81. The Beauty To Come

A pep talk for when you’re worrying about all the bad things that could happen in the future. 

Emily McDowell is a writer and illustrator, founder and formerly of the stationery brand Em & Friends. You can now find her writing on Substack. She is the co-author of There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Emily McDowell:  I’m Emily McDowell, and it’s going to be okay. But for a long time, I didn’t think I would be okay. Growing up, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t depressed and anxious. I lived in a house of fear and worry. I had a single mom who was an artist supporting two kids by making quilts, which was not exactly lucrative.

My mom struggled hard with her own depression. She was also really isolated. And without other adults to talk to, she would share her adult worries with me and my sister. Basically, I was the only 8 year old I knew who was extremely concerned about health insurance. As long as I can remember, I’ve spent a lot of time convinced that danger and tragedy lurked around every corner, just waiting to strike.

When I was 24, after spending a year feeling like garbage and being told by doctors that my blood work was inconclusive and I should probably just exercise more, I was hospitalized in a dramatic fashion and diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. All the statistics said how rare it was to get cancer in your 20s, but I got it anyway, and it hadn’t even been on my list of things to be afraid of.

I am very happy to report I did not die, but I also came out of chemo and radiation with a new list of terrible surprises to worry about. Would the cancer come back? Would I get secondary cancer years later from the treatment? Would I be bankrupted by medical debt? Would I be bankrupted by medical debt?

 After cancer, I got a job in advertising, because there’s nothing like a brush with death to inspire you to spend your one wild and precious life making dog food commercials. But I needed good health insurance, and it sounded kind of fun. And then I spent 10 years working 80 hours a week, staying awake all night at the office, snorting Adderall that our boss gave us, and living on Diet Coke and beef jerky, and fear of being laid off.

And then I did get laid off.

 And I started a greeting card company that got very big, very fast. And I spent ten more years destroying myself in the name of productivity. A big part of this was my belief that working this way would keep me safe. That if I tried hard enough, I could be in control. I could see the bad things coming and maybe avoid them, like icebergs.

Or maybe, when the bad things happened, it would hurt less, because I’d been expecting them. Last fall, I got a headache that lasted nine weeks, and when I finally went to the ER and got a scan, they found a brain tumor that was totally unrelated to the headache. And now I’m going to need brain surgery.

Well, wow, didn’t see that one coming. A very hard and universal part of being human is that our minds are biased towards the negative. We’re biologically programmed to pay more attention to the negative things, to notice them more, to remember them more than the good. This vigilance is our brains trying to help us survive, but it’s also what makes life feel fearful and small.

This is why gratitude journals actually work. We need help noticing the good stuff. And not only that, we need help remembering that the good stuff is often the small stuff. When we think about unexpected things happening in the future, most humans generally assume those things will be bad. An unforeseen tragedy hits, the other shoe drops, the world explodes.

But the truth is, even more often than the big bad surprises, the Good surprises happen too. And I have spent the last few years working hard to undo my negative bias and learn to notice the good things that I also never saw coming. And it turns out they’re everywhere. Like, really, they’re all over the place.

I didn’t know I would meet the greatest love of my life when I was 44 years old in my first week in a new city. As a person who was literally taught in middle school by my youth group leader how to give and receive a hug, I had no idea I’d learn in my 40s that physical touch is in fact my love language.

I didn’t know I would become a stepmom to twin teenage boys, which is kinda like having two Clydesdales living in my house, but is also really fun. And here’s a good one. I had no clue. That all the therapy and journaling and meditation and years of work on myself I did would eventually start to pay off.

I didn’t know this. After a lifetime of worrying about everyone not liking me, I would learn to like and trust myself enough that I would finally stop caring. I didn’t know I could change. I learned I really like lifting weights. I have a cat named Action Sports Brian. I went on vacation and found out about these lizards that make this ridiculous and delightful noise.

Past me had no idea any of this awesome stuff was gonna happen. What is both really irritating and really beautiful about the good things is we can’t know what they’re gonna be or when they’ll show up. When I am in a depressed place, which I sometimes am, The hardest part is feeling like things will suck forever.

That I know what life will bring and it will all be terrible and hard, but this is just not true. For the times when I feel this way, I keep a list of all the wonderful things in my life that I could never have predicted or imagined. So I can pull it out and see the evidence that it’s just as safe to trust the future as it is to fear it.

The truth is we don’t know. And yeah, life surprised me this year with a brain tumor and a whole bunch of other garbage, and is that fun? No. But when I’m tempted to future trip on brain surgery and all kinds of horrible what ifs, I will remember the versions of myself who existed before. Who, even in a pandemic, even with the diagnoses, even with the uncertainty that permeates absolutely everything.

Could not begin to imagine the beauty that was to come.