It's All Material

What was really going on with me last year

At the beginning of 2025, I was full of hope. In February, I boarded a flight to St. Louis for a final stage job interview with a six-person panel. The role was remote, senior-level, and felt like the perfect next step in my career.

I got a rejection email a few days after returning from the trip. I was shocked. I had tried and failed at not getting my hopes up.

In true writer fashion, I wanted to write about it. But I felt a sense that the story wasn’t ready. People get rejected from jobs every day. There wasn’t enough tension.

Winter turned to Spring, and Spring brought a cascade of events.

In April, I joined my usual weekly one-on-one call with my manager, and HR was there. I was laid off.

No more than five days later, water was coming out from behind our TV. A bad storm damaged the house we were about to put up for sale—the house that my rapidly deteriorating mental health depended on selling.

Two weeks later, I got a credit monitoring email about new accounts. I hadn’t opened any new accounts. Someone (a still unidentified scammer) had used my information to take out thousands of dollars in fraudulent student loans.

I’ve long loved this quote by Philip Roth: “Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.” And the material was quite literally pouring in (out of my house’s walls, for goodness sake!).

I had my story’s tension. I had my material. I had an almost constant eyelid twitch that my therapist said was likely a physical response to stress. Now what?

I’m not afraid to write about hard things, but I tend to only do it in retrospect. When the crisis is unfolding, I may take a few notes, but I’m not writing an in-the-moment analysis of my feelings. I can’t meaningfully observe a fire that I’m desperately trying to put out.

Instead of writing, I made my husband a witness to about one mental breakdown a week. I texted my best friend to say I could handle one or two of these things at a time, but not all of them at once. Couldn’t I have just been unemployed? Did I really have to be job searching in a terrible market, fighting with insurance to fix water damage, dealing with the house-listing process, and handling an identity theft case at the same time?

I maintained a certain distance from the urgency of it all to keep from completely losing my mind. But for once, I didn’t push past the feelings or push them away.

In a version of Christianity that I used to subscribe to but no longer do, folks have a habit of “spiritual bypassing,” which John Welwood, who coined the term, defined as “using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business.’”

It’s the religious version of “toxic positivity.” I learned to deny unpleasant emotions and slap on a “it’s God’s plan” or “everything happens for a reason” label to every situation.

But in this 2025 crisis avalanche, I said to hell with it. I still had to “let go and let God” in some respects—I had no choice but to wait with a lot of these scenarios—but I was too exhausted to dodge dark emotions or neatly spiritualize them the way my younger self had.

As Barbara Brown Taylor explored in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, I had to adopt a new way of looking at darkness. She wrote: “After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know.”

I sat with depression. I got cozy with uncertainty. I leaned in scary close to my anger. I was uncomfortable and antsy for months on end, but I felt my feelings. I felt them all instead of immediately mining them for meaning.

When people ask why I read so many heavy books, I often admit it’s because I’ve had a relatively easy life. When it comes to other people’s stories, I’ve always viewed darkness as instructive. It was time I let my own darkness and discomfort teach me.

I spent a lot of last year in agony and suspension. I was waiting for the house to get repaired so we could list it (the year would end without that happening), waiting for call-backs about jobs, waiting for the eyelid twitch to stop, waiting for my life to restart.

I felt like Thomas Merton must have when he wrote, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.” (The full prayer has more to offer, but that first line summed up my plight.)

This story still doesn’t have a tidy ending or a big, dramatic lesson (part of me wishes it did), even though I’m writing this from the other side of that series of unfortunate events. I found another job. The house sold. We just moved to a new area, and it’s already doing wonders for my mental health. The fraudulent loans are finally being discharged.

I don’t know the point in all of this is, but I know it’s not reaching the other side and saying, “Hooray! Look at me!” Maybe getting comfortable with “I don’t know” was the point.

One lesson I almost missed is that I wasn’t wrong for getting my hopes up. I got let down enough times to become more okay with it. I moved on because I had to, and the wait wasn’t a waste of time.

There was always a chance that none of it would work out the way I wanted. The timeline surely isn’t one I would’ve picked. But I told myself that even if everything doesn’t go the way I’ve planned it in my head (and it didn’t), it’s a story to tell. Maybe even a good one. Everything is material, but much of it is still raw material I’m doing my best to work with.

I try to edit my writing tightly, and you may notice this post isn’t that. Let’s just call it a life update letter to my pals on the internet. This is as close to one-pass writing as I get. I decided to share it with you anyway, but this remains an unfinished story.

Last year’s chapter showed me how to keep going without knowing the why or what’s next. It’s a lesson I’ve learned before, and can never set aside for long. Life twists the plot as it pleases. As the old Gospel jam goes, “I believe I’ll run on, and see what the end’s gonna be.”