Go By Yourself
An essay by Spike Humer
4 min readThere was a stretch of mornings — sometime in 2022, maybe early 2023, the pandemic thinning into something not yet named — when I woke up hoping the day would be a different one than the day I was actually in.
Not a specific different day. Just other. Later. The one where the clarity had arrived.
If only I had done this instead of that. If only I had more certainty about how I was going to rebuild the business, the finances, the life. Then I could rest.
That is what I was doing on those mornings, though I would not have called it that. I was locating peace somewhere out ahead of me and waiting for the road to reach it.
Then one morning I stood up, pulled my shoulders back, and told myself to stop smoking hope.
Nothing had changed. No lottery, no hero, no rescue, no deity arriving with the certainty I had been asking for. That was the entire content of it: there is nothing outside of me that is going to change my circumstances. If it was going to be different, I was going to have to be different.
I would like to tell you that ended the searching.
It did not. The if-only still comes. What changed is that it now has somewhere to arrive — a place I can get back to instead of a road I have to keep walking.
My wife and I were talking about going back to Mexico, where we lived most of the last three years. A quick trip, a week, a little more, before her knee surgeries at the end of September. We will already have been traveling most of August. Friends, family, three weeks of it.
I wanted to go back, even for a week. I have wanted to live there long-term, and still do. Just a handful of days before her recovery becomes paramount.
She said I should go by myself. She would rather spend the week in Las Vegas with one of our friends.
I had expected her to say yes. Or if not yes, then something close enough to acquiescence that I could call it yes.
What happened next was almost nothing.
A fraction of a second of disappointment. Not hurt. Not anger. A pause about the length of one breath, and then the thing I still have to remind myself: she is who she is, not who I expect her to be.
We talked about it briefly. It was not a surrender. She went on wanting Las Vegas and I went on wanting Mexico, and neither of us was wrong, and the expectation that either of us should have wanted otherwise was the only thing in the room that was not real.
Some years ago, I began releasing relationships that did not bring peace. Colleagues. Friends. A family member. None of it cost me anything I would rather have kept. Every release was clean.
Which is less of an accomplishment than it sounds.
You can end a friendship once, and it stays ended. The expectation leaves with the person. That is what makes it a resolution, and resolutions are the easy kind of peace — they finish.
You cannot end an expectation of someone who is still there in the morning.
She is not a decision I made and completed. She is in the kitchen. She is making plans I did not make. So the setting-down is not something I did. It is something I do, and will do again, probably this week.
That took me a while to understand. The releases were never the practice. They were removals. The practice is whatever is left standing after there is no one left to remove.
And it explains why resolve kept failing me. Resolve is a resistance to something that already exists, and resistance wears you out. What holds is not resolve. It is a shorter walk back.
I used to think peace was a place I would reach once the rebuilding was finished.
Now I think it is what happens in the second after the disappointment arrives. Which means it is not a destination, and not a possession, and not something I will ever be done with.
It is only closer than it used to be. Close enough that I can get back.
—sh