Invisible Strings

It is funny. I have written about a concept I call “the red string” for about fifteen years. Still, yesterday, I was watching a documentary about the making of Taylor Swift’s folklore album, and there is a song called invisible string, in which she shares her writing process. I embedded a link in the post (and before you ask, she lowercase the album title and each song, so I have here as well).

Her thoughts are not necessarily new as they relate to invisible strings that connect us, sometimes called fate. Still, I love the song and the writing (as with most of the songs she has written that I have examined more closely, she is a better and more complicated writer than I perceive that she gets credit for - certainly than I have ever given her credit for before the last 18 months).

There are some differences worth noting between what I call “the red string” and invisible strings, but I will save that for another post.

Since childhood, I have believed in soulmates, so it would not be a huge leap for me to believe in strings or fate. I didn’t start writing about them until I was in my thirties. I am not sure it was so much of a romantic thing as a hope thing. For someone who had the world by a string (no pun intended), I felt very untethered—complicated family dynamics that had followed me into adulthood. Unresolved childhood trauma (this would be a good decade before I went to therapy). A very messy romantic life. I was a woman who desperately wanted to believe that my life had some reason or meaning. I was also a woman desperate to be seen and known outside of what the world saw every day. As I wrote about in Facedown, you can have the world by a string, and no one has a clue that you are lost or lonely or have doubts - about anything.

When you reach my age, you think a lot about strings, decisions, paths not chosen, and the like. I am as guilty as anyone of allowing my mind to wander down a rabbit hole or two now and again. I do not recommend planting a flag in any of those holes. I also recommend treating yourself with kindness when remembering. Of course, you would have made different choices if you knew then what you know now. We all would. Today’s important thing is making the best decisions now that you know more…better…different.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”

- Maya Angelou

Change is hard. Change is hard when you know better and what to do differently. I have spent time wrestling for years - not with others, with myself - over making a change in my life that I knew needed to be made. I have stayed in jobs, careers, relationships - romantic and friend and family, cities, houses, churches, etc., all longer than I should have because I knew the cost of making the change (or I thought I did), and it felt too high, too scary.

I do not like to give up on things or people. I am the quintessential ‘last man standing’ personality, but this last change/transition I have made may have finally reformed me. It isn’t that it is perfect. I trusted myself and God to follow through with what I understood the assignment to be. It felt insane to do what I was doing in the throes of it, but now, on the other side, it feels so…well, right.

Sure, I am a little lost some days. Some important relationships are being renegotiated (for lack of a better word), which feels terrifying at times and hopeful at others. Then there are my days that look so radically different now that sometimes I catch myself staring out into space, almost like I am hovering above my own life, taking in the view with a bewildered look. As the kids once said, “Who dat?” For the love of all that is good and holy, I do not have a clue in those moments.

I think one of the biggest surprises in this category of thoughts on my transition season is how long I am finding it takes me to make a significant decision, and then when I do, how much I need to celebrate it and myself for making it. I have never been one to shy away from making a decision, which helped me tremendously in my professional life over the past thirty-plus years, and in my personal life, I had to move just as fast to keep up.

Now, I find myself on simmer a lot. Allowing myself the gift of wonder and the art of pondering over things. The truth is that I do not like to be rushed. There are things I know to be true, so they do not need this ‘time,’ but the things I don’t know or am new to, man, oh man, do I want to sit a spell and chew on them. It is a trait that I am just getting a handle on eleven months into.

What I am the surest of is that, in so many ways, the things I am doing now are things I was always meant to do, and I am grateful to have lived long enough to experience them. From cooking a big breakfast every morning after hours spent curled up writing to changes that I am making to my bathroom shower to make it even more epic to puttering around my yard/the woods with a cup of coffee in the morning or a drink and cigar at night to learning how to use an espresso machine to reading a library of books, I have been collecting since I learned to read at age four—and those are just a sampling.

…and for what it is worth, that last one is not the only one I can trace back like a red string to being a little kid growing up on our family’s farm outside a small town.

Yet, the invisible strings continue to capture my imagination and hope for the days, months, and years ahead—invisible strings with my writing, teaching, and especially with my heart.

Last night, after I had finished up for the day in the writing shed, it started pouring rain again. I decided to make a cup of tea. I grabbed a quilt, book, and writing tools and went to the cottage's front porch. I snuggled under the quilt and sipped my tea while rocking, watching, and listening to the rain.

If I tell you it was glorious, would you believe me?

Happiness.

A dozen years ago, I was sitting on a porch talking with an old friend during a rain shower like that one. They tried to remind me who I was and wasn’t, which was a difficult conversation. We had not spoken in over five years, but you would not have known it if you had been eavesdropping on our phone call. I do not know why that memory popped up just now, but if I had to fester a guess, it is because that is one of the relationships in my life where I see that invisible string at work—always working.

In a world that always feels on fire in one way or another.

In a life where the span of your living years is unknown.

In a body/heart/mind/soul that craves to be seen and known by that one person that most are never lucky enough to find.

Maybe it isn’t that silly to believe in invisible strings.

Maybe, just maybe, we should pay more attention to them.

What I know to be true is that every single time I have tried to deny them, they have come back with greater intensity. This is true of writing, teaching, and my heart.

So maybe a lesson for me in this transition season is to pay more attention to those things that have never let go of me, no matter how far or fast I ran from them.

{This makes me think of an old song, “Ran into You,” by Mitch Rossell and Trisha Yearwood, which played a role in a chapter of Facedown that will never see the light of day because I have decided not to include it. And yes, if allowed, I would include a playlist with every book chapter in Facedown.}

What invisible strings are being revealed in your own life?

Maybe that is a journal or writing prompt for someone today. I have more than a few friends going through transition seasons of their own, and while I do not want them to feel attacked,

…there you go.