A Love Letter from The Middle

I turn 48 on Tuesday. If you need me I’ll be at Disneyland with one of my best friends. My friend Summer jokes that I have one thousand best friends; she is also the absolute best! I am excited to turn 48. I am excited to be in THE MIDDLE. This is not a peri menopause post, let’s just get that out of the way. I’m not trying to sell you a supplement or a protein rich diet delivery program, but I guess I am trying to sell you something, it’s called LIFE.

I watched Bridesmaids on a very early morning flight from Austin to Los Angeles yesterday. It’s funny to watch Bridesmaids at 7am, but I know an opportunity when I see one. There is a scene where Meghan comes in with all the dogs and Annie is sitting sad on the couch crying to Castaway. Meghan starts hitting her and, here’s my point, she says something like, I’m your life Annie, Hit me back, Start fighting for your shitty life Annie. I love that line. Today it’s one of my favorite lines ever. I wanna fight for my shitty life!!

But my life isn’t shitty, it’s never been shitty, shitty things have happened, but it’s a whole entire beautiful life, and it’s mine, my life, yours, your life. I know I write about this a lot, this lame old ass sentiment of falling in love with your life, but it seems to me like the first and most important part of living.

What if you loved your life so much that you fought for it?

We LOVE beginnings and endings; they are so dramatic, they are what we talk to friends about on the phone and on street corners after dinner dates; they are like big brass bands, expanding our insides and making us feel alive. But also, they are painful, birth is beautiful and all, but we come into this world, naked, gasping for breath, experiencing hunger for the first time, cold, the lights are bright, a stranger is touching us, and then we are literally cut away from our mom; take a moment and pretend these things were happening to you now in real time, I’ll wait. You’d be on the phone with your therapist or reaching for a cupcake in five minutes. And death, I’m not even gonna get into that monster under the bed.

It takes work to love something in the middle, a friendship, a marriage, a creative endeavor. We are so surrounded by life that we can feel kind of lost. Sometimes we are stumbling around in the woods looking desperately for lights from cars and neon gas station signs, and sometimes we stop and get curious and look around and think how breathtaking to be surrounded by so much beauty. The middle is about the details, the gratitudes, the single truths that are hard to tell, the tone of a friends laugh, the way your partners hand feels familiar on your back even when you are mad, the comfort of admitting your favorite outfit is an oversized t shirt and underpants, the joy that they never stop making The Bachelor even if you do have a lot of complaints about it. I think the middle is about falling in love, in steady gentle love with this shot we get at life.

In the middle we are surrounded by LIFE!

I have spent so many years of my life thinking about loss, being lost; I have written a whole goddamn book about being losing. Now I’m ready to be found. I realize I have found so many more things in my 48 years than I have lost, and from that perspective my life has been about fucking around and finding out, but isn’t that what all life is supposed to be about, about finding out? What’s it like to laugh so hard with your friends that you get dizzy, to fall in love for the first time, to fall out of love, to get broken up with, to break someone else’s heart, to have babies and a slice of pizza, to lose a parent, what about both of them? What is it like to get older and realize you didn’t get the life you thought you wanted? What is it like to realize there is life left waiting for you to claim it. We are not done because if you are reading this, you are alive.

Sometimes I read those essays about what I wish I could tell my twenty year old, like you are skinny now, speak up, and I thought what would I wanna tell her, and I think I’d wanna tell her all the things she’s doing right. So here are some of them.

You are always curious. You are mostly kind, but you know to be cold when you need to protect yourself in the world. You have so much fun. You made so many best friends and you fell in love with their hearts and you let all of them into yours. You read a lot of books. You practice gratitude even in the moments you’ve wanted to die. You somehow knew that the beauty of nature, art, the material world would save you when you needed to be saved. You made laughing and making other people laugh one of the most important things in life. You try and fall in love with at least one thing a day. Sometimes when you are feeling brave you let yourself change, and you don’t try to trap the ocean. You trust yourself sometimes. You try to say the honest truth, at least to yourself and your team. You have fought for your life, sometimes like in a dream where you can’t find your legs, but you always fight for your big beautiful one of a kind shitty ridiculous fantastic life. I thank you for all of it.

If you sit real quiet can you hear what your life is asking of you? You don’t have to do anything, but can you hear it?

xxJenny