I was out to lunch with friends recently when one asked if I’d seen her driving by that morning. I had, because she’d honked, while I was walking into town to meet The Husband and the boys. She told me that I’d looked really happy–I’d had a smile plastered across my face. At first I was a bit embarrassed (my face often has expressions plastered across it that I’m unaware of, and it’s gotten me into trouble before), but after a moment I found myself clinging to that story the way I cling to my kids’ forgiveness at the end of a long and fraught day, or the way I cling to the way TH grins and bears so many of my quirks (read: bitchery), or the way I cling, like a damn life raft, to grace. To its redemption. To its hope. To its oxygen.

Or the way I cling to doing the hard, but right, thing–the times I’ve chosen to do it–and the people I meet on that path.

Call it a dustup, or a brouhaha, or, if you’re like me, a clusterfuck, but recently an event occurred in relation to The Kid’s teacher situation from last year that brought the whole damn thing WAY back up. It was like a wound getting reinfected: all the bad memories and stench of the drama floated back to the surface, along with new drama on both sides, much of it taking place in sidelong glances in the schoolyard or hushed conversations over tables or–my favourite–comment sections on social media. You know, those cesspools of modern society where fear and insecurity go to take giant, public, semi-anonymous, protected-by-a-keyboard dumps.

ANYWAY…I ventured into one such comment section, and overheard one such conversation, and may have been the recipient of some such glances, and at first it all felt like a personal assault. The victim-blaming mentalities on display, the inability to see the greys and complexities of people and life, the determination for the world to remain small enough to manage–it was all just…gross. Misguided. And, I suppose, completely unavoidable. People be hatin’, and such. People also be, sometimes, who they’ve always been.

But people also be…full of grace. People be oases in deserts. People be understanding, and willing to see all sides of an issue. People be coming through for you in ways you never expected. People be for you, period. People be incredible.

So after awhile, I stopped looking at the comment sections and just had to laugh along with the Lady Chablis–“two tears in a bucket, mother fuck it”–because there comes a moment when you’re just too old for this nonsense. You know who your people are. You know what you’re about. You know what matters, and what is worth defending. And that has to be–because it is–enough.

Because when you’re one of the people for whom life hasn’t gone as planned–and let’s be clear, it isn’t bravery or choice that usually gets you there, but brokenness and pain–one of the people who finally got crazy enough to remain above deck for the storm, and tell the truth about the space between what should have been and what is, and embrace the grief instead of maintaining the mask–when you’re one of those people, funny things start to happen. Your runs that don’t suck are punctuated by lyrics that now jump out at you and won’t let you go–you, right along with Bruce, want to know if love is wild, and if love is real. Or you punch a fist in solidarity with Maggie because you’re both still dancing at the end of the day.

Or you read words that become your own. When Emerson says, “People wish to be settled, [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” you know exactly what he means because that’s the topography of the land where you’ve been living for awhile now. When Margaret Fuller writes, “There is no terror like that of being known,” you mutter a silent, “Amen, sister,” because she speaks from her own experience and yours. And you know that unsettledness, and terror, are part of the whole package: the package of being fully alive. Not safe, but alive.

There is a difference.

You know that your friendships are built on rock, not sand. You know that even on the days when you’re not dancing at the end, you can look your children in the eye and know you’ve done every right thing you can to protect and honour them. You know that your marriage is a hard-fought refuge, and your home is a place where people can go to tell the whole truth, usually over a bottle of wine.

You become, like the Velveteen Rabbit and all my favourite people and like grace and love itself, wild. And real. And this? Well, this is painful, and hard, and scarred, and beautiful, and just everything.