Note: I started writing this post about two years ago. Obviously, a lot has happened since then. Life has been very busy. I've been meaning to finish writing this the whole time but various things have gotten in the way. Now I'm finally taking the time to do it. I'm in a very different place in life now than I was when I started writing it, which I'm sure I'll reflect on at the end.
Now, picking up from where I started writing in early 2023...
2022 was, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most difficult years of my life.
When I was in seventh grade, I wrote an autobiography for a school assignment, and its title was Life is a Roller Coaster, a nod to my passionate enthusiasm for the amusement park thrill rides. I wrote a blog post about this several years ago, and near its conclusion, made this observation: "Life is a roller coaster. I'm struck by the fact that when I used that phrase as the title of my seventh grade autobiography, I had no real idea of what was signified by that comparison. I had no idea what a roller coaster my life would be."
Certainly, one could say that the phrase "life is a roller coaster" describes my life more than the average person's. Certainly, one could also say that that was not true during my childhood, when I gave that title to my autobiography. It was an eerie bit of foreshadowing, in retrospect.
In 2022, the Jeff's life as a roller coaster analogy reached new heights. (Heh. I couldn't resist.)
And oddly enough, on one of the most pivotal days of that year, roller coasters appeared in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense.
On August 21, 2022, I was in New York City and as part of my trip I took the subway to Coney Island in Brooklyn, primarily to ride arguably the most famous roller coaster in the world, the Cyclone. Just as odd was that this was the second time in the last few years that I found myself at Coney Island and also at a major turning point in my life. In fact, thanks mainly to COVID, that previous Coney Island trip in May 2019 was the previous most recent time I'd ridden a roller coaster.
Before I describe the events of August 2022, though, I have to go back to August 2021.
Every year in August, my family takes a vacation to Lake Placid, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. It's a tradition I cherish. I love it there. I love the scenery and the time with family and the chance to get away from normal life but perhaps most of all I love all the great outdoor activities - hiking and biking and kayaking and swimming. At the beginning of our August 2021 vacation I felt so exhilarated because I was at my best physical fitness level in over a decade.
Something that must be understood if you want to really understand who I am as a person is how central my athletic pursuits have been to my sense of self. Growing up, I probably stood out most to my peers for my academic achievements, but it was far more important to me to be a good cross country and track runner. That was what gave me real feelings of accomplishment. There's just something about pushing one's body to its physical limits and then experiencing the steady improvement as you do that continuously over a period of time that nothing else could match for me. If you asked me in high school or college how I identified myself, the biggest part of the answer would have been as a runner.
It's been many years since I've been able to do any substantial amount of running at all, due to injuries, and this has not been easy for me, but with time, I've been able to move on. Other athletic pursuits have continued to be very important to me.
Another thing that has been central to my life, unfortunately, is my struggles with chronic pain. I can happily say that in recent years I've been doing much better than I had been for most of my life going all the way back to high school. It's not something that I expect will ever completely go away, though.
Something about those myriad chronic pain issues is that they can generally be divided into two bins: pain issues that are caused by anything other than sports injuries, and pain issues that are caused by sports injuries. And the thing is, at any given time there have generally been one or two out of a big grab bag of pain issues that are mainly bothering me, and if what's mainly bothering me is pain not caused by sports injuries, then one of the best remedies for the pain is invariably doing a whole lot of physical activity. But then if I switch to being mainly bothered by pain caused by sports injuries (which might, of course, be brought on by, well, doing a whole lot of physical activity), suddenly doing all that activity makes me feel worse instead of better.
This has led to repeated cycling between times when I was super physically active for a while and times when I wasn't very active, not because I didn't want to be but because of how my body was feeling. Another way my life has been like a roller coaster.
From the spring of 2020 to the summer of 2021 something remarkable happened. For the first time since, really, I was 20 years old, I had a long stretch of time where I felt basically not limited by pain from doing all the physical activity I wanted. Well, with a caveat, I still couldn't run much at all. But cycling, riding my road and mountain bikes, had long ago replaced running as my main form of exercise. Although cycling is easier on my hip and ankles than running is, for most of my post-running career I still felt my body was placing limitations on how much I could do. And then, somehow, it just no longer felt that way.
2020 was such a weird time. I don't have to remind anyone of that. I was so worried about the pandemic and about so much else. But I was also very lucky to suddenly be working from home and able to make my own schedule and there were so many times that summer I just took off on one of my bikes in the afternoon and enjoyed being alive and being outdoors and being healthy and feeling the wind in my face and the air going in and out of my lungs.
As I rode more and more, I got stronger and stronger. I tracked my results on Strava and it started to feel like my old running days. I was doubtful at first that it would last. Always in the past, going back to age 20, there would be some setback and I would have to take time off and lose that fitness. So I tried not to push too hard. But that setback kept not coming. I don't know when exactly it happened, but at some point I started to think, maybe this time was different? Maybe a setback wasn't going to come? Maybe I'd be able to keep getting better at cycling for years and years to come?
It almost seems like a dream now. But it was real and it was amazing.
By the middle of summer 2021 I found that I was in the best shape I had been since I fractured my pelvis in a cycling accident in May 2010. Age 38, and able to ride my bike faster and farther than at any time since before I turned 27. It was so exhilarating.
Taking into account both my fitness and that I was able to do all those rides with a remarkably low level of pain by my standards, I genuinely think that in the summer of 2021 I felt the best physically that I had in 18 years. It's staggering to think about, now that I'm writing it out like this.
(That finishes what I had written in early 2023. Huh, I thought I had gotten farther than that. Oh well.)
But then, that August, as the trip to Lake Placid approached, I started to feel a weird pain in my feet. It felt like a pretty minor issue at first. An unfortunate thing about pain is that there are all sorts of things that feel like minor issues and really are minor issues and will go away on their own, and then there are things that will become major issues, and there's no way to tell them apart at first. As usual, going to Lake Placid, I didn't want to miss out on all the great cycling and hiking I could do there (there's just so much to do, and so little time for it!), so I pushed through the pain. This was probably a mistake in retrospect, but I also suspect that it was already too late, and I was already in for a bad time.
On one of my first days in Lake Placid that year, I set out on a ride on my road bike. It was a ride I'd done once before, in 2009. 2009 was the year when I reached the best physical fitness of my entire life. Thanks to the double whammy of horrible, long-lasting ankle tendinitis brought on by training for a marathon that fall and then the pelvic fracture when I crashed my bike the following spring, I had never since reached anywhere near that level of fitness.
This ride was a 36.7 mile loop with over 2600 feet of climbing within it, easily the hilliest ride I've done in my life. I titled my August 10, 2021 activity on Strava "The 2009 loop." On August 10, 2009, exactly 12 years earlier, I'd averaged 18.7 mph on the ride (two months and one day later, incidentally, I would come in second place in the first and only marathon I've ever run). In 2021 I averaged 18.2 mph. I was tantalizingly close to being in the best shape - on a bike, at least - that I'd ever been in.
I remember well how I felt upon completing that ride. Exhausted, but also exhilarated, and full of endorphins, and so powerful. It was an incredible feeling. It felt like I was on top of the world.
It wasn't long after that I felt like everything was falling apart.
(An odd thing about the life as a roller coaster metaphor is that on an actual roller coaster, the downhill parts are the most fun.)
I had a great time on the 2021 Lake Placid trip and when I returned home I kept up with my busy training schedule, getting out on one or the other of my bikes most days and continuing to set numerous Strava segment PRs. But it was starting to feel like that pain in my feet was not just a minor issue. It was sticking around and growing worse and then in mid-September it kind of suddenly got really bad and I realized, damn, this is a problem, I have to take things easy for a while.
This didn't lead to an immediate improvement. In fact, at first the pain just seemed to get worse. I recognized what was happening because I'd experienced it before. Being in a lot of pain feels really bad. Not being able to ride my bike very much when riding my bike had become my favorite thing to do? Also a really bad feeling. That added up to me being depressed. If I was struggling with my mental health for other reasons, riding my bike would be the best treatment. Now riding my bike made my pain worse. Maybe just going for a nice walk? That also seemed to make my pain worse.
All in all, a recipe for deepening depression.
Just as this was happening, my at-the-time girlfriend was falling into a bad period of mental health herself - and as a result, was withdrawing into herself and largely pushing other people away from her. This meant that suddenly, just when I really needed a lot of emotional support, I was hardly ever seeing the one person I had regularly spent time with since the pandemic started.
I don't know if I really blame her for it even now. She was in a very bad place and I don't know how much control she had over how she reacted. But it was definitely a sign that a relationship that had at first seemed great actually had serious compatibility issues.
Anyway, the whole thing really sucked.
And then, in the ensuing months, a bunch of really, really crazy stuff happened. I don't feel like spending time on it in this post. If you know, you know.
Fast forward to August 2022. At the start of the Lake Placid trip, in contrast to the previous year, I was in a horrible place. I think it was obvious to my parents when I showed up at the house they always rent. I'd spent the summer trying to salvage a relationship that should have been left for dead and it was really one of the bleakest periods of time in my life because something that had once made me so happy now only made me incredibly sad. I was also still not feeling great physically - the pain that started the previous summer had improved, but was still very much present, and I continued to feel limited in what I could do.
My spirits did rise considerably over the course of the two weeks on vacation. It was nice to spend time with my family, and I did enjoy a lot of outdoor activities, albeit on a limited basis compared to the previous year. At the end of the trip, rather than driving back to Cleveland as I normally would, I drove to New York City for a two-night stay (at a hotel in Jersey City) centered around seeing Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Julien Baker at the last stop of their Wild Hearts tour, at SummerStage in Central Park.
Although the two weeks in Lake Placid had helped my mood considerably, it plummeted again when I got to Jersey City. Spending time with my family and especially my parents (the last few days in Lake Placid, after both my siblings had departed, was the longest period of Jeff and parents with no one else around that had happened since I became a big brother at age 2) had helped me feel better, but now I was alone again. Alone, again, for a trip to a concert that I'd originally planned to attend with someone else. Alone, thinking about all the previous times I'd been in similar situations - on trips to see concerts for which I'd purchased two tickets and then, for one reason or another, had ended up going alone. Toronto in September 2013 to see Ohbijou. Denver in June 2015 to see Belle and Sebastian. Portland, Maine in December 2021 to see Weakened Friends. Denver again in June 2022 to see Andrew Bird. And now New York.
I actually often really enjoy going on trips like that by myself. Sometimes I plan them as solo trips. But I was getting tired of having planned trips for two turn into solo trips.
I was getting tired of being alone, and being alone that evening left me with little to distract me from contemplating the horrible trainwreck my love life had turned into, and feeling miserable about it.
I did go to Liberty State Park along the water in Jersey City and it was a lovely evening with a beautiful sunset and great views of the NYC skyline. One thing I saw while there was a public wedding proposal. Actually, I noticed that some props were being set up for a public wedding proposal, and I hung around for quite a while (along with some other curious onlookers) to see the proposal take place. This was an interesting decision on my part, looking back. It was a cute thing to witness, but it was also very much a reminder of my own problems.
The next day, August 21, 2022, was a day like no other I've lived. In the roller coaster of life, there are some dramatic ups and downs. Perhaps never before have I experienced such dramatic ups and downs in a single day as I did on that day.
That evening was the concert in Central Park. My plan for the day was to travel by train from Jersey City to Coney Island, spend some time there, and then get on the train again and head to Central Park to get to the concert close to when the gates opened.
That morning I felt just as glum as the previous evening. In addition to being alone, another thing that was getting me down was that, thanks to me (predictably) pushing perhaps harder than I should have on outdoor activities in Lake Placid, my feet and ankles were again really bothering me a lot, and with my planned day including spending a lot of time on my feet, I was very worried that this would make it hard to enjoy myself - especially at the concert! Which would really suck, if that did happen.
Something I've realized about pain is that if you are thinking about and worrying about something hurting in a particular situation, there's a good chance that just thinking about it will make it hurt more.
It was about an hour and a half train ride from Jersey City to Coney Island including one transfer. On the train, I was listening to music, looking out the windows at the city scenery, and worrying about whether I'd be able to enjoy what should by all rights have been a very exciting day ahead of me.
And then something remarkable happened.
The Cyclone roller coaster came into view through the train windows, and my mood instantly transformed.
I've loved roller coasters since childhood. I remember how incredibly excited I felt about going to Cedar Point as a kid, looking out the car window at the coasters looming in the distance. As an adult, riding roller coasters stopped being something I do frequently... but that feeling of excitement never went away. An anticipatory feeling that can also be stirred in me by going to see one of my very favorite bands in concert, but by few other things in my adult life. "Like a kid on Christmas morning" is a common descriptor for the feeling.
And yes, sitting in that train car, where moments before I'd felt worried and sad, upon seeing the Cyclone out the window I suddenly felt like a kid on Christmas morning.
Minutes later I departed the train, walked the short walk to the famous Coney Island amusement park, and quickly obtained a card to pay for rides and made my way to the queue for the Cyclone.
As a young roller coaster fanatic in the 1990s, I'd read on the Internet about how this ride, built in 1927, remained one of the most thrilling in the world, and was a destination for any diehard coaster enthusiast. I'd always wanted to ride it but never got around to it until 2019, and it had lived up to the expectations that I'd carried with me (dormant and not thought of for many of those years) since childhood. There's just something about these old wooden roller coasters that exhilarates me in a way that few fancy modern rides can quite match. Far too few of them remain with us, and thank goodness that the Cyclone, regarded since its debut nearly a century ago as one of the best, is one.
Seeing the Cyclone had a profound effect on how I felt that day. Riding the Cyclone had an even more profound effect.
The wait for the ride was short. This is kind of amazing. One of the most important roller coasters in history, and still arguably one of the best in the world, on a hot summer weekend day. The Millennium Force at Cedar Point, one of the only roller coasters I like at least as much as I like the Cyclone, surely had hour-long waits that day. I think most people don't appreciate what they have with these classic wooden coasters, but hey, I'm not complaining about the short queues that result from this lack of appreciation.
I boarded the train, we exited the station and started up the lift hill, and that kid on Christmas morning feeling intensified.
As I mentioned, I'd been experiencing a lot of pain in my lower extremities, and was very worried about how I'd hold up in a day that would include a lot of time on my feet, something that invariably made such pain worse. I was especially worried about the concert that evening.
The train crested the lift hill, I let out a whoop of delight as we plunged downward, and I forgot about the pain.
This is normal. Pain has a huge mental component, and one of the best ways to reduce pain is to be distracted from it. A physical therapist of mine once used the example that if you were crossing the street and stepped on something sharp that went into your foot, you'd be in a lot of pain. But if a large truck were bearing down on you when this happened and you had to scramble to avoid being run over, in that moment you wouldn't even notice the pain from stepping on something sharp.
The ride was just as intense and fun as I remembered - so many sudden drops and turns and exhilarating g-forces and "headchopper" moments where you feel like you have to duck to avoid the coaster's structure (of course you don't really need to, but it looks this way) and for those two minutes I wasn't aware of that physical pain that had been bothering me so much earlier that morning, and that wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was this: for the entire rest of the day, the pain was at a dramatically lower level than it had been before I stepped into that roller coaster train.
It really felt like a magic spell had been cast over me!
My mood, naturally, was also much improved from where it had been earlier that morning and especially how it had been the previous evening. As you can see, I felt quite exuberant on the ride, and this feeling lingered:
(I'm wearing my beloved Julien Baker t-shirt in this picture, by the way.)
I spent a couple hours at Coney Island, enjoying a few more rides on the Cyclone, a couple of rides on newer and far inferior but still enjoyable coasters, a little walk on the beach, and a chili cheese dog and fries from Nathan's.
The last thing I did at Coney Island, of course, was one last ride on the Cyclone, and then I walked back to the train station and boarded the train for another nearly hour and a half ride to Central Park. My spirits were much higher than they'd been when I'd boarded the train that morning.
I arrived at the Park with plenty of time to spare, and spent a little time walking around, and also grabbed a (mediocre) pretzel to eat before heading to the venue. I'd heard about SummerStage at Central Park before but had never been there. I was surprised when I got in because I'd been expecting something bigger. It was a really nice setting for an outdoor concert on a good day for one. Before finding a spot close to the stage, I went to the merch table and bought this tote bag, not knowing at the time just how accurate it would be:
The show started early in the evening with a short set by opener Quinn Christopherson, which I enjoyed but which was basically a distraction before the three performers who I could hardly believe I'd all get to see in one night: Julien Baker, Angel Olsen, and Sharon Van Etten. Three women who have all made music I love and cherish and three women who had each previously played live shows tied to significant moments and memories in my life.
Baker was the first of the three to play. She's blown me away with her live performances every time I've gotten the privilege to see her (this was the fifth in person, plus one of my favorite streamed shows of the pandemic era), going back to the first time in July 2016 when this tiny young woman whose music I'd never heard before stepped onto the stage of Mr. Smalls in Millvale, PA to play an opening set for Daughter and left me utterly in awe with her heartwrenchingly beautiful music. The only thing I wished were different about this show would have been longer sets, and Baker's was especially short, but she made the most of the limited time. The set mostly consisted of songs from 2021 album Little Oblivions, one of my favorite albums of the 2020s.
Baker always brings such intensity to her performances and it's a marvel to see and hear. It's hard to believe that that voice emerges from the lungs of such a physically small person.
This was the final show of the Wild Hearts tour. Near the end of Baker's last song "Ziptie," numerous members of the tour crew and other bands (including Sharon Van Etten herself) emerged onto the stage to rock out to the extended outro, and it was a delight to see - especially because Baker herself seemed so delighted!
It was a joyous moment. I'd been riding an emotional high for much of the day, pretty much since I'd arrived at Coney Island, a gigantic contrast to how I'd felt the previous evening. But now the emotional roller coaster continued. After Julien Baker came the performance by Angel Olsen.
Angel Olsen's music was inextricably linked for me to the failing relationship that was the cause of most of my emotional distress that summer. When the relationship had been good, I'd liked listening to Olsen's music. When things went downhill and I started to really doubt the relationship would work, I mostly stopped listening to Olsen's music because it just made me feel sad.
After what had been a great day to that point, when Angel Olsen stepped onto the stage to begin her set, I found myself awash in the same melancholy feeling that had consumed me for much of that summer.
Olsen had released her new album Big Time in June, but I still hadn't been able to bring myself to listen to it, which was pretty telling considering how much I'd loved her previous two albums. I'd merely watched, once, the video for title track "Big Time." The song is a really sweet love song, a happy song, which is pretty unusual in Olsen's catalog. Since it was the title track, and it was a happy love song, I had the impression that this album would be much less sad in lyrical content than most of Olsen's work.
Because I hadn't listened to her new album other than that one song, this concert was my introduction to most of the songs Olsen played that evening. She opened her set with "Dream Thing" from the new album and I stood there and watched and felt miserable. She played "Big Time" next and my misery deepened because I was absolutely not in a place where I wanted to hear Angel Olsen play a happy love song.
But then something funny happened.
The third song in the set was another new song, "Ghost On." The opening lines of the song go thusly:
And those words shot straight into my heart because they matched so well with the thoughts and feelings I'd been having about that relationship.
I think I probably laughed a little to myself at that point. Okay, I see what's happening here, I thought.
Yeah, pretty much! I thought.
Sharon Van Etten closed out the night, and whereas Angel Olsen's set had me working through all sorts of complicated feelings, Van Etten's was just a delight. It had been eight years since I'd seen one of her concerts, so I'd been eagerly anticipating getting to finally see her again, and she did not disappoint.
A highlight of her fantastic set was "Mistakes" from 2022 album We've Been Going About This All Wrong. Van Etten introduced the song by talking about how she had always felt very self conscious about dancing, until she had a child, and when she danced with her child, she no longer felt self conscious, because it didn't matter what she looked like; she loved dancing with her child!
When I make a mistake
Turns out it's great, it's great, it's great
I loved this story and I love this song. Throughout the more up tempo songs in her set, Van Etten danced exuberantly, confidently, sometimes in a silly way but always in a joyful way that was delightful to witness. Dancing is such a great thing and I sometimes think about how people who are too self conscious to do it - at a wedding, at a rock or pop concert, even in the privacy of their homes - are really missing out on a great part of the human experience.
The show, and the Wild Hearts Tour, ended with Baker and Olsen joining Van Etten on stage to play "Like I Used To," a Van Etten/Olsen collaboration that was easily one of the best songs of 2022 and that I can't believe still hasn't been released in any physical format. It was such a joy to experience and you could see the joy on the faces of all those on stage as well, which was wonderful. I marvel again and again at the power of music and the wondrous effects it has both on those performing and on those listening to it, especially in a live setting.
Another screenshot from a joelrchan YouTube video.
As the trio soaked up the raucous applause and I enthusiastically contributed to it, I found myself thinking, Wow, that was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. Pretty remarkable that that morning I had been worried about whether I'd be able to enjoy the concert. Also pretty remarkable that partway through the concert I'd been plunged back into a deep melancholy and had again emerged from it and now felt on top of the world. It had been a roller coaster of a day and it was a day I didn't want to end!
I joined the crowds walking out of Central Park and went to a nearby subway station, but instead of heading directly back to Jersey City I first made a stop for a late dinner (having not yet actually eaten dinner that day) at one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Coppelia.
There I sat at the bar and enjoyed a drink, an appetizer, an entree, another drink, and dessert (an especially delicious tres leches cake), and also just kind of enjoyed the feeling of being alive and being unreservedly happy. On my many solo travels I've come to find there's great pleasure in going out to eat alone and consuming some really good food and drink while also just sitting there and taking it all in, the other people in the restaurant, all the interesting little things that people say or do in the little moments of life. I think my appreciation of such experiences has greatly heightened since the pandemic.
Coppelia was a great nightcap to a great day. I then returned to the train and eventually to Jersey City, where I ended up walking some ways on a very lonely path next to the water before reaching my hotel. It was a little eerie. It was also beautiful.
I was in a still exhilarated yet also contemplative mood as I stared back across the water at the city. I marveled at it all. The sky. The buildings. The amazing day I'd just had. My crazy life.
Emotions are funny things. If you're in a really bad emotional state, it can feel like you'll feel that way forever and it can be hard to imagine feeling better. Then when you do feel better, it can seem like there's no reason why you shouldn't just stay feeling better and it can be hard to imagine you'll ever feel that bad again. But emotions are transient.
At the end of that magical day, I felt like I was so ready to just put all the bad stuff behind me and that my life was simply going to be better going forward.
Of course, it wasn't that simple in reality.
The emotional roller coaster wasn't over.
Once I got into a relationship with Erin, a relationship that (unlike my previous few) had basically no real reason it shouldn't work, things seemed perfect at first but then it was like my brain couldn't accept it and had to make up obstacles to the relationship succeeding.
I was wracked with horrendous anxiety, something that had been a long-running theme of my dating and relationship experiences ever since my first relationship as a widowed person traumatically ended. The relationship before Erin was one in which I frequently experienced dramatic mood swings as I cycled between feeling good and bad about the relationship, and now it seemed like somehow my brain had become entrained to those cycles and I would go back and forth between feeling totally at ease and happy with Erin and feeling deeply, viscerally uncomfortable - a pretty horrible way to feel when you know intellectually that the person you're with is a really good match for you.
It's been suggested to me by others that the feelings I was getting might be some form of PTSD or panic disorder. It was very hard to predict when, how intensely, and for how long these feelings would strike. The only predictable thing was that if I was feeling good, at some point I would start to feel a lot worse, and conversely, if I was feeling bad, at some point I would start to feel better.
"No feeling is final." These words from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing," which Erin shared with me when I was having a bad anxiety episode, became a mantra. (Extended quote: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." Words to live by for sure.) When I was feeling really bad, and it was hard to imagine not feeling that way, I'd repeat the words to myself, "No feeling is final."
I think it helped.
Erin was very patient and helpful. She also got me to do at-home yoga with her. For a while we did it (either together, or separately on days we didn't see each other) almost every day. This also helped.
It was a long journey. There were a number of times when some significant experience or event happened and then I felt like I was all the way better and the feeling persisted for some time and I imagined concluding this post by saying something to the effect of, "and then [x] happened, and after that, the emotional roller coaster was finally over." Examples: Erin and I moving in together and then going on a great camping trip to Ohiopyle, Erin and I eloping in Yosemite... also several really good concerts. That's something really interesting I noticed. There were multiple occasions when I had been feeling pretty troubled emotionally and then I went to a really good concert and after that I just felt so much better and my head felt so clear, and not just in the immediate aftermath of the concert but for weeks. I'd love to understand the neural basis for that effect!
But over and over again, I'd go from feeling better to once more feeling very unsettled with life. For no rational reason, which I was perfectly aware of, and that made it all the more frustrating.
Gradually, though, the bad times became less frequent and usually less severe, and I started being more and more able to just enjoy finally having, well, I guess something like a normal life. Which I guess was what I was striving for all along, but I was also so used to having a crazy and traumatic life that it was difficult for my brain to accept at first.
Maybe those weird, anxious feelings won't ever be 100% banished 100% of the time, but for the last few months I'm finally at a point where I feel at least almost all the way better, almost all the time. There were a lot of things I did to help me get there, but I think two things were really the most important:
1. The passage of time. Time may not actually heal all wounds, but I think almost all wounds do become less painful given enough time.
2. Getting married to a great partner, and then having an amazing baby with her!
It's funny how events of the past are continuously recontextualized by our feelings in the present. All those difficult times in the early days of my relationship with Erin, that seemed so big and hard to overcome at the time, are collapsing more and more into a minor hiccup in our lives. And August 21, 2022? It was a tumultuous and thrilling and beautiful day when it happened. Looking back now, it feels like something more: a portal between the chaotic life I had leading up to that day, and the mostly happy and contented life I now enjoy.
The next time I got to ride a roller coaster after that day was in October 2023 at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, days after Erin and I got married. About nine and a half months later (people will be doing the math!), Erin gave birth to our daughter. Life is a roller coaster, indeed! And I'm sure it will continue to be a wild ride - but I also feel like, for the first time in most of my adult years, the emotional roller coaster aspect of my life has, well, pulled into the station and I've exited it for a while.
I wonder what little 12-year-old Jeff would think of all this.
