Danielle Lavoie (Renzi) is a self-declared up and coming author in her thirties. Though she most strongly identifies as a humorist, she had a pretty fucked up year that sent her careening into her very own Blue Period hallmarked by doing weird shit like writing bios in third person. The writing you’ll see here focuses on divorce, cancer, family and new love that feels like it’s survived lifetimes.
How It Started
The world’s circumstances have made it especially hard to lean on anyone, because not one person I know has proper footing right now. Thankfully, there is google. Google has become my god, and I suspect that is not unique to me. I’ve become the Noah of my own ark, trusting that I am doing the right thing at all times because a cherry-picked web article told me so. Recently, before the words tumbled from my mouth I googled “diarrhea and the stress of being in love” and found that they’re correlated. That was enough to feel assured I had a case of Love Diarrhea and not *the* lethal virus blooming inside me. Before leaving my husband, who was more importantly my best friend, I googled “should I leave my husband?” and found a disturbingly vast market for the question. Personally, I sought solace in Oprah’s “Twelve Signs It Might Be Time to Get a Divorce” article, because I identified with nine of the twelve. Once I left my husband, it was time to google how to move on. Would I be okay? Would I love and be loved again? Was I making the right choice? When I was exhausted every day, despite having arguably rested more than I had in years, I googled “pandemic fatigue” and found that plenty of people had that too. And when my mother’s biopsy results came in, I googled “life expectancy for small cell lung cancer” to be met with single digits and an inability to see the future.
One of my smart friends taught me that when a baby is crying and you’ve done all you can to console her but nothing is working, you can flip the baby on her belly, over your forearm, wiggle her butt, and she’ll stop. It confuses the baby, gives her something to think about besides why she is so upset, and it lasts long enough for her to catch her breath. I suppose I felt compelled to write this, because I was searching for and continue to search for myself on the internet so I may catch my breath. Yet, despite all this searching for myself, I don’t find much about this murky middle part and all the uncertainty that lives here. I see a lot of tidy endings. I guess it is because it’s easier to reflect back on a situation, and much harder when you are in the throes of it to string a sentence together.
Every article about divorce takes place before, or after. There are much fewer primary sources about the year long separation that housed heartache, grief, and unparalleled love all at once. The internet is crawling with articles for after your loved one has passed away from cancer, but much fewer articles on what it is like to care for someone who no longer resembles your mother. Or something for how lonely it is to grieve her before she is dead, and not feel entitled to utter that out loud.
I do wonder if it is because we want to put the best versions of ourselves out there. These incoherent, unflattering versions of us while we are actively dealing with something don’t provide much hope do they? When the doctors diagnosed my mother, we were in the midst of a pandemic. And, when the pandemic arrived in the United States, slowly at first like folklore and then urgently as everything closed, I was in the midst of a divorce. It’s a lot to be in the midst of, even with words as whimsical as “midst” at your fingertips. I mean, we are all operating with unprecedented amounts of uncertainty right now, just read one of the ten thousand emails you’ve received in the last nine months months that say so.
Our brains are particularly bad at coping with uncertainty, according to an article I googled just now, thus focusing on a future you cannot picture for too long can inspire a panic attack. The key to combatting the Great Unknown is to remain hopeful. And with the hollow thrum of death the only certain thing these days, an elixer like hope is hard to bet on. I’m not claiming to have the answers but I hope you’ll join me, for the messy murky middle part--like you, I’m just another millennial in crisis.