Melancholic but hopeful: On broken dreams and vulnerability hangovers

Living with heartache, discouragement, and disappointment

I’m back home on the island, after spending a week with my daughters in the city where I raised them (Winnipeg). We had a lovely time together, but there were some melancholic moments that brought up memories of broken dreams. I’ve written an honest post about that below. I wasn’t sure I would, because I’ve also been dealing with a vulnerability hangover, but I leaned in and did it anyway.

A few things before you get to the post:

• We’ve had a spot open up in Time to Do The Brave Thing. If you’re on the verge of something big, maybe you want to join us for this coaching circle? It starts July 31st.

• Registration is open for our Fall programs - Not the Main Character, How to Hold Space - Foundation Program, and our Holding Space Certification Program.

• I still have space for a few coaching clients. You can book an exploratory call with me if you’d like.

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“Anyone who's ever had a dream
Anyone who's ever played a part
Anyone who's ever been lonely
And anyone who's ever split apart...”
- Sweet Jane, Cowboy Junkies

I didn’t anticipate the wave of emotions that came when I heard Cowboy Junkies open with Sweet Jane at the Folk Fest recently. My sister reminded me of the last time we’d seen them together, and suddenly I couldn’t stop the waterworks.

It was 1997 – in early September, if I remember correctly. I had two small children at the time, and we were in the process of moving into the house on River Road that would be our home for the next 25 years – the same house I sold two years ago when I became nomadic and eventually moved to where I now live on the west coast.

It was an exhausting day. I’d spent most of it unloading the moving truck, and then caring for a toddler and a baby. With the emotional stability of the family resting largely on my shoulders, especially during such a big transition, I was bone-tired and soul-weary. And yet... I was still determined to attend the concert I’d bought a ticket for months earlier.

The concert venue had removed all the chairs, and I spent the entire concert sitting on the hard floor, aching and exhausted, but still stubbornly present. I knew then, as I know now, that few things are better for a weary soul than a night of good music.

The moment Cowboy Junkies started their set last week, I was transported back to that night, twenty-seven years earlier. The tears that came weren’t about the weariness of that night, though – they were about the hope of that time, and the way that hope died.

“Nothing ever turns out like you thought it would
Spare me some patience, if you could
Sometimes it feels like you’re watching the sun
From a rain cloud far from home.”
- Tomorrow, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors

This house we were moving into – it was supposed to be The Place. We were going to fill it with magical family memories. Our marriage was going to get better there. We were going to be a happy family.

Sure, there was some magical thinking at play, but isn’t there always when you launch into something new that you believe will change your life? A new job will be Just The Thing that finally turns your life around. A new house will be Just The Place where your family will stop being unkind to each other and happiness and love will abound. A new marriage will be Just The Relationship that will finally end your loneliness.

My husband’s first suicide attempt had happened three years earlier, when I was pregnant with our first daughter, but things were better now. His mental health had stabilized, we both had decent jobs and could afford a bigger home, and we had these two beautiful daughters. Life was going to be good. This house was going to help us have a Good Life. A safe, easy, happy, suburban life.

If you’ve read my book, Where Tenderness Lives, you already know what happened to that dream of a good life. Sure, there were good times, but that house held a lot of heartache. My next pregnancy ended in stillbirth. My husband attempted suicide again. My dad died in a horrible farm accident. My mom died of cancer. I finally admitted how unhealthy the marriage was and ended it. I started trauma therapy, as did my daughters. One of my daughters was diagnosed with a rare illness that was especially life-threatening during a pandemic.  

I sold the house partly because it had served its purpose in holding my daughters’ growing-up years, and partly because too much sadness was soaked into its walls. The dreams of a gentle, easy suburban life had never materialized.

“If you are not taught to drive
You’re probably going to crash the car
And we are taught nothing of love
Taught nothing of love
And that’s why you will marry the wrong person.”
- You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Tom Rosenthal

The divorce, nine years ago, was the right choice, but that doesn’t mean it was the easy choice. It’s certainly not the choice I had in mind when I sat on that hard concert venue floor listening to Cowboy Junkies sing Sweet Jane. It’s not the choice I had in mind as we moved all our belongings into the house we thought we’d grow old in together.

David Whyte sums it up well: “One of the difficulties of leaving a relationship is not so much, at the end, leaving the person themselves — because, by that time, you’re ready to go; what’s difficult is leaving the dreams that you shared together. And you know that somehow — no matter who you meet in your life in the future, and no matter what species of happiness you would share with them — you will never, ever share those particular dreams again, with that particular tonality and coloration. And so there’s a lovely and powerful form of grief there that is the ultimate of giving away but making space for another form of reimagination.”

The next day, after the Folk Fest had ended, I went for a walk in the city that held all my adult life and most of my adult dreams. Still holding some of the melancholy, I turned on the playlist I labeled “Nothing Stays the Same”, full of songs that get me through the hard spots and remind me that I have the strength to carry on. I walked past places that represent the dreams once held – along the river where we got engaged, beside the old cathedral where our wedding photos were taken. All those places where I’d clung to the dream and the self-delusion that happiness was just around the corner.

“It’s been a long year
Feeling so small you wish that you could disappear
Something’s gotta give
You swore you’d own your mistakes
Now you wonder if you did.”
- Carry On, Fortunate Ones

So many dreams die – for all of us. There are many in my inner circles holding the shattered remains of their dreams - some who find themselves unemployed after years of dedication to a career, some whose adult children are now estranged from them, some whose businesses failed, some whose health failed or spouse died just when they could finally retire, and some whose children are incarcerated, mentally ill or dead by suicide.  

There are collective dreams dying too. There’s the church that will likely close its doors due to dwindling numbers. Or the non-profit that never managed to fulfill its vision. Or the community group that couldn’t get past conflict. So many people poured their hearts into these dreams and now they’ve evaporated.

While walking in Winnipeg, I passed the monument that honours the five women whose efforts secured the vote for white women in 1918 (it took years more for Indigenous women). What I couldn’t help but think of, given my state of mind, was… where are the monuments for the women before them who failed, those whose dreams of political equality died with them?

Even at the scale of a country, dreams die. Heartsick people in the U.S., with the long-held dream of a safe, equitable, just, and progressive country are faced with a leadership choice that seems almost unfathomable, with policies that are moving backward instead of forward.

What do we do with these dreams that die? How do we carry on when we’ve pinned so much hope on something that was supposed to make the future better?

“We all believe in something that’ll rip us into shreds
We all know why it stings to open up your chest
We all show signs of greatness
That we hope that someone sees
Our broken teeth are scattered, but we’re smiling underneath.”
- Nothing Stays the Same, Luke Sital-Singh

Only a small part of the melancholy I carried around the city earlier this week was related to my failed marriage. There are more recent disappointments and dying dreams that I was holding too.

Nearly five years ago, on the strength of the beautiful trajectory my work had seen in the years prior, Krista and I dreamed up the Centre for Holding Space. It was an exciting time, but just as we were about to launch, the pandemic hit and the world changed. Since then, nothing has grown the way we envisioned, nothing engages people in the way it did pre-pandemic, and the struggles increase every year. This year has been our hardest ever, with some significant financial blows, and we’ve had to dip into personal savings to survive.

And then there’s been the launch of my second book, Where Tenderness Lives. So far, response has been mediocre – with far less interest from people than my first book generated. Though the publishing company engaged in a beautiful and ambitious publicity campaign, there has been little response, with hardly any media interviews and few people showing up for in-person events.

Both of these things – building a business and putting a book into the world – take immense amounts of effort, passion and risk, and the discouragement that comes when few people pay attention, or numbers diminish, can be confidence-shattering. It’s hard to keep dreaming when you’ve poured everything you’ve got into something beautiful that you were certain would thrive. And we’re not alone – many who do similar work are facing similar challenges these days.

Sometimes I envy those who manage to cling to magical thinking throughout their lives - those who believe in the principle of “if/then”. If only I think positively, then the world will magically reward me. If only I focus on good things, then I will attract more good things into my life. If only I dedicate my life to a religious belief system, then the struggle will all be worth it because I’ll get my reward in heaven.

I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because I also believe that much of that belief system is rooted in privilege and spiritual bypassing. There used to be a woman who would chastise me regularly for writing about hard things like grief and trauma and not modelling more positive thinking on my blog, and I told her that the kind of positive thinking she was asking for felt more like intentional blindness and I prefer to live with my eyes open.

“I was one more mistake from losing it all
Everything I’d ever worked for
Things can go wrong when they should be right
And it can haunt you the rest of your life.”
- Broken into Better Shape, Good Old War

On top of all that, I’ve been struggling with some vulnerability hangover post-book-tour. Many of the events (though small) were lovely, and I don’t regret the tour, but the vulnerability it has required to put myself out there again and again in this way has taken its toll.

A lot of my trauma was poured onto the pages of that book, so I prepared myself for the vulnerability it would take to promote it and the boundaries I’d need to manage my energy, but one can never fully anticipate the impact something like this will have. There are no books one can read about “How to Prepare Yourself for the Launch of a Book Full of Your Trauma.” As Katharine May says in her powerful essay about the uneasy intersection between artistic vulnerability and capitalism, “For Daws to Peck At”, “We are not taking good care of the people who give us so much through their sharing.”

“There’s no university course for being a public figure, no training in handling interviewers who push for that little bit of extra revelation, no protocols for coping with trolls who tell you that you should undergo compulsory sterilisation. There’s no support group that you can join to talk with other vulnerable artists who are out there, sharing their truths. You have to make it up as you go along. You learn to set increasingly firm boundaries, but often too late. The advances are rarely big enough to pay for the therapy you’ll need in the aftermath.”

Again, I do not regret what I wrote on the pages of my book or anything I did to promote it, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. To garner so little attention and make so few book sales after so much vulnerability, expense, and free labour is disheartening. The last book event was the hardest, with a challenging encounter that left me feeling destabilized and discouraged, so I’m still trying to pick my wounded soul up off the floor.

“My arms are tired and weary
These wounds are on full display
I’ve tried every door in the hallway
There’s just nowhere that I feel safe.”
- Mercy’s Shore, NEEDTOBREATHE

There’s a part of me that wants to protect myself by withdrawing and perhaps even dissociating for awhile. There’s a part of me that feels determined to be more detached – to switch to writing the kind of self-help-y or teach-y posts and books that allow me to be the expert instead of the one bleeding onto the page again and again.

There’s a part of me that’s not certain that this post will ever see the light of day. Is it worth it? Is anybody listening? Does anyone pay attention to long posts like this anymore or am I simply whistling into the wind? Is there enough return on this immense investment I make again and again?

And yet... I have a stubborn belief in this book (and this work). I believe it will land with people whose lives will make a little more sense when they read it. I believe it will contribute to people’s healing. I believe it’s beautiful and powerful and meant to be in the world. I believe in the dream that birthed it.

Despite the discouragement, I stay committed to this hard-to-explain calling that keeps nudging me to share my own stories to help heal the world. When I sit with a small circle of young people healing from religious trauma in the basement of a bookstore, or get an email from someone who feels seen in a way she hasn’t before, I KNOW it matters.

“We are fragile, we are human
Wooden boats out on the sea
We want something to hold onto
We need something to believe.”
- Nothing Without You, My Sister, My Brother

One of the challenges with both of my books, but especially the second one, is that there is no natural place for them to live. They are part essay, part memoir, part therapy, and part skills-teaching. They end up on self-help shelves in bookstores, but there’s an uneasy fit between them and the neighbouring books on those shelves.

Nothing I teach is really “self-help” in the way we’ve come to understand it – in the way that this writer says has become toxic for her. It’s never about fixing yourself or making your life better or attracting beautiful things into your life. Instead, it’s about living in the complexity and messiness of life, learning to navigate liminality, being tender with your own brokenness, telling the truth about yourself, and building meaningful communities of care. It’s about learning to be more human and accepting the humanity of others.

I don’t know how to teach or write about any of these things without being honest and real and gritty and vulnerable. I don’t know how to help people find healing for their trauma without sharing stories of mine. I don’t know how to model tenderness without being tender myself. Maybe there’s a way to do it, but I haven’t found it.

“Oh, gather up the brokenness
And bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow
The splinters that you carry
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body, come healing of the mind.”
- Come Healing, Leonard Cohen

No, I won’t withdraw. I won’t switch to writing detached posts that set me up as the expert but divorce me from my humanity. I won’t stop sharing stories that I know might be the healing balm that someone needs. I’ll risk, I’ll get hurt, I’ll watch a dream die, I’ll step back and rest for a while, and then I’ll come back – again and again.

This morning, back home on the island after a week in my former prairie home, I went for a walk by the lake and listened once again to my melancholic-though-hopeful playlist. As I did so, I was reminded that the best art comes from the most vulnerable places. The art that moves me, that helps me get back up after the death of a dream – it all comes from a place of honesty, brokenness, and a willingness to stay open. It all comes from one heart offering something tender to another heart.

I shared a quote from Joni Mitchell in the preface of my book: "The trick is if you listen to that music and you see me, you’re not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you’ll learn something about yourself and now you’re getting something out of it." People like Joni Mitchell, who create art out of their vulnerable places, reach into my vulnerable places and I learn something about myself – THAT is why I will never stop despite the setbacks  and discouragement.

Yes, I will keep being vulnerable and having big feelings. I will keep going on long walks where I let myself cry over shattered dreams. I will feel the grief and let it stretch me. I will stay on this quest to be as fully human as I can be. I will hold space for myself, lean into tenderness, and strengthen my supports and boundaries so that I never risk becoming brittle and cynical.

I will dare to dream new dreams, even as I let the old ones die. Some of those new dreams will likely die too, and I will grieve them when they do, but then I’ll get up off the floor, go for a walk, listen to some melancholic-but-hopeful music, and carry on. Because it matters. Because it connects my heart to yours.

“Stay gentle, keep the eyes of a child
And wear your heart on your sleeve
Know to find joy in the darkness is wise
Although they will think you are naïve.”
- Stay Gentle, Brandi Carlile

Just now, after finishing this post, I went for another walk and I spotted this morning glory whose centre was glowing with sunlight. There’s something about those pinpoints of light, especially when they fall on something so fragile, that help me get through another day, even the ones that discourage me.