On April 26th, 2021, my love mug broke. It tumbled out of the overcrowded drying rack and as it crashed on the floor, I kicked myself for being so careless. In the silent seconds that followed, I counted eleven large pieces and several small shards. It was a tacky mug, honestly; a loopy cursive “#love” was emblazoned in red across the kind of mug that otherwise looked like a cozy Saturday morning. Still, I bought it proudly upon my return from my junior semester of college abroad in London in preparation to live alone for the first time in my life. That mug watched me survive heartbreak, filled with champagne when I published my senior thesis, brought me 10 minutes of peace in mornings spent living at home with my chaotic family, and finally, kept me awake through graduate school and my first job as a public health professional. This ugly mug was one of the few material things I had throughout my turbulent 20s, and now it was gone.
I thought to text my ex, except then I didn’t consider him an ex. We were still trying, I think. In reality, I knew our time was running out and it really was tragic, but I knew he would find this funny. Despite his radical acceptance of me as exactly who I am in all my quirks, I knew he was amused by this mug and would be somewhat relieved it was gone. He would understand the irony better than anyone. I had been trying so hard to hold us together that love spilled across the floor was an inescapably good metaphor for what was likely looming. He eventually slipped through my hands, or maybe I slipped through his, it’s hard to say. All I know for sure is I loved him and I wasn’t ready to let him go. I didn’t text him. Instead, I shook my head alone at this seemingly recurrent theme in my life.
My roommate emerged from his room at the noise. He did me a favor by reserving his judgement at my inaction and instead, just reached for the broom.
“Do you want to keep the pieces? I bet you could glu-“
“No.”
That was the end of that. In the blur that followed, the shards tumbled down our garbage chute and I returned to my room to take my work calls. I didn’t allow myself to linger on what it would mean to keep the shards. In the past year, I rarely lingered on anything. Who had the capacity? For me, a New Yorker, a public health expert, and a social being with an oversized conscience, the relentless destruction of the previous year left so little room to process anything. I’d like to think I did my best, as we all did, but the circumstances of pandemic were just too far-reaching and unavoidable. I grew accustomed to truncating my emotional reactions to the world around me, everything from death to ended relationships. What would normally consume me for days instead had an allotted hour, and then I would move on to the next calamity on my plate. The mug got its designated few minutes from me in the kitchen. I decided it deserved no more time.
My mug decided otherwise. It demanded more from me than I was willing to give, and in that tug-of-war, I lost. Instead, I found myself overcome with grief over a tearful realization too heavy for a Monday afternoon: a part of me, one I had extra fought hard to hold onto lately, had died as well and I am long overdue my own permission to mourn her.
I was timid at 20. There was so little I was confident about and a staggering amount of things that worried me. Was I going to be able to get a good job after graduation? Was my family ever going to feel like a family again? Would I ever get over him? I wish that truly was the order of my fears but heartbreak is a relentless burden. I did, in case you’re wondering, get over him. My goodness though, it took time and a perseverance I didn’t know I had. I knew I was on my way though, because I stepped onto the Pier 7 vista in San Francisco, a meaningful place for us, and felt my aching heart relax into a sigh. The winds whipped around me as I watched a fisherman pull crabs from the Bay. The rolling hills behind me, backlit by the setting sun, went on for miles into the horizon and something about this jagged continuity was comforting. This was my place now, not ours, and little by little, I would disentangle my identity from our relationship and reclaim myself. A few years later, I brought my mother to that same pier and recounted this scene to her. She told me that she admired me, that she was proud of me for my determination to find joy where there had been such pain.
I didn’t consider myself determined, but I liked the sound of it. I grew up admiring my mother and her resilience in the face of constant adversity. If she was proud of me, I must be on the right track. With this in mind, I navigated my mid-twenties with as much grace and kindness to myself (and others) as possible. Of course, hardship and heartbreak were not strangers, but they weren’t mortal enemies either. The woman I became still held fear in her heart, but she also held a newfound courage and conviction. I liked her. She was kind but mercilessly committed to preserving her dignity and self-respect. It was a relief to have shed my younger self and grown into new skin. This woman could recognize and subsequently avoid pain and if she couldn’t avoid it, she could at least process it with poise. This was a true victory for someone whose life up until then had been marred by loss and abandonment.
But the mug broke, and so did I. It was not just the daily ritual, the memories, or even the physical mug that I lost. It was the increasingly desperate attachment to who I had grown into and wanted to remain, despite the whispers within me that said it was time to let go. I don’t like change. I fully subscribe to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The tenacity I had finally developed had served me well, so why let go? I spent so many of my younger years feeling powerless in the push and pull of my life circumstances and consumed by melancholy, why would I ever risk losing my newfound emotional equanimity?
Unfortunately, my formula for escaping the brunt of life’s hardships frayed at the edges as COVID-19 engulfed the planet. The magnitude of suffering was like nothing I had ever seen before. People around me passed away overnight, relationships fell apart over political differences, the threat of death loomed 24/7 over everyone I loved. The state of affairs wasn’t just painful, it was excruciating. And, its distinguishing features, longevity and uncertainty, ensured that an end was nowhere in sight.
In a context like this, a broken mug is certainly an unexpected final straw, but that mug was my talisman. In its presence, I grew into a woman worth her own admiration. I poured coffee, creamer, and courage into that mug. I sipped it early in the mornings, contemplating the day ahead and what it would require of me, be it a grocery haul or emotional fortitude to face an old lover. The mug was a consistent companion, a small but mighty constant in a life that otherwise often pushed me to my physical and emotional limits. It reliably bore witness to my uneven but glorious blooming and symbolized a steady continuity and promise to me that my life’s trajectory was indeed only upward. The mug’s message was became my North Star: prioritize love as an antidote to suffering. Its sudden death at a time I had begun feeling weary felt like an omen. With this trusted cornerstone in my life was suddenly gone, I had to accept the possibility that something in me may indeed be broken and need fixing.
Even if obsolete, it’s hard to let go of fragments of your spirit, especially when you are attached to the luxury of predictability. All my life, I wanted so badly to anchor to the familiar, because the other option is charting an unknown path and as we age, such unpredictability becomes increasingly unappealing. It presents the potential for pain, something I treated as an unwelcome visitor who crashed on my couch entirely too long. It was a negative externality of life, an unfortunate pre-requisite to valuing happiness but otherwise, something to actively avoid. Coupled with the myth fed to women that our best years are our twenties, there is an unspoken pressure to, “have it all figured out” and I thought I did. I believed wholeheartedly that I had undergone and passed the tests of my emotional maturity, gone to school enough, dated enough, lost enough, was enough; I couldn’t risk losing this. But, I wasn’t ready to lose my mug either and in this loss, I found an inscrutable truth: pain is the vanguard of growth, not because it tests our resilience, but because it challenges us to live and love freely, despite the inherent risk of disappointment.
The day my mug broke, I was deep in misery — I missed my partner, I longed for my life to feel easier, I worried about my loved ones who were rushing to get vaccinated. I resented the pain and the accompanying anger and frustration. But then my mug broke and I was at my desk in tears an hour later, wondering what on earth it was about this cheap cup that could illicit such an embarrassing reaction. The fact is my bubbling grief had finally come to a head and I was deep in mourning. I cried freely. I wept for the ones I had lost in the last year, for the friends I had to let go of, for my family that hasn’t felt like family in too long, for my partner and the future together we may not get after all and, most significantly, for myself. In those unallotted but nevertheless taken moments, I held myself with tenderness for the first time in months. I allowed myself to finally admit that I was hurting and for once, I was not interested in fixing it. Instead, I chose to honor it.
In the days that followed, I allowed sorrow to sink into the hollow of my bones. It consumed me the way it used to — wholly. However, time had endowed me with perspective I previously lacked and thus, the grief transformed into a meditation. I emerged from my soul-searching with this: in mourning, there is inherent celebration. How blessed I was to love something and someone so much that the loss feels insurmountable. These encounters, howsoever fleeting, wove new threads into my essence that shine long after loss, fundamentally changing me. The beauty of our brief but wondrous time on Earth with each other is in our innate need to connect, to feel seen and admired, to love one another earnestly. Pain often arrives unannounced and without permission, but even pain is our friend. This notion would be inconceivable to me in my early twenties, but in my late twenties and armed with the gift of retrospect, I have come to appreciate the role we can choose to play in our inner worlds. We are not meant to vilify, power through, or even tolerate pain, we are meant to approach it with curiosity, invite it in as another character in the plot of our lives, and permit it to move us just as we do with love. Lauren London once wisely said about her late partner Nipsey Hussle that, “grief is the final act of love.” I know now that grief and love are not opposites; they are, in fact, complements within the human experience. By inviting grief to play its part in our yearning and desire, we become boundless in our capacity as warriors of love.
Change scares me, and always will, but through the loops of loss and love, a plague, and a mug, I’ve freed myself from the self-imposed confines of pain as punishment. For that, I am infinitely richer. As time continues to unfold, it will undoubtedly present both bliss and bitterness and I will strive to henceforth be brave enough to welcome them both, warmly.
My love mug taught me more about myself than I ever could have dreamed. Its death showed me my ever-evolving role in my emotional world and allowed me to gracefully (and finally) outgrown old skin with gratitude for its protection and readiness for the new. Still, I was down a mug. In the days that followed, as I contemplated these valuable lessons, I decided that just as this mug had come and gone with purpose, I would happen upon a new one when the time was right. About a month later, while offhandedly window shopping, I picked up a pink and white mug with a neatly engraved, “love ya, mean it.” It was a simple statement, and maybe even cheesy to most, but to me, it balanced conviction and compassion. It perfectly represented the emotional shift in my heart from love as a noun to love as a verb, from a nebulous and abstract concept to a conscious action. It kept me company as I wrote this story and it will keep me company, I’m sure, until its loss becomes more meaningful than its presence.
