The worst happens.
That’s the lesson I thought I was learning for a couple months. The phrase came with a sense of peace, though it didn’t seem like it should. I gazed out of my crumbling tower and saw my friends in the windows of their own falling fortresses, the foundations of their lives cracking beneath their feet. Every headline in my newsfeed punched me in the gut, never allowing me to catch my breath between blows. The angry goblin voice in my head that I thought I’d finally muted pushed its way to the front of my brain to scream, “Ha! Told you so! The worst always happens! You are helpless to stop it! Life is just a sequence of random, meaningless cruelties!”
It was hard to argue with that. Doing so felt naive and deluded. I talk a lot about positive psychology and how we can improve our lives by improving our attitudes and expectations. It’s easy for me to proselytize that concept when I’m in a position of privilege, when I already live a life filled with fortune, in which I don’t fear running out of food or being shot at a routine traffic stop or being detained in a concentration camp. Positive thinking isn’t enough to save anyone from poverty, racism, disease (and its associated expenses), or any number of real-world threats to our physical needs.
When faced with the horrors of reality, both on a personal and a global scale, searching for meaning can feel not only pointless, but potentially insulting. How can you justify telling someone with a terminal illness that it’s all part of a divine plan? How dare we assign meaning to the preventable deaths of migrant children or dozens of US mass shooting casualties? Is it foolish to even ponder these individual or national catastrophes with a massive climate disaster on the horizon? What meaning can you glean from the avoidable destruction of the only planet currently capable of sustaining life as we know it?
Even typing that paragraph is enough to tip me toward an existential spiral. Understandable, then, that I’ve been really considering this lesson, letting it marinate in my brain juices. “The worst happens” isn’t a particularly unicorny idea, nor is “Your anxiety was right: everything is awful and we’re all going to die soon, probably.”
The Year of the Unicorn is supposed to be about seeing the world with childlike wonder and contributing our own brand of magic to it. It’s about joy and connection in spite of the hungry darkness pursuing us all. It’s about this bittersweet concept:
You Make Your Own Meaning
There’s this quirky video game called Night in the Woods (NitW) that I fell in love with last year (only last year? Wow, jeez, time is weird and fake). Playing it feels like coming home to a place that I didn’t know was my home, and that’s partly because I so strongly identify with the protagonist. So strongly, in fact, that if I’d found the game any earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been emotionally equipped to handle it.
The main character, Mae, struggles with mental health issues that look a lot like mine (the description of a depersonalization/derealization episode that she experiences is what made me recognize and then forgive myself for a similar experience of my own. No joke.). She’s haunted by the passing of a grandparent that she was exceptionally close to. She climbs things she’s not supposed to climb. She says things like this, which could easily have been part of my previous Year of the Unicorn lesson:
Just because that online test said that your best chance at being happy is a situation where everyone already likes you but they mostly leave you alone except when they're delivering food to you... that doesn't mean you can hide in your room and wait for that to happen. That's how hermits are made, Mae. And they die alone in the middle of winter. Waiting for pizza from friends they don't want to see.
Plus she’s an anthropomorphic cat, so… I was doomed from the start.
I bring up this game and this character for a couple of reasons. First reason being that I dragged my friends into cosplaying it with me at Gen Con this weekend. Check it:
Second reason is because of another quote that stuck with me months after finishing the game:
But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... Pretty amazing to be something, at least...
NitW deals with a lot of issues, ranging from mental illness to economic inequality to organized religion to supernatural murder cults… But I’m getting off track. The point is, hopelessness and the search for meaning are front and center throughout the story, and it’s not always a chipper story.
The terrible events in your story are the irritants in the oyster’s innards, painful parasites or detritus that get coated over with time and effort to make something that’s not just pretty but gentler on the mullosk’s insides. The process of making a pearl of meaning requires effort and hope. And it hurts, but the hurt is what makes it real. The hurt makes way for something softer.
Maybe that’s just a story I’m telling myself to explain the pain away. But even if it is, what of it? If it helps, if it gives me a moment of peace and perspective, then it’s worth it. It’s a gift I can give myself.
Perhaps that’s how meaning works. In the face of the worst tragedies of your life, it may be one more unfair burden on your already bent heart, but it’s up to you to make meaning. Find a glimmer of light in the muck and carry it with you.
While I was digging around for those game quotes, I came across one more gem:
So I believe in a universe that doesn't care and people who do.
Worst case scenario, the thing I feared when I first contemplated the idea that the worst can and does happen, is that there’s no great cosmic reason for these hardships. The horrible randomness of it threatened to drown me. But even in a universe that doesn’t care (and I’m not saying that’s true), there are people who do.
There are people who care for you now. There are people you’ve yet to meet who will care for you. There are people who used to care for you, people who left you for one reason or another, people whose paths diverged from yours, people who are gone. Simply, achingly, impossibly gone. But for a time, they were there, caring for you, shaping your life, creating something with you.
And if nothing else, you always have yourself. You have these resources at your disposal to make a greater meaning out of all of this. Even if that greater meaning is something as simple as: “Life is hard, but jalapeno poppers are cheap.”
Or maybe: “I didn’t get the time I wanted with this place, or this career, or this person, but I’ll carry the good parts of that time forward and be better for it.”
So I’m making meaning for myself in wine-drenched 3 A.M. heart-to-hearts with my besties, in time spent walking my dogs in the sunshine, and in moments alone in the woods appreciating the susurration of the wind through the treetops.
It doesn’t obliterate the evil in this world. It doesn’t eradicate the gnawing grief in my bones. But it’s something to keep my soul alight so that I can live to see (and help create) a sunnier future. Sometimes, at least for this unicorn, that has to be enough.