"You are not the first person to have a breakdown in this IHOP": On grief, and crepes.

The weirdest breakdown I had after my divorce was in an IHOP attached to a truck stop in rural Tennessee.

My mother had flown to New York with me to gather my things and drive them back to Texas in a rental car, and my four closest friends met us at the apartment at 11:30 p.m. on a Monday night. I sat on the couch — the couch my ex-husband and I had so painstakingly selected three years before as our first Adult purchase — and wept. They meticulously packed everything I needed on their own. My grandmother’s Time Magazines from World War 2, framed on my living room wall, came down and were stuck in the bag the we used to take to Central Park. My clothes were folded, organized by type and stuffed into the gigantic rolling suitcase my ex-husband and I purchased the year before at an outlet mall, justifying the expense because of all of those trips we were going to take together.

Once that was done, my best friend filled up water balloons, and the five of us went out to the street and threw them at nothing, screaming. The orange streetlight at 147th and St. Nicholas cast a Halloween-like glow on the muggy July scene, and the splattered little flecks of neon-colored latex glistened on the street, still wet.

The next day my mom and I began the long drive back, stopping in D.C. for two days for an unavoidable work trip. While I met with sources at a Corner Bakery and then at a bar, my mom secretly lurked a few tables over, eyeing me over the tops of laminated menus, to make sure I was holding it together. I still have no idea if my sources noticed the woman 27 years my senior, who looked suspiciously like me, suspiciously staring at us.

Then, it seemed like we were driving through Tennessee forever. Driving the width of that long state seemed like a bizarre metaphor for my life to that point — unrelenting and flat, apparently with no end. That sounds dramatic now, but it felt very deep to me then, especially as the pine trees got so thick that I felt I couldn’t breathe. In her determined quest to force me to eat, my mom pulled over at an IHOP at a truck stop. I got out of the car and found my way to a table on the back wall, where I thought I might be able to cry in peace.

I ordered coffee and Swedish crepes. My mom ordered coffee and the senior special, which she enthusiastically informed the waitress she now qualified for. The waitress, who couldn’t have been more than 20, returned quickly with the food. I poked at the sugared lingonberries with my fork, watching the butter melt over the crepes, which looked exactly the same as they looked when I ordered them after high school debate tournaments.

Meals were the hardest thing in the weeks after my divorce. One of the emotional burdens I took on with my ex-husband had been food. I grocery shopped, I cooked. Sending him to the grocery store was simply asking to be screamed at (How should I know where to find pie crusts, he’d yell through the receiver, often while I was in the middle of a massive cooking project and unable to fully hold the phone with flour-covered fingers).

There was a part of me that thought that if I could just cook well enough that maybe he’d see my value. If I could master homemade gnocchi and I could roast the fuck out of a chicken, then he’d realize that I was thoughtful, talented and caring. It was silly. It was one of many games I played with myself over the course of our marriage, trying to shift to accommodate him though he never shifted to accommodate me.

And, so, there I was, staring at this shiny plate of uneaten crepes, ugly crying and knowing that none of those silly games had made a difference and they were never going to. I unwrapped a roll of silverware and wept, heaving, into the napkin. My mom stared at me, unsurprised. I’d spent most of the previous two days looking out the window, crying, while she drove and attempted to make me realize everything I could offer the world on my own.

While I sobbed into the scratchy napkin, the waitress walked over – unaffected by the scene – and refilled my coffee. She dropped the ticket on the table, thanked us for being there, and walked away as if this were totally normal.

I looked up at my mother, realizing suddenly that I’d been in a public place this entire time, horrified. My mom snatched the ticket off the table and looked at me while she got out her wallet. “You are not the first person to have a breakdown in this IHOP,” she said. “And you won’t be the last.”

That’s a deep thought, when you get down to the brass tacks of it. But it’s also the trickiest part about grief: When you are consumed by it, you feel like you are the only one in the world whose heart could be this broken. It’s a deep, physical pain that starts at the pit of your stomach and radiates out, making your nose tingle and your fingers contract. You feel irrational. You feel like if you could go back in time and do this thing or that thing differently, you wouldn’t be here right now, feeling these things. You are humiliated by your feelings and assume that everyone around you — everyone — must be judging you for this monumental personal failing.

It takes a long time to stop feeling so alone. When you are in the throes of grief, you see nothing but that grief. You are not ready for people to tell you that you are strong — you do not believe them. You are not ready for people to say that they have felt what you feel — you do not believe them. And you certainly do not believe people when they speak to you in truisms like “God has a plan for you,” or “everything happens for a reason.” Go fuck yourself, honestly, is what you’d like to say to that "plan god has" and those "reasons."

Grief isn't something you experience alone. Others see you hurting, and so they hurt, too, because they know they cannot help. And, so, you tell them you are fine to make them feel better. And sometimes you really are fine, but grief isn’t linear. The “steps” that people talk about after a loss — denial, acceptance, anger, whatever — don’t happen in order, and everyone has always been able to walk downstairs just as well as they walk up them.

“You were fine yesterday,” people would say when I would cry. And I was. But now I am not.

-

I feel like I could write a book about all of the wrong things that well-meaning people say after someone experiences a heart break of this magnitude. For example, do not say, “You are the strongest woman I know.” Instead say, “You don’t feel strong, but I know that you are. And it’s fine if you don’t see that right now.”

You hold people’s feelings for them, instead of asking them to feel things with you. One day, they will believe those things about themselves, too, but right now they feel weak and stupid. They don’t need to feel otherwise, but they do need to know that you don’t think they are weak and stupid.

Do not say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Because that isn’t true. Sometimes things just happen to people but, more often, the person who is grieving knows exactly why the thing happened. In my case: my husband fell out of love with me. That’s the reason this is happening, and that’s what I wanted to shout at people every time they talked about “god’s plan.” (Was it really god’s plan that I’d end up weeping in an IHOP, Lisa? Was it?) Instead, “You probably don’t know what the next step is, and you won’t for a while, but I’m here to take that step that with you,” is more persuasive and helpful.

People love certainty, and they love their people. And when our loved ones are so deeply upset and nothing is certain, we yearn for them to be put back upright. We yearn for normalcy — we can’t help it. But in the first stages of grief, forcing that stability onto someone makes them feel even more out of touch with reality. Everyone says I’m strong, they say that it will get better every day, but it doesn’t. And if everyone says that’s how this works, why doesn’t it? What is wrong with me?

I’ve become, in my small group of friends, the new breakup guide — a role I am happy to play. And even after experiencing this myself sometimes all I can do for my friends who experience this sort of pain is speak in those truisms. I do it before I can even catch the words as they fall out of my mouth. “This will get better every day,” I’ll say. And that’s a lie! It will not! Over time the pain lessens, but sometimes, months into it or years into it, that pain shoots back out of your stomach and knocks you straight on your ass. That’s just how this goes.

Last September, two months after my marriage ended, I won an award that was important to me. I was to collect it at the Society of Professional Journalists national conference, conveniently being held in San Antonio that year. By happenstance, my mother also needed to be in San Antonio that week and we drove down together. I was thrilled. It was the first truly good thing that had happened to me in months.

I checked into the conference hotel and started to get ready in the bathroom. And then, out of nowhere, I wasn’t fine anymore. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time I’d experienced a work accomplishment without my ex-husband, who, even in our lowest moments, had always been my career’s biggest cheerleader. When I was in journalism school, he taught himself AP style so that he could top line edit my stories before I turned them in. And when he became a lawyer, he’d help me draft my FOIA appeals. He bragged to his lawyer friends that I made it to court before he had and loved to talk about my next story with me. And now here I was, receiving an award for all of those things, and the person who I’d always share those successes with was 1,300 miles away and no longer mine.

I shut the bathroom door and wept harder than I had ever wept before, more than 60 days after the initial shock. I ripped my dress off, sitting on the floor in Spanx, trying to literally ground myself on the cold tile. I did all of the things that had made me feel better before: I laid down and I took deep breaths. I got up and I splashed cold water on my face. I took a Xanax. Nothing, it seemed, was going to help me process the depth of the loss I was feeling in that moment.

My mom stood on the other side of the door, calling my sister, texting my best friend — what should she do? Why wasn’t Jessica ok? She couldn’t do anything, and I just wasn’t.

At some point I realized I was going to miss the awards ceremony and forced myself to stop crying. I put as much makeup on my face as I think is physically possible and put my dress back on. I sprayed the shit out of my hair with hairspray, hoping that if my hair looked really good no one would notice that my eyes were bright red. I went downstairs.

I sat with the very kind people at my assigned table, who wanted to make small talk and congratulate me on this award. I smiled back and thanked them, trying not to throw up the frisée in the salad as it scratched its way down my throat. I declined the wine, the only good choice I’d made all day, and willed it to be over.

Unexpectedly, my award was the first to be announced. I walked up to the front, smiling through the terror and stepped onto the constructed stage.

I hadn’t realized — though I’m sure someone told me — that I was expected to give an acceptance speech. So, when I was handed the award and shook the hand of the presenter, I began to walk off the stage. “Do you want to make a speech?” the presenter asked, and I, meekly, turned around and said “No?”

Had my award even been second, I could have cobbled together some generic drivel: Thank you to my editors, who have been endlessly supportive. Thank you to SPJ, for your unparalleled guidance of new journalists. Whatever. But no — it seemed perfectly fit for the moment that I’d just picked myself up off of a hotel bathroom floor and dragged myself down to this awards show so that I could humiliate myself.

The awards show continued, and the crowd was entertained by the situation. It was, legitimately, funny. I continued to sit there at my table, content for the acceptance speeches to continue well into the night so long as I was no longer forced to speak to anyone else. And then, suddenly, it was over. I could not make myself flee the room, knowing how rude that would be, but the prospect of having people come up to say things to me was terrifying. Would they be able to tell I’d just been crying? Would they ask where my husband was?

They couldn’t, and they didn’t. Instead, these wonderful people wanted to tell me how great they thought I was and make jokes about the number of pictures I tweeted about my dog and invite me to speak to their journalism classes. I don’t remember any of these people, even though I’m sure it was not my first time meeting many of them. Everyone’s faces are blurs, though I can still picture their extended hands clearly. All I could think to do was make self-deprecating jokes about my lack of an acceptance speech until it was ok for me to leave the room. When the moment presented itself, I scurried out of a side door and bolted to the elevator, removing my heels so that I could run.

I got to my room, put the glass award with my name on it on the hotel dresser and collapsed into my mother’s arms, exhausted. She wiped my makeup off my face while I continued to cry. “You just won an award,” she said to me. “Don’t you know that other people see your value?”

I didn’t.

-

Downtown San Antonio is a great place to be sad. There are things to do that aren’t weird to do by yourself, like walking along the Riverwalk or sitting in a margarita bar and getting slowly drunk with the 12 other solo travelers that have found themselves at a hotel on the Riverwalk for a conference they didn’t actually want to go to. And those people are so wrapped up in their own happenings that, if you – say – start to cry, no one notices. And, you have a margarita.

It was on one of these solo adventures I, suddenly, felt my chest loosen.

It was as if my body simply could no longer handle the weight of my grief and forced itself to let out just a bit of air before the whole balloon burst. I blinked, and looked around the coffee shop I was in, trying to decide if I liked the lavender latte I ordered. I did not. But it was the first time in two months I didn’t feel like I wanted to cry.

I have no idea why it happened, or why it happened there. Maybe the award, in the back of my mind, did force me to appreciate my own value. Maybe something that my mother said to me in the hours and hours we’d spent together since early July finally had finally sunk in. Maybe my heart had simply had enough self-hatred.

I chucked the lavender latte, ordered a coffee to go and went back to the hotel room I was sharing with my mother. Later that night, I went with her to the hotel bar and we drank red wine out of plastic wine glasses while her co-workers popped in and out, saying hello. She’d been with the company since before I was born and knew everyone. I laughed — belly laughed — for the first time in two months when my mom dropped her phone while showing one of them a picture of my dog. I got genuine enjoyment from the funny stories these people told me about what my mom was like in the late 80s. I pretended like I remembered a man who informed me he’d met me when I was “this tall,” holding his hand about 18 inches off the floor.

This, it seemed, was what it was like not to feel sad.

In the weeks that followed I did a lot of new things. I went on a date with a British man in downtown Dallas. He was terrible, but I did make out with him in the bar just to see what it was like. It was fine. We made plans to see each other again that never materialized and I didn’t care. Weeks later, I realized I’d left an earring at his apartment and had him leave it in a labeled envelope at the front desk, as if there were a lot of other women looking for a single earring at the Monterey Apartments in uptown.

I went to Florida — my “reverse bachelorette party” — with seven of my very best friends and we had a truly incredible time getting drunk and bobbing around in the water. I have never laughed so hard in my entire life, and never felt more closely connected to friends. When they left, I stayed and continued my vacation alone, making small talk with people on the beach and going on dates with a random guy I met on Bumble.

“You are amazing,” he said to me, giggling, as we walked around a marina after dinner. It was the first time I believed I was.

On my last day, he picked me up and drove me to the airport. When I got out, he kissed me and handed me a bag of dark chocolate he’d purchased for me to enjoy on the plane. It was such a small gesture, but one my husband of 7 years would never have made. We kept talking over the weeks that followed, but it fizzled as it tends to do when there are multiple states separating you. I hope, somehow, he knows how much I appreciate his genuine kindness—how much our three-day love affair bolstered my self-confidence.

It’s been more than a year since I sat there with that lavender latte in San Antonio, and I still cannot make sense of why my grief released at that moment. It never, really, went away. There are days, even now, when I look back with an aching sense of sadness on the way my marriage dissolved. But the pain no longer consumes me, and no longer robs me of my sense of self.

A few days ago, as someone close to me was in the initial stages of feeling this grief, I tried to articulate all of this to her: It’s not going to be better tomorrow, and you might not notice it getting better until it suddenly is. And once you are ready to take on the world, the world will rise to the occasion — tossing you a bone in the form of a wonderful vacation, or rediscovered closeness with friends, or a nice man who wants to go to dinner with you and laugh about nothing. Those things are here for you now, you just can’t see them.

I don’t know if that was comforting to her or not. And I don’t know if I even made any sense – I probably didn’t. You never say the right thing to someone you love who is in pain. All you can do is hold on to all of the good things about them — their strength, their character, their tenacity and talent — until they are ready to take them back.