’m ‘done with it’ yet (lest another crying spell rear its head.) But I’ve grown beyond weeping for what could’ve been, because what has been has been strange and challenging and isolating and restorative and I (maybe) wouldn’t change it, had I the power to.

The fact of the matter is that I seem to have a blind faith in the bones of my house. Rumbling walls, shuttering china in cabinets and deep fissures in its core have not become normal to me now, but I’ve been forced from the age of blissful unknowing of the power of these quakes. I know, with every new storm, which walls in my house bend. Where the roof will leak in the aftermath, where to place the bucket in the morning.

I’ve found safe spaces within my weathered house to shelter-in-place: beneath the stairs, nestled at the innermost of my sacred home.

I sometimes worry that I don’t feel frightened enough, in these storms. But my fear isn’t the point, nor my worry. Fear only keeps me under the stairs after the storm’s blown on, flinching at imaginary crashes of limbs.

The anxious wind will bow my windows while rains of longing will pummel the shingles. And the deep, inescapable rumblings and breakings of bereavement will barrel through stoney bedrock and find me, beneath the stairs or in the garden or at the grocery store.

All of this, and all of my life, will be as full of magic and joy and hardship.

I look forward to all of this and more, and am grateful that, for now, I can put daisies on my kitchen table and open the door to let fear out of her home beneath the stairs. I’ll step outside, look at the patchy paint and the shaken windows and find, with love, that my house still stands.

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When my mom died five months later, someone sent this back to me. My own words. They were still true, but they felt almost mocking. Losing her was the deepest, most shattering, and destructive tremor of my life yet.

Now, I’m halfway through an application to a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. Not just that, but a program in which I can study spirituality and its myriad of psychological influences. I’d be studying under incredible researchers, Jungian analysts, Buddhists, positive psychologists, and more. My mother would be dancing in her red cowboy boots, as giddy with excitement as I am.

Losing Quentin, losing mom—both of which helped me find and strengthen my desire to accompany others in suffering. I look at my life and I do see patterns. I note the synchronicities and improbabilities and divinities that have merged to lead me here today. I do find meaning.

But last night I wept. Bitterly. I fucking miss my mother. If I was in an old blues song where I could make a deal with the devil, I’d offer to shave off ten years of my life just for one more ten-minute conversation with her. I’d make that deal, without hesitation. With joy.

“As much as I hold faith that these hardships have meaning,” I continued, talking to my friend between bites of falafel and sips of tea.

“As much as I believe I’m being tempered for something, that there’s a greater purpose, that I’m growing in some necessary and good way,” our eyes met and stayed locked.

“I would give all of my growth and goodness and purpose back in an instant if it meant I could have back the people I’ve lost.”