Letters to the Lost

The book has been speaking to you for nine chapters.

The you has been one of the convenient yous of self-help writing, which is to say not anyone in particular, which is to say possibly nobody. The blanket you is what makes a book economical. It is also what makes it impossible to feel addressed.

Before the next part begins, I want to write to seven people. Not to all of you. To seven of you, specifically, because seven is a manageable number and because every reader who comes in through one of these doors will, I hope, recognize themselves in one of the rooms behind it. If none of these letters is for you, the next chapter probably is. If one of them is, please read it as a letter, which is to say slowly, which is to say imagining the person who wrote it sitting in a room across from the person it was written to.

Dear One Who Married the Deadline,

I know who you are because I was you. I had a calendar in 1998 with every Tuesday and Thursday booked through 2002. The whole purpose of moving from one block of time to the next was to arrive at the next block of time, where another set of obligations had been waiting for me to get there. I called this being on top of things. The phrase on top of things did not include any space in which I was to consider what things I might rather be on top of.

Here is the part nobody told us. The deadlines were never the work. The deadlines were what was happening to our lives while we were calling them our work.

I want to be specific because my regret is specific. I was forty when I noticed that my best ideas now arrived only in the eight minutes between turning off the laptop and falling asleep. I was forty when I noticed that every poem I had read with feeling I had read before I was thirty. I was forty when I noticed that nobody who loved me was on my calendar. They were in the margins. The deadlines were in the calendar.

Nobody was deceiving me. I was deceiving myself with the active permission of a culture organized around deadline-marriage. The culture had an interest in the marriage. I was a productive spouse.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest, not optimistic. The years you gave to the deadlines are not retrievable. The years that remain are. You will not get back the time. You will get the rest.

That is enough to start with.

Dear Founder Whose Company Collapsed,

I will not waste the first paragraph telling you the collapse was not your fault. Some of it probably was. We are not in the business, here, of comforting lies. Some of it was your fault. Some of it was the weather. Some of it was a thousand small decisions you did not know were decisions until they became, in the aggregate, your fall. You will spend years sorting which was which. The sorting is honest work. Do it.

What I want to tell you is something else.

The company was real. The thing you built was a thing. The people you employed were employed by you. The clients you served were served because of decisions you made in rooms most of those clients will never picture. The customers who paid you paid you for something that briefly existed in the world because you made it exist. None of that is undone by the collapse. None of it stops having been true. The collapse is a fact that came after the building. It is not a verdict on the building.

I want to say this carefully because the world will not. The world will look at you and see failed founder. It will pretend it always knew. It will tell stories about your hubris that bear no relation to the small, careful, sometimes sleepless decisions you actually made. The world will be wrong, in a thousand specific ways, about what you did. You will know it was wrong, in those thousand specific ways, and you will not be able to correct most of them. Stop trying. Save the correction for the few that matter.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. The next thing you build, if you build a next thing, will be smaller, slower, and stronger than what you built before. Not because you are wiser, although you may be. Because you are no longer trying to prove that the first thing was real.

It was real. You know that. That is enough.

Dear Parent Who Failed Your Child,

This is the hardest letter in this book.

I want to start where you cannot start: by saying out loud, on the page, that you failed. You can say it, here, because no one is listening. I am writing this in a town you will never visit. I am not anyone you have to see at Thanksgiving. You can say it the way it is true. I failed my child. You can say it about a moment, or a year, or a decade. You can be specific about which kind of failure. I will not list the kinds. You know yours.

The first thing the world tells parents who failed is that they did not. The world has a kind voice for this. You did your best. They will understand someday. They are angry now but they will come around. Maybe. The kind voice is not a lie, but it is not the whole truth either. It is the part of the truth that protects the parent from the child. The whole truth is that some failures are real, and the child knows, and the relationship will only outgrow the failure if you stop denying it.

The denial is what the child cannot forgive. The failure they can. The failure they may, in time, even understand. The denial they cannot, because the denial keeps them from being seen.

So name it. Quietly, to yourself first. Then aloud, to them, when they are old enough or far enough away from the wound to hear it. I failed you in this specific way. I am sorry. I do not need your forgiveness for me to keep saying it.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. The relationship that survives an honest naming is sturdier than the relationship that never had to.

Dear Immigrant Who Cannot Go Back,

I know this letter is for many people. The one who left because the politics changed. The one who left because the family changed. The one who left because the economy changed. The one who left because the version of themselves who could have stayed was a version they could not bear to be. The reasons matter when you are leaving. They stop mattering once you have been gone long enough.

What I want to tell you is something everyone who has been gone long enough already knows but has not heard out loud.

You cannot go back.

I do not mean the visa is hard, or the flight is expensive, or the politics make it dangerous. I mean that the place you left is no longer the place you left. Time finished it. It became a different country, with different streets, different neighbors, different faces in the windows you used to walk past. The country you left exists only in your memory. Your memory is the only country you have a passport for, and you cannot live there.

I lived this, twice. I left a country at twenty-seven and went back at forty-seven. The country I went back to was, for a while, persuasively similar to the country I had left. But I had been away. Twenty years of small changes had compounded into a different place, and the people I had left behind had also been compounding, and the version of me they remembered did not match the version of me who had returned. We were polite about it. We did not say it out loud. The next nine years did the saying for us. By the time I left again, I had understood that the home I had thought I was returning to was a memory, and the home I was leaving to go back to was also a memory, and that I was, as I had been since I was twenty-seven, a person with two memories and no country.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. Two memories and no country is not a tragedy. It is a kind of citizenship. The wise have always been a little bit homeless. You are in good company.

Dear Artist Who Was Told To Be Practical,

You are forty-something, probably. You have a job. The job is fine. You are good at it. People depend on you. You make enough money. You have given up resenting the people who told you, in your twenties, that the art was not going to work out. They may have been right.

The thing they were wrong about is something else.

They told you the practical career would protect you from the question that drove you toward the art. What if I am not enough? What if my time on earth does not amount to anything? What if I am ordinary? They told you that the practical career, the steady paycheck, the clean apartment, the colleagues, the calendar, would, by their solidity, answer the question. They did not tell you this in those words. They told you in the form of be reasonable. But the promise underneath be reasonable was that reasonableness would shelter you from whatever it was the art was reaching for.

It did not.

I want to be careful here. I am not telling you to quit your job and become an artist. The art may still not work out, in the practical sense. I am telling you that the practical career did not deliver what it promised. The question is still there. You are still forty-something and ordinary and afraid and aware that your time is finite. The practical career is a perfectly good place from which to ask the question. It is not a shelter from it.

So ask it. Make the small art now. Not for an audience. Not as a side hustle. As an answer to the question the practical career was not built to answer. Twenty minutes a day. The bad poem. The unfinished song. The drawer of paintings you will never show.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. The art was never going to save you. It was going to keep you company while you saved yourself. It still will.

Dear Caretaker Who Has No Time for Any of This,

I know this book has been telling you to do things. To examine your life. To build a compass. To walk a path. To become a guide.

You cannot do any of this right now. I know.

You are caring for a parent, or a partner, or a child, or a person who is not your relative but somehow ended up being your responsibility because nobody else was going to do it. You sleep when you can. You eat what is closest to your hand. The minutes you have to yourself you spend, mostly, staring at a wall. Sometimes a phone. The wall is better. The phone makes you feel guilty because there are fourteen messages on it from people who do not understand why you are not replying.

I am not going to ask you to do any of the things this book has been asking. The book is not for you, in this season. The book is for people whose hours can be examined. Yours cannot.

What I am going to say is something else.

The thing you are doing, the unglamorous, unwitnessed, exhausting thing, is the most ancient form of human goodness. It is older than philosophy. It is older than religion. It is what made us a species that survives. The fact that nobody is praising you for it is a measure of how foundational it is, not how trivial. Foundational things go uncelebrated because they are everywhere.

I will not promise you that this season ends. Some seasons do not. Some end in ways you would not have wanted them to end. I will say only this. The version of you that emerges from the caretaking, whenever and however it ends, will have a kind of sturdiness that the rest of us have to seek. You will not have to seek it. You will have built it without noticing.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. The book will be here when you are ready for it. So will you.

Dear Person Reading This in a Hospital,

I do not know what you are in for. I do not know if you are the patient or the visitor. I do not know whether the news has come or whether you are waiting for it. I am writing this letter without knowing those things because the letter is the same in any of those cases.

What I want to say first is that I am not going to tell you the hospital is a teacher. People love to say this in books. The hospital is not a teacher. The hospital is a hospital. It is fluorescent. It is loud. It smells of cleaning products that imperfectly cover what they were used to clean. The food is bad. The chairs are wrong. The clock above the nurses' station moves at the speed of a clock in a dream. Do not let any book tell you the hospital is a teacher. The hospital is a place where things happen to bodies, and the things are not pedagogical, and the body is not a metaphor.

What the hospital does, sometimes, is something else.

It compresses the question.

The question of what your life has been for is normally distributed across the whole of your life, in such small daily portions that you can ignore most of them. The hospital does not let you ignore them. It puts the whole question in a chair across from your chair. The question sits there as long as you are there, and you cannot pretend it is not there, and you cannot leave the room.

This is, in a strange way, a gift. Not the kind of gift you wanted. Not the kind you would ever ask for. But a gift in the technical sense, which is something you would not have given yourself.

Here is the comfort, and it is honest. Whatever you decide the question deserves as an answer, you will be deciding it with more clarity than you have had in years. Use that. The hospital will not last forever. The clarity does not have to last forever either. You only need it for the answer.

There. Seven of you, addressed.

The book returns now to the larger you, the you that holds the book in its hands, the you whose particular lostness I cannot guess. The next part is the Fire. Not all of you will need this part. Most of you will need at least some of it. The Fire is what comes after the Descent, which is what comes after the Crisis, and it is the part of the journey where the house we have been living in, possibly for years, possibly for decades, finally needs to come down before anything new can be built.

I will see you on the other side of it.