In 2015, companies begin hiring us to speak and travel together. We make silly videos and sing. We laugh when the internet ignores the fact that Jed is gay and asks when we’ll have babies. We road-trip across the country from event to event and I try to do it all with a smile on my face. Jed doesn’t smile unless he wants to. We’re together all the time and he really sees me, the masks I need to wear to get through the day, or the job, or the next hundred miles of highway. He’s one of the first people to notice the impact this life I’m leading is having on me, watching with concerned eyes as my body fails me, and even more so as I fail my body. He watches me push too hard, pick myself up, and keep pretending.
“You don’t have to do this,” he tells me as we chat about the next gig.
But I just keep going, curling up in our hotel room at the end of the night on my heating pad and thinking about truth. Jed doesn’t wear a mask. He writes about his flaws, his pain, his God, his deepest, darkest feelings, without a single apology. He knows himself. I begin to realize that I’ve barely begun to learn who I am.
“Ruthie is a human energy sponge,” he writes on Instagram one day. “She feels the room. She walks in and knows exactly who has had a bad day, who just fought with their girlfriend, and who feels inadequate.”
I’m good at absorbing the pain of others, at serving them and showing up for them. But I know that at some point I’ll have to show up for myself.
The farther I travel, the longer it all goes on, the more I feel like a sponge—heavy, moldy, dripping wet, desperate to be wrung out or thrown away.
Over the next two years, magazines and blogs begin to interview me. I notice that pain is at the center of every conversation, every presentation. I talk about the accident, about losing my daddy, losing Jack, and weaning myself off pain meds. I talk about choosing joy, about the gifts that pain gave me. I’m softer, more empathetic. I don’t want to be bitter and I don’t feel that pain and divorce have to make a person that way, but we get to choose. My pain becomes a vehicle to help people, to serve them and bring them hope. The purpose it brings feels good to me, as close to a calling as I’ve ever known. I jump into helping people, I pour my soul into it, but I do so at a great cost. I have to sneak away during jobs to lie down with my heating pad. I occasionally drink too much at night to quiet the red ants, and when I get home I crash mightily for days at a time. Sometimes I get physically ill from the sheer intensity of the pain and the pace of life. I talk about hope, but sometimes I don’t really have much. I’m terrified of the future and I believe that my pain will only get worse. I numb fear with noise the same way I numb the pain, hopping from fix to fix, distraction to distraction.
My body keeps speaking to me as I cram it into another economy airline seat, perch it behind another podium, fill it with junk food and Malbec.
I need you to slow down.
I need you to breathe.
I need you to listen to me.
But I drown it out with what’s bright and beautiful and busy. I show up, but I pay the price.
* * *
My pain intensifies as I go and go. It becomes more grating and less forgiving. My nerve damage feels extensive but I stay away from doctors and pills and try to “manage it” on my own. Everywhere I go, I take the red ants along with me. They march up and down my side as I travel and write and sleep, as I dance and meet new people and date for the first time, as I embrace my sexuality instead of quieting it with shame. I dull my pain by denying it, defying it, not letting it slow me down. Serving others brings in the love and affirmation, but I lean on it, and as time goes on I become less capable of loving myself. I have to disconnect—let my mind and spirit stray from my pain so that it doesn’t consume me, so that I can keep up with the beautiful life I’ve built for myself, a life that begins to fall apart.
I go to Big Bear in February 2017. It’s a blanket of fat golden trees and gorgeous lakes in the middle of the San Bernardino Mountains. They hold a wildly popular photography conference there and they hired me to speak, even though I don’t own a camera. They tell me they’re diversifying this year, bringing in a wellness component, they want to tell new stories. My story doesn’t feel new anymore, it feels as old and tired as my body, but I go anyway.
I don’t feel well when I get off the plane at LAX. The pain got the best of me thirty-five thousand feet over Texas and it’s stuck around. I haul my big plastic suitcase behind me through the terminal and look around at all the people careening carelessly, drunk on their phones. Their busy eyes, pink and brown and black faces, old and young, all pointed down—CNN, Facebook, the time, Amazon, anything that feels good. I smile big at them but nobody smiles back. People make less and less time to see each other these days. I’m sad about it, but I’m complicit. I do it too. My phone is a new drug and it’s a powerful one. I have beauty, brightness, and “love” at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day. I can’t put it down.
“They say it might snow up there,” the white-haired lady at the Avis counter whispers at me, as though snow in the mountains is a secret just between us.
“I hope so,” I say back to her. I have to force the friendliness; my body is screaming at me. I want to be alone.
She hands me the keys to a tiny rental car and waves.
“Be safe.”
“I will,” I promise her. But nothing feels safe.
* * *
The drive takes two hours. I listen to Matt Corby the entire time, rising up from the starving, gray desert, through the mist of low-hanging clouds, to the base of the powder-capped mountains. The altitude makes my temples twitch angrily at me—another migraine.
I clutch the wheel as my little car skids and I make my way around a big mound of mossy rock. The road becomes a spiraling Slinky, taking me round and round. The pain nags at me and I want to go home. With each turn, I look to the sky and pray the same way I did back in Libby’s garden.
Make it be beautiful. Make it be beautiful. Make it be beautiful.
After the hundredth bend in the road, the sky changes. The sun has sunk somewhere below me and left a radiant spill of raspberry pink and orange and buttercup yellow. I pull onto a wide shoulder that must be especially for sky watching, and step out into the air. It’s twenty degrees cooler than I thought it would be.
“Look at that sky!”
I take a picture and look at the sunset. I focus on the beauty and wait for the relief. My muscles go slack; everything hurts a little bit less. The colors ebb and flow and then vanish completely. The beauty pauses the pain for a moment—it distracts me, but it never lasts.
* * *
I arrive at the venue by nightfall and all anyone can talk about is snow. The outdoorsy Patagonia-vest types can hardly contain their excitement as they pace through the lodge and ready their lenses for the perfect picture. My body is ready for bed but I know how it will feel when I lay it down for rest; the red ants will take over, the migraine will come back. I just can’t bear the idea of stillness right now, so I stay up, stretching my eyes and my smile wide and waiting by the windows with the others. We drink dark-colored drinks and laugh and make the beginnings of friendships. The snow never happens but nobody seems to care. At around 2 a.m., we all slip away to bed.