By 
There are a plethora of ways your life can be ruined:
Your body can get really sick.
Your brain can get really sick.
A close friend or family member can die.
You can lose a leg.
You can lose your job.
You can realize that you’re 39 and have only ever trained to be a claims adjuster, and fucking hell, does that mean you’re really going to be a claims adjuster until you retire and then you just fucking die having adjusted claims your whole life? How do you get out of this and start something else?
You can get wrapped up with the mafia.
You can get divorced.
Your kid can get really into EDM.
Your pet can die.
You can lose your mother’s engagement ring.
Your dick can stop working.
Your only friend can move away.
Your house can burn down (literally, or in a million figurative ways).
You can get owned by a woke teen online.
So, you know, you have your options.
Here’s the good news: The idea that your life can actually be ruined–as in become forever shitty and terrible because of one bad (even horrendous) thing happening–is total bullshit.
Temporarily, sure, any of those things can fuck your shit up. But what can’t be dealt with on a temporary basis? You can go through any torture with a known end time. I’ll have a conversation about paint with your aunt if I know it’s going to last for like 10 minutes max. The hope of a light at the end of the tunnel can get us through even the shittiest tunnel.
Now plenty of bad things are permanent, of course. But the point is that their impact on making your life shitty doesn’t have to be permanent.
You may never get your leg back. But you’ll find ways to manage not having a leg. You may miss your dad forever. But you’ll find ways to find fulfillment, safety, and joy without him. You may have your feelings really hurt by the teen that owns you. But you’ll find ways to carry on through life’s treacherous online terrain.
The fact of the matter is this: We become conditioned to rely on things. As a result, you feel like you need the current people in your life, or your job, or a good harvest of apricots.
The reality is that that is some bullshit. There is no one thing, or person that you need…ever–not to survive, not to thrive, not to have a life that doesn’t suck. This is a universal rule.
Now, there are certain conceptual things, and activities you do need. You need love, and socialization, and a certain amount of carbs and protein. You need your life to have meaning, and stimulation, and people who are okay with fucking you.
But all of this can come from anywhere, and that leads us to a harsh-sounding, but in reality, totally awesome truth.
Nothing Can’t Be Replaced
Take a second and think about the most important things and people in your life. Take a second, and make sure they’re clearly pictured in your head.
Now, read the following:
There is nothing, and no one, that can’t–in the most important respects–be replaced.
That feels wrong, and diminishing of the special people, or big ambitions in your life. But it’s not. It really just speaks to your power.
Your life is infinite in its possible scenarios. You can do an infinite number of things in an infinite order. You can spend the next two weeks hiking across rural Louisiana, then start studying for the MCATs, taking breaks only to play on the PacMan machine you just bought, all while eating a celery-only diet, and then you can decide “Fuck the MCATs” and work at Wendy’s. That’s like, scenario #75,653,251,685,057,256. May not be the best one. I’m just saying, it’s an option.
Between those scenarios (Scenario number 1 and scenario number infinity), there are plenty that lead to a pretty awesome life. Plenty great scenarios have you not being a professional comic book creator, or having a hot girlfriend. Plenty more even have your mom not being alive.
That sounds fucked up. I get it. But the point isn’t that your mom dies, and then you’re instantly like, “I’m doing great!”
The point is that down the line, after your life has been temporarily ruined, your life can still eventually be good. Even if your life is permanently missing something, even if there are a bunch of holes left in it, and you look around all just like, “Aww fuck, there’s a bunch of holes in my life!” it can still be great.
You can find some other hobby that excites you, but in a different way. You can find another job that you can live on, and enjoy, but in a different way. You can find different people to love, but in a different way.
So if something awful happens to you, and you feel like your life is over and permanently shitty, consider the following steps:
What to Do When Your Life Is (For Now) Over
1. Feel Like Shit For a While
Here’s what could happen when you don’t deal with your emotions properly, and let yourself be sad when you need to be sad:
-You exhibit weird outbursts of emotional instability for years on end, and don’t really know why, and everyone is like “God what is Paul’s deal?”
-You lash out at people for shit that has nothing to do with them.
-You’re just fucking sadder for longer than you otherwise should be.
Here’s why I think that tends to happen:
It’s like every time something awful happens to you, you’re given these hand fulls of liquid sadness.
And when that awful thing happens, and you have your handful of sadness you have two choices:
A) You can just let it spill all over you current outfit, accept that your outfit is ruined for now, deal with the mess, look for a replacement cable-knit sweater and, eventually move on. Or….
B) You can hold onto that sadness for as long as you can. But here’s the problem with that. Sadness doesn’t go away just because you keep it from spilling all over you. Instead, it seeps through the cracks between your fingers, and gets all over the rest of your life. Every experience gets a little bit of sadness on it. Everything gets kind of ruined.
Soon all of your clothes have a little bit of sadness on them. Your furniture has sadness. Your food gets weird little tastes of sadness–which I imagine tastes like mustard.
In non-metaphorical terms, every part of your life is infected with these unresolved feelings. Every experience, and feeling, and relationship is stained because you’re refusing to let this feeling make the mess it has to make.
Eventually, you get in a huge fight with your wife because she asked you to change out of your graphic tee because you have sadness juice all over the relationship, and it turns interactions that should mean nothing into major bummers.
So my point is this: Just let the sadness get all over you right away. Let it ruin your outfit. Let that time of your life fully suck. Reflect on the shitty reality you’re in. Wallow for a however long it takes (it might take a while). Fully acknowledge how much this sucks and feel all of the feelings associated with that until you’ve cleaned up all of your leaky sadness.
2. Remember You’ll Get Through This (Because, Well, You Have To)
There’s a handy little thing about the world around us: it keeps spinning even when it feels like our worlds have stopped.
That’s how I know you’ll get through this: you fucking have to. Eventually you look around, and you have to get back to work, or school, or your weekly knitting classes. I mean shit, you already paid for those. Are you really going to let them go to waste and leave a perfectly good quilt un-knitted because you’re sad right now?
How many stories have you heard about people whose entire family died in a plane crash, and then they went on to found Apple, or to start their own family, or to do a really great cover of Rude by Magic?
Human interest stories like this pop up all the time. They’re the subjects of movies, and what we find to be the most fascinating, inspiring stories in all of humanity.
And they are inspiring. But don’t let that make them seem unattainable. Bouncing back like this seems impossible at the time, and therefore blows us away to witness. But the reality is that this is kind of what we do.
Humans are resilient motherfuckers. Earth’s history is chock the fuck full of life taking a dump on peoples’ heads, and them continuing to live. It’s through this inevitable continuation through life that we can eventually morph into living a life that doesn’t suck.
So that’s your next step–keep living.
3. Find Those Replacements
Look, when I say to replace the people in your life, I don’t mean in terms of specifics.
If you and your mom watched Wheel of Fortune every night, don’t dress your new girlfriend like your mom, and put a grey wig on her, and demand that she call you “sweetie,” and try to solve every puzzle with you every night at 7:30. That’s not healthy.
You can’t recreate the life you had before it went to shit. You instead have an opportunity to create an entirely new life. In order to do that, you have to really reflect on what the bigger asset to your life is that is now gone.
So with the Wheel of Fortune example, you miss a simple, judgment-free, easy companionship over a shared interest. If you’re missing your job, what is it about the job? What is it about your ex? What was so special about the family heirloom you accidentally pissed all over in a drunken stupor?
This can be difficult to identify. You’ll be wrong a lot. You’ll think someone can give you what you’re missing, and then shit, you find out they list themself as a Hufflepuff and you’re totally a Ravenclaw (I have no idea what these mean).
You’ll think some new career is the one for you, then realize, shit, working from home doesn’t get you health insurance. You’ll think moving to the midwest so you can afford a home is what you really want, but then realize, fuck, you’re in the midwest.
This is all okay. This is all part of the process of figuring out how to rebuild your life.
If you remain open about what could be good for you and relentless about finding it, you’ll be fine. You’ll keep on pushing. You’ll make progress. You’ll find new parts of your life that can fit nicely into your current void.
Know that you’re not going to get exactly what you had before, and that that is fucking awesome.
4) Reinvent
There’s a reason women have a tendency to get a weird, drastic departure haircut after a breakup.
It’s because when you go through something traumatic–something that changes the course of your life, you tend to feel something like, “I don’t know how to function without this part of my life, so if I’m going to continue on without Chadwick, it’s going to have to be a new me that does it.”
This actually makes sense. To some degree, our best way to recover from a shitty situation is to reinvent ourselves.
So as much as you might look at your friend with her new weird Kate Gosselin cut and think, “God I want to fix you,” to some degree, she’s totally on the right track.
We tend to think our lives are over when we lose something important because we’ve stitched that things into the fabric of our lives, and we don’t know how to unstitch them without pulling threads all over the place. So our only conclusion we can arrive at is that the whole blanket is fucked.
And it is fucked. I mean, shit look at that terrible life-blanket. Our previous lives are over.
But our mistake is in assuming that this is our only blanket.
We can find new versions of ourselves. We can reuse our fabric and create something entirely new and less stupid.
So yeah, dummy. Cut your hair. Jump into a new activity. Make new friends. Fill voids with new, totally unexpected things. Try some weird shit. Make a new life-blanket.
You get to experience a totally new love, or fulfillment, or stimulation, or way of making that cheddar. Your new quilt can be something entirely new, and more exciting, and better, but only if you try to make it better.
So yes, a part of your life is over. It’s over forever, and it’s not coming back, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll never be loved, or happy, or fulfilled, or stimulated in that exact way ever again.
So regroup, and get to sewing.
