Dear Joie

Dear Joie,

I am writing from the year 2022, a year for you that is in the seemingly distant future. For you, it is 2013, and you are just about to embark on the next phase of your glorious life. You have had the courage to break free from a relationship that is slowly siphoning off your confidence. You will leave your life in New York, a life you have worked hard to build. A life of eat, sleep, work, repeat, with very little actual eating. You realized this life was unsustainable, and you have decided to move to Los Angeles to find balance. Now you are on the precipice of stepping into something unknown and new. You have made the hard choices you needed to make to nourish your body, work in harmony with life, grow, and live.

I must make one thing very clear: I am proud of you. I need you to know this because even though the coming years will bring tragedy, I would do it all again 1000 times over.

When you get to LA, you will very quickly meet a man. He will become your husband and the father of two sons. He will make you feel like there’s nothing you can’t do. He will make you feel like you belong. It will seem very fast, and you will question whether or not it’s “too fast,” but listen to me when I tell you, go for it 100% and never look back.

You will know him from his smile. The first time you see him, time will slow down exactly as it does in the movies. You will look at him and see your whole life because you both are karmically destined to be together, but not forever. He will make you feel like the only other person on Earth. He will look exactly like the picture you had of your future husband when you were a little girl. You will LAUGH every day because of him. You will wake up in his embrace, but not forever.

Somewhere inside you, you already know this. Somewhere you understand that nothing is forever and that every day is a chance to appreciate the little moments. You have a clear picture of this somewhere in you, so I am not writing to tell you to soak up every moment with him because you will do this already. I am writing to tell you that you must prepare to be a different woman than you imagined.

The love of your life will die and leave you with his two most precious achievements, his sons. You will need to be both mother and father to these children. This man will choose you because somewhere in him, he will know that the mother of his boys will need to endure beyond his death. She will need to not lose herself in her grief. She will need to learn to ask for help; she will need to learn to create spaces of joy and relaxation through her suffering; she will need to provide and nurture, discipline and comfort, challenge and accept. She will need to let go of who she thought she would be to live as she is.

I am writing to tell you that you will not be the woman you think you will be. This might come as a shock. This might make you sad. This might make you feel lost and alone. But that is not my intent. You will not be the woman you think you’ll be because you will be much more. You will be a woman loved by a man so deeply and completely that a part of him will reside in you when he leaves this Earth. You will be both mother and father; you will be both masculine and feminine; you will be the unifying singular point of two distant polarities. You will be the very nucleus of a universe occupied by two tiny minds just starting to find expressions of themselves.

You, Joie, will be loved, and because of this, you will live not as a wife, not as a woman, but as a point of balance.