A Series of Unfortunate Events

When I was in my prime—about 8-11 years old—I adored the A Series of Unfortunate Events books, which followed three orphans as they were tossed from foster home to foster home, avoiding an evil count who wanted to steal their inheritance. I adored them for the exciting stories of daring-do, of course, but also for how they were written. Their author, Lemony Snicket, never condescended to his young readers, using words we had to look up in the dictionary (or ask our parents the meanings of) and trusting that we could handle the inherent darkness of his stories. But it was the way he wrote about that darkness with humor and wit that spoke to me specifically and which I find myself returning to throughout my life, creative and otherwise.

“If you didn’t laugh, you’d have to cry” is a phrase I throw around a lot, and one that I can’t attribute to one person after some Googling, so I guess it’s just one of those things people say. See also, “Take your broken heart and turn it into art,” attributed to the inimitable Carrie Fisher, which has been a guide for me creatively—so much that it was the title of my MFA graduating thesis presentation. These have been the words clattering around in my head lately, as I’ve been going through a series of unfortunate events of my own.

Let me break it down for you. Here’s all the shit that’s hit the fan in the past two months:

1. I got dumped. Long-time readers will know I’m no stranger to this experience. This one, however, hits different. This was not some stranger I met on a dating app, but a close friend of nearly seven years. Yes, we fell victim to that old rom-com trap of dating your friend and letting it ruin your friendship. And as a result of that lost friendship, I…

   1. lost other friends, who were technically his first. This almost hurts more than simply getting dumped. I’ve never been through a breakup like this before, where we were part of the same friend group and so involved in each other’s lives, and therefore there’s this messy Can we be friends, can we not? thing going on with people who are probably being told a version of the story of the breakup that doesn’t feel true to me. I find it difficult to live in that uncertainty, which my ex would probably say is the reason I got dumped in the first place.

2. I got laid off from my writing job. Long-time readers will know I’m no stranger to quitting and/or getting fired from jobs (mostly the former). This one, however, hits different. It was a freelance gig, so it’s not like there was any real security there in the first place, but as a result of being laid off, I am now…

   1. suffering from an identity crisis. You have to understand—I’ve been working mindless retail jobs for the better part of a decade. Then I got my MFA, then I got a job writing about celebrities and reality shows. Like, are you kidding me? I got to use my degree and my brain and call myself an actual, for real, professional writer, and I got to do it by writing articles about The Real Housewives with the same level of profundity I did when I wrote papers about The Picture of Dorian Gray in college. It was the stuff of childhood dreams. I am not one of those writers who stay up late into the night, overcome by the muse, making up stories for my own enjoyment. I need an assignment, and now I don’t have one. Except this, I guess. Thanks?

3. Speaking of childhood, I am, once again, moving back into my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house. Alas, all of these rejections mean I no longer have enough income to afford renting on my own because the economy we live in hates single people. I’ve had to break my lease and get out of Dodge in order to protect what savings I have left. It’s no one’s fault but my own—I’ve learned the hard way not to rely on a freelance income to pay your rent, and especially not to rely on a man to stick around long enough to move in and pay half your rent, no matter how much he tells you he wants that and no matter how long you’ve known him for—but as a result of this I am now…

   1. staring down the barrel of 30 and, as Charlotte Lucas so eloquently put it in Pride & Prejudice, “I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents, and I’m frightened.” And to think she was only 27.

Oh, and also,

4. My car broke down for, like, two hours. It was just the battery, but still.

Where does one go from here? My instinct is to turn inward, to figure out why I keep finding myself in situations like this—where the rug gets pulled out from under me and I’m not wearing socks, so then the hardwood underneath splinters my feet—so I can fix my fatal flaw and make sure this never happens again. But for all my self-awareness and navel-gazing every time something like this happens to me, for all the lessons learned the hard way, for all of the growth each time…I can’t confidently say something like this won’t happen to me again; that I won’t be dumped or laid off, yes, but also that I won’t have made decisions leading up to those events in the name of taking leaps of faith, or depending on others, that make it harder for me to bounce back. My friends and family tell me they admire me for my boldness and willingness to take risks and also for my capacity to give love freely. I like that explanation a whole lot more than the ones I get from Instagram, which is basically that I have some version of narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and/or bipolar disorder. Don’t worry, I deleted Instagram.

The best I can do is return to those familiar phrases and the wisdom of my childhood hero, Lemony Snicket. Turning my broken heart into art is what I do as a memoirist. I did it in grad school when I wrote my thesis on my dating life, and I’m doing it now. And finding the humor in the darkness—laughing instead of crying (or, really, after crying)—is why I’m making the vow to you now that I will never move again unless it’s into a convent. No, seriously, I’ve always said it sounds like the ideal situation. Just one big slumber party with your girlfriends, and the only man in question is technically not alive, so he really can’t bother you, and you wear the habit or whatever all the time, so you don’t even have to worry about picking out a cute outfit.

Until then,

Emma