Makers Magazine - Spring 2024 - Flipbook - Page 18
I tried to stop myself from crying, but I couldn’t. The sobs got deeper and deeper . . . and
I made my way to the only bathroom in our whole house—a tiny little bathroom right
off the kitchen—and I sat on the toilet and just wept. I wept for about an hour.
Twenty minutes into crying, my wife found me and said, “Oh my gosh! Are you okay?” I
tried to say something, but all I could answer with was more sobbing. She came into the
bathroom and began to rub my back, asking, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“My tears are me talking about it,” I stuttered. “I don’t know what this is.”
With the passage of some time and with some reflection on that moment, I realized
what was happening: a dream was dying in me. For a long, long time, I’d had a certain
dream, and somehow physiologically and psychologically my body understood this
dream was never going to come to fruition . . . and I was grieving the loss and death of it.
WHAT WAS YOUR WORST MOMENT IN
THE LAST YEAR?
I’m not going to pretend to know what it’s like to be in your skin. I can’t fathom the pain
some of you have gone through. The losses you’ve experienced. The suffering you’ve had
to endure. The disappointment you’re still heartbroken over. Again, I don’t know what
it’s like to be you. But my guess is that your worst moment of the year was something
like a dream dying. The dream of the way you thought life was going to work out but it
didn’t. The dream of the kind of suffering you thought you were going to be insulated
from and you weren’t. The dream of the kind of person you thought you were going to
become and you haven’t.
“MY TEARS ARE TALKING
ABOUT IT...”
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