Let Them Eat Piecaken

When life happens in layers.

I once dated a guy with two identities.

That sounds more compelling than it was. He wasn’t a spy, nor a grifter from a Netflix series. He wasn’t a pilot with homes in different cities, toggling back and forth between them. But in a way, he did lead two separate lives.

He was a performer who went by his stage name. Hardly anyone, save for family and a few close friends, knew his given one. Whenever we went out, it was like watching him slip into another being, his shiny public persona. Behind closed doors, he was a different person — a more reserved creature the larger world never got to see.

I used to think he was an anomaly. But the more I look around, the more I’ve noticed that almost everyone I know is living at least two existences — oftentimes more.

There’s the deeply introverted friend who dons an outgoing mask for her customer service job, then spends the weekend recovering in silence.

Or the friend who is a buttoned-up corporate professional by day and a celebrated drag queen by night.

Or the couple who met in the most dramatic, unsavory way — I can’t say more, but use your imagination! — and vow they will never tell their children the truth.

Even if your situation is not so night-and-day, you’ve likely experienced some version of this. One face with family. One face at work. Another for parenthood. Another with friends. Never the twain shall meet… except inside of us, where they are expected to coexist.

We — quite literally — contain multitudes.

There is another, deeper version of this balancing act — when we exist inside two emotional states. When triumph and loss happen simultaneously. When we are handed equal doses of heartbreak and awe. When life is mostly positive, but the headlines are anything but.

View from my window as I was writing this. Life imitating art imitating life.

In life, there are good seasons and bad. But much of the time, it’s not so easy to define.

The final episodes of Insecure handled this concept brilliantly. Every character’s storyline, but particularly Molly’s, had an emotional resonance TV shows so rarely capture. (I won’t give anything away in case you haven’t seen it — in which case, do yourself a favor and go watch immediately.) The highs and the lows were palpable, yet unfolding simultaneously.

This last year has felt that way for me, as it has for many people I care about. In my circle, there was a miscarriage on the heels of an engagement, a wedding followed by a tragic loss, career success unfolding alongside illness. The hoped-for arrived with the never-saw-coming.

As compartmentalizing has never been my strong suit, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we go about housing these unlikely roommates. How can we occupy multiple head spaces, multiple seasons, simultaneously?

The English language lacks satisfying terminology for this — the closest I can get is “bittersweet,” but the experience is stronger. It’s not the same as “conflicted,” because you aren’t confused about what you feel. Nor is it “ambivalent,” because your feelings aren’t mixed. Each is as pure as can be — there just happen to be a few of them, and the blend is more lethal than a Long Island Iced Tea.

In the absence of a better term, I’ve taken to calling it lifey. As in, “Damn, I feel lifey today. I’m going to take a walk.”

Traditionally, lifey means “full of life,” and that’s about as accurate as it gets. It’s the cousin of emotional overwhelm, but instead of coming at you with quantity, it opts for variety.

If feelings were food, it would be piecaken — a many-tiered monstrosity with various pies baked into alternating slabs of cake. Some layers are enjoyable, some layers are not-so-much, and when you put it together it’s really… just… a lot.

This plate has a lot going on right now.

The most helpful piece of advice I’ve heard recently is that it’s okay to feel multiple things at once — not only okay, but inevitable. Grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive.

There is much beyond our control, but we can do our best to let the hard parts inform our living. We can honor someone through our actions. We can use our feelings as a catalyst for change. We can appreciate the hell out of this day.

Earlier this week, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. “How have you been?” she asked, as we embraced on a street corner that once housed a beloved dive bar but is now a TD Bank. “What have you been up to?”

“So much life,” I said, shaking my head. “So much life.”

It is human nature to qualify everything — good and bad, positive and negative, progress and stagnation. Surely there is value in specificity, and value in sharing. But in the end, it’s all just life, not for us to understand as much as experience.

So.

If you are pretending. If you are compartmentalizing. If you are putting on a brave face. If you are worried and hopeful, mourning and celebrating, confused and certain, determined and just about ready to give up.

Me too.

I don’t have the answers, though I do know this: Life happens in layers, but even the scariest piecaken can only be eaten one bite at a time.

Card of the Week

Here is this week’s card for the collective, as well as some thoughts to carry into the days ahead. As most modern readers will tell you, the tarot is not about fortunetelling, nor is it about neat, definitive answers. The cards are simply one path to reflection, a way of better knowing ourselves and others through universal themes. If this reading resonates with you, great! And if not, no worries. Take whatever may be helpful and leave the rest.

Featuring Soul Cards Tarot Deck by Kristine Fredheim

I’ll just call it like it is: The Tower is easily the least popular card in the deck.

The Devil and Death might be the “scary” cards, but The Tower is the one that always gets the biggest groan. Why? Because it’s all about change, something people are famously resistant to.

Traditionally, this card shows a building that is on the brink of crumbling. If you take it at face value, then yeah, it seems like a bummer. But that’s not how I see it. Destruction may not be the most uplifting image, but it’s a necessary step for renewal.

I find it ironic that this card is so unpopular when people absolutely adore the concept. The Tower is the energy behind every wildly popular home makeover show. There can be no big reveal without a renovation. True for houses, true for life.

We love to see a good transformation story, because it gives us hope. Hope that we aren’t stuck. Hope that we don’t need to exist inside old patterns. Hope that something wonderful is yet to be revealed.

The Tower tells us we have the power to change our lives for the better. But first, we’ll have to say goodbye to whatever isn’t working.

To that end, I’d like to lobby for us all to see The Tower less as a crumbling building and more like the cast of Queer Eye (or Fixer Upper or Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, or whatever you wish). Yeah, they want to shake everything up, and yeah, that can be uncomfortable. But it’s only because they want to help.

Here in reality, most of us aren’t operating with Netflix’s budget. Nor do we have a crew to take care of the heavy lifting. Our renovation may not be as simple, and it certainly won’t be as instant. But the results can be every bit as rewarding — even more so, because you made it happen yourself.

Writers are often told you have to “kill your darlings,” cutting out words, sentences, paragraphs, or pages that aren’t necessary. A sentence might be pure poetry, but if it isn’t serving the greater whole, it has no business being there.

Much like a skilled editor, The Tower wants to make your (life) story better. But their suggestions may not align with your original vision. You may feel attached to what you’ve created. You may feel afraid to make adjustments. Can you trust them? Can you be open to trying something new?

The Tower is the moment just before the phoenix rises from the ashes. It’s the force behind memoirs like Eat Pray Love, where the protagonist starts off curled on the bathroom floor, but slowly discovers a new, more expansive worldview.

Making a shift can be scary. But this card is here to remind us that change happens, whether we resist it or not. Sometimes, you need to tear down old structures, especially those created by others, to replace them with systems that work for you.

This is your makeover show, your renovation, your reinvention. The Tower is making way for the beauty of the blank canvas, the blueprint of all that is waiting to be built. It’s up to you, now. What will you design?

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