Anatomy of a Disappointment

Or: How to cancel your Thanksgiving trip to NYC because of Covid, while only being a partial self-pitying asshole

Let me take you through the disappointment: the background, the thing itself, and how I got to the point where I could see it clearly enough to write about it. The background is always the hardest isn’t it? I could start at the point where I decided to reward myself for loading myself up with teaching gigs this year, in order to keep the wolf from the door during the writers and actors strikes. My friend, Milly, had moved to Nyak and I nabbed a round trip ticket early for the Thanksgiving break. She had a guest room and plenty of free time to drive us into Manhattan which would be all done up for Christmas by the time I got there. Milly and I would walk arm and arm through the village, stopping for several cups of tea at little establishments with round marble-top wobbly tables. Then we’d grab a train up to the Met or the park or to meet a friend. I had saved money for this. Even resisted buying a long suede jacket, on sale.  Milly, Manhattan, mornings alone in bed with a novel – a just reward for all the long hours of work I’d put in.

            I could give more background here about how I lived in New York in my twenties – with Milly, as it happens. I could tell you that the city never lost its romance for me. I am forever young there. An acting student in my young twenties. I was gorgeous and eager and cynical in ways that seem desperately naïve to me now. Or I could flash forward and let the reader know that from months before the lockdown until the beginning of this year were unequivocally the worst in my entire life. Serial losses gutted me; but the worst was losing my sense of self to the degree that I felt like a ghost in my own life. A ghost in a lot of corporeal pain. Which is impossible I know. But that really covers it.

            In the interest of time, I won’t got into too much detail of how I emerged, but I did. Landing back on the planet early this summer and this Thanksgiving trip was the melding of all that – the loss with the reemergence, if you see what I mean.

            Until it wasn’t. Pat got Covid first. Doing his thing of lurching around with two wads of Kleenex up his nose like a prize fighter, while I isolated in the bedroom, masked, with a pile of Covid texts and barely anything left to watch on all my platforms because fuck you strike. But I was determined to get to New York City and Milly, who has been through everything with me and who loves me anyway (she’s the friend most likely to start a conversation with “you weren’t your best self -- last night/ last week/ when you let the joke go too far/ had that last glass of wine/ jumped into the pool in your clothes/ told the ticket guy you were twelve…”).

            Daily texts to Milly while Pat isolated in the living room with me in the bedroom. Fingers crossed. Masked and trudging past Pat laid out on the sofa, with absolutely no pity for him. Just get to New York. You deserved this. You worked for it. Murphy, my nineteen year old, also holed up in his room, blasting “My Sweet Lord” through the walls. One day we conversed through masks, him from the master bathroom, me on the bed.

            And then, of course, the faint red line. Was that really a line? Hope dwindling, I waited a few hours, watching the entire season of “Botched” where bad cosmetic surgeries are “fixed” by a duo of doctors who make jokes that are entirely devoid of humor, but who are nonetheless told how hilarious they are by patients and staff alike – don’t encourage these fuckers! By the time I took the second test, the line was unmistakable.

            FUUUUUCK! The injustice! I had sacrificed! Planned! Worked like a mother-fucker! So I dug down deep into my worst self, past all the other shit reactions I have ever had – there’s a fucking trove down there – and committed myself to the fullest expression of self-pity I had ever manifested. Pack of cigarettes (I had quit, but what the hell), check. Bottle of wine, check – never mind the Covid. Pot gummis. A slew of texts to friends wishing them a fantastic Thanksgiving wherever the fuck they were that wasn’t in my Covid dripping bedroom – all with a whiff of “you go have fun while I rot”.  Not my best self, clearly. But Milly wasn’t around to comment on it, because fuck you Covid.

            Here’s why I advocate for wallowing in self-pity after a disappointment. First of all, it’s kind of fun. I don’t think I showered for a week and that’s just plain interesting in ways that I will spare you from hearing. Although, I can say that the self-pity part of the bath strike lasted only about a day. The other days were “just because I could.” Fuck you disappointment. I won’t bathe and I’ll watch another true murder show, while taking smoke breaks because fuck you. Yes, “The Gilded Age” lacks any kind of nuance, swerves out of its way to avoid complex, deeply American rifts in our attitudes toward class, race, women, and values, wastes great actors -- and the only thing stiffer than its dialogue is the rods up all of the American actors’ asses. However, seen through the lens of my great disappointment, it was perfect. Poor, poor me. I didn’t deserve anything good. Indeed, the world had just told me as much.

            But the real reason for wallowing in self-pity is that it’s damn boring and very difficult to sustain. The second day of Covid, I started trying on clothes and accessorizing them. This was a self-soothing routine I’d begun during lockdown, which helped me imagine a world outside in which I would actually wear the ensemble.

            The third day, I was making big plans. Looking up ticket prices to London, Italy, Amsterdam. Could I afford to rent a villa on the French Riviera for a month? Now that I wasn’t going to New York, did that open up other possibilities? What were the requirements for an artist visa so I could live on Shetland Island -- a location in Scotland that I fell in love with after watching the show in which the small community there is plagued by a severely disproportionate amount of murders?

            The third day, I made promises to myself about being a better person –

A better person AFTER I got through all this. Not before. But as soon as I got out. Or maybe after Thanksgiving. Or let’s be realistic, in the new year.

            And then FINALLY– perspective. Because there is only so long you can sustain all that self-pity and indulgence. The trick is to really dive in such a way that strips you of any dignity. A kind of aversion therapy for the soul.

            If you do it right, you wake up one morning remembering all those things that make us our best selves. Which is that human suffering is unavoidable. And God damn, this little grain of your personal suffering is nothing compared to the whole fucking desert.

But make no mistake, your suffering is important; it is. Know this. Your little loss softens you to the unimaginable suffering of others. If I’m felled by a change in travel plans, how would I handle the loss of a child, my house blown to bits, war at my doorstep?

Since I turned sixty or so, I have noticed that my recovery time from small disappointments has shortened. While the time spent mourning huge losses has increased (probably because those huge losses get bigger and bigger and more final). Drop the last of my grandmother’s tea cups on kitchen floor and I barely skip a beat. But thoughts of my mother even a year after her death, can bring me to my knees. An image I thought was an exaggeration until it happened to me recently, several times.

Theologian and poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama starts a prayer “Let us pick up the stones / over which we stumble, friends / and build altars”.  Ó Tuama is undoubtedly a better human than I because he doesn’t talk about the part that got him to deciding to build an alter out of his failings and disappointments. He doesn’t admit to hate-watching a season of “The Gilded Age” while buying freakishly soft Turkish towels online before coming to his state of grace. But, hell, whatever gets you there.

Oh to be young in New York (Sometime in the mid-eighties)