Hello, reader! This is the third original essay published in Maple Suggests. If you're new here, I send suggestions every Thursday based on things that have inspired me throughout the week and an essay once a month, usually memoir-style, about accepting personal truths and the crusade that is existing in the world. Starting next month, my essays will be paywalled in the hopes that I can make enough to cover the cost of my brilliant editor! If you would like to support this newsletter, it’s $5/month or $30/year. Thirty bucks is like, one nice lunch! If you want to read another essay before you’re sold, here’s another free one about the concept of being "classy." I could not be more thankful for you.❤️
The Gaps
It was about 9 p.m. on a weekday in January and I found myself leaning into the bathroom mirror of a beach condo, clumsily drawing cat eye points with liquid eyeliner. I swore every other minute; I'm no makeup artist and didn't want to spend any more time pretending to be, so even though the point on my left lid was fatter than the right, I capped the bottle and made that strange, manufactured, post-makeup-face in the mirror, that bizarre look somewhere between surprised and sexy and constipated. I thought: Is this me? But the words of a friend rose up unbidden in my mind:
You don't have to believe in yourself. You just have to do it.
I sighed, smacked my rouged lips together, and slipped into a yellow silk dress with a slit up the side.
In the condo's living room, a camera — a little Canon Rebel SL3 — was set up on a tripod, its dark glass pointing towards a freshly-steamed purple fabric backdrop cut by a middle-aged Walmart employee just hours before. I squinted into the playback window of the camera to check for the seventh time that my framing and lighting were okay, then pressed the fat, red record button. I sat on the stool I'd also bought earlier that day and assembled on the floor. I had five days until my art residency application was due, and since I was applying as a video artist, my video submission had to be good. The best I could make it.
So I cleared my throat, smiled big, and started talking.
It took me two hours to get through the script I'd carefully crafted and edited in the three days prior. I recited all my lines as naturally as I could, but since I had no prompter and was memorizing the script as I went along, the recording process was slow; I kept stopping to refer to my script, then saying the lines back to camera in five, six different ways. Eventually, though, I spoke my last bit to camera, beamed for five long seconds after (when the editor directs herself, she knows what she wants — and tails are one of those things), and hopped off my stool, proud and relieved.
It was about 11:30 p.m. when I started ingesting the footage. While the progress bar slowly creeped its way forward, I washed my face, smearing eyeliner across my forehead and cheeks. Mid-wash, I paused. I dared to lock eyes with myself in the mirror. Through all that smearing and wetness, I looked demonic. Destroyed.
You hurt me.
My breath caught in my chest.
Why can't you grow in this relationship?
Remembering.
I could never leave the way you left.
I gripped the sink and lowered my chin, squeezing my eyes shut.
I'm sorry.
I pumped some cleanser onto my fingers and scrubbed my face until it was pink. After the breakup, it's never so much snapping out of these moments as it is mucking through.
To distract myself from the surge of memories of my ex that so often come at night, I focused on how my video was going to stand out: I would add After Effects flairs to prove my skillset, I would mock up what my proposed video installation could look like in a gallery, and the footage of myself I’d just shot moments before — footage of me explaining my video art concept and pitching myself for the residency — would be perfect.
Perfect. When the footage finished uploading, I eagerly double clicked the first .mov file — but like a falling magnet snapping to a metal floor, my heart plummeted to my gut. My framing was fine, the sound was clear, my makeup even looked pretty good. But nothing about it was perfect. I'd misjudged my ISO, and everything I'd shot was filtered with an annoying, sizzling grain. I slumped in my chair, rolling through the five stages of grief with lightning speed: denial (it's not that bad!), anger (I'm such a moron!), bargaining (I can fix this in post... Red Giant effects can work wonders!), depression (I can't believe I just wasted an entire night on this...), and finally, acceptance. I knew, of course, what the inevitable outcome would be. I sunk my head into my hands, defeated.
I would have to do it all over again, and differently this time.
—
I'd decided to apply for this art residency on a whim after relocating temporarily to Charleston, South Carolina. Since my breakup last summer, I've been nomadic — relying on friends and family for housing here and there while I sort out where and what I want to do and be (not to mention recoup some money — breaking up is expensive). Charleston would offer me a four-month, rent-free reset (the gift of this was not lost on me), but after that, I'd be back in the wind. If accepted to this residency, I'd have housing secured for four more months, plus the pressure to make things, which I'm self-aware enough to know I appreciate. After I'd flubbed my first self-recording attempt however, the rest of the application process was fairly anticlimactic; I set aside time the following evening to shoot myself again, this time using different lighting, a new background, and tighter framing, and the end result was much better. In total, I spent nine full days putting the application together: writing, shooting, editing, adding graphics. I learned more than I thought I would it its making and submitted the application with one day to spare.
And then I waited.
At some point in the midst of those nine days, I re-watched an experimental short film I'd first seen in 2016, a piece set to audio spoken by Ira Glass. The video is called "The Gap"; it was one of my favorites back when I first discovered it, and I found I still loved it. The point Ira makes is this: when you embark on the journey of honing your craft as an artist, you must go through a period of making work that is not as good as you want it to be; it's not as good as your taste is. This space, this Gap, between the work you make and your taste, slowly closes over time — but the only way to close the Gap is by making volumes and volumes of work. In other words, you cannot be great without first being just kind of... okay. To me, the ironic, almost funny, and kind of brutal part about being in this stage of making only okay work, is you might know you aren't yet as good as you can be, but the only way to grow into a better artist is to believe, each and every time you produce something, that the work you're making will be good. If we knew a final product was going to be just okay, why would we ever embark on making it in the first place?
It felt like some kind of supernatural intervention that I had remembered "The Gap"; after not thinking about that video for years, it was suddenly urgent that I watch it again — but this time, the message hit differently than it had before. I'd been thinking a lot about "growth" since my ex and I split. As people tend to do when they've disrupted their lives in a seismic way, I stood at the edge of that shaken earth and looked back at the wreckage, back to the events that led me to act as the earthquake causing such destruction. Early on in my therapy journey, it was part of the process to simply look at my past with curiosity, without judgment. It dawned on me after re-watching this video that my real work, in fact, was to look into my Gap.
—
Way, way back at the very beginning of my filmmaking career, in college, when my artistic Gap was at its very widest, I directed a short film for Campus Movie Fest, a national collegiate film competition. Of course, my "crew" and I had no money — I partnered with two friends who acted as director of photography and grip and cast my family and friends as actors — but we were as serious as a heart attack about making that little movie. It was my first "real" film, and everything about it was exhilarating. I remain in awe of how shameless I was during our one weekend of production, waltzing into an über-popular coffee shop in downtown Charleston in the middle of the day, for example, and asking to film inside for hours, right there in the midst of paying customers (and they let us! I think now, How?).
Since I had no post-production experience at the time, my friend/DP also filled in as editor when production wrapped. I can still taste the Red Bull, feel the closeness of our bodies as we gesticulated in front of the desktop that final night before the midnight submission deadline, listening to various music beds under my melodramatic voiceover, deciding which overlays and transitions to use. I remember thinking then: how could anyone ever be happier than I am right now? All of it — the guerrilla production, the camaraderie with my friends, the last-second submission — clicked like the final twist of a Rubik's Cube.
We ended up winning Best Picture on our campus and scraped together the money to fly to the national competition in Los Angeles. I carried that winning feeling with me for a while after it screened, but the truth is, at this point, as vividly as I can recall the euphoria of making the film, I remember almost nothing about sitting in that dark auditorium in L.A., watching our finished product. That’s perhaps for the best: to look at the film now, it's safe to say it's not even just okay. It's honestly pretty terrible. Flash forward to the years of my life I worked full-time at the New York Post, where I was hired as a video editor with zero prior editing experience (although admittedly, I, uh, altered that fact during the hiring process). In that role, I cut countless — countless — short videos to be thrown into the media mill and chewed up for rapid digestion, but I can only recall a couple with any specificity now and I'm extremely glad of it; the ones I can remember and have watched since are quite rough (I was learning on the job, after all). The motion graphics work I was producing at that time was no better. But while I can't remember so much of what I made, I do remember so much about putting in the work to learn all those facets of post-production: time spent pulling handles in the After Effects graph editor, the first time I successfully used the pen tool to cut out an object from a background in Photoshop, the hours I spent memorizing Premiere hotkeys while polishing off bowls of Just Salad I would pick up on my lunch break in Rockefeller Plaza. I was learning all the time, addicted. Part of this rapid learning was brought on by necessary pressure — I mean, I could never let my boss find out I'd lied about my editing background — but once I started, I was hooked. This learning, this working, was a kind of ecstasy — a sense of purpose that glowed hot in my chest.
The night I cut together my very first reel, I was in my old office, working after hours to piece together all the small bits of work that represented my growth as an editor and motion designer over the course of a year. I remember pressing the spacebar, watching it back to the upbeat track I chose, swelling with pride, and allowing myself to cry. Akin to watching a life's worth of photographs shown in a birthday party slideshow, here it was, this string of proof that I had progressed and grown. Yet — and by now, you may see the pattern — today, I cannot recall even a quarter of the work I pulled from to make that reel; I don't even know if I still have a copy of it. But I don't need to see it again to remember how elated I was watching it back, or to know what I would think of the quality of that work now.
This entire period, of course, was part of my Gap. The work was not as good as I wanted it to be, but the growth in that time made me feel superhuman. I was working, muscling through, all the while ecstatic with each building block I laid, thinking so often, How could anyone ever be happier than I am right now? Each time I opened the Adobe Suite, a little piece of me believed the result would be something better than I'd ever made before. It kept me going, this naïve hope, and without that hope, the effort — the very thing that made me feel so superhuman, so alive — would not have had grounds to exist. The belief, every time, that I was going to make something beautiful, something good, was all-important. Without it, everything else would have died on the vine.
—
I met my ex when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine. He was a business owner — a partner in a bar. He had a beard, was tall, and liked niche music. He knew the ways of New York, the ways of the world. He seemed so sure of what he wanted out of being there in the city, and I would listen, romanced, by his stories of bar-crawling the East Village, of occupying Wall Street, of traveling as a musician, of his friends, who all seemed to be infinitely cooler and more mature than I could ever dream to be. I fell in love with him at first sight. People will argue that's not possible, but I know it is because it happened to me.
I decided from day one that he would be my partner for life. We began making memories quickly, and every small, sweet moment we shared was something to be documented and referenced for the day we'd write our marriage vows. Our love was palpable, albeit slow-burning and sometimes unevenly yoked; I told him I loved him after three months, it took him a year to say it back. Maybe I should have taken that as a sign I might one day, somehow, outpace him in our relationship, but instead we forged on, and the thought didn’t occur to me. For eight years I hoped, I believed in our future. For eight formative years, I put in the effort to make something beautiful with him, something good — something like art. And so did he. We did this, and we did this, and we kept on doing this — this growing, this learning, this being, this loving. We fought and made up, we joked and compromised, we held each other tightly and gave each other space. We believed in us, and put in everything we had.
But slowly, over time, I realized the truth. The outcome — who I was in that relationship — wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.
We as people have a tendency to celebrate a thing's final result. In the world of film, especially, most of us strive for awards, laurels, recognition, and I am the first to say getting hardware in the mail, unwrapping a shiny trophy symbolizing the worth of your work, feels so validating. The reality though, is that the end result of any single thing that has ever been created and ever will be — any film, song, vaccine, speech, restaurant dish, ad campaign, garage sale, court hearing, Olympic performance, the list goes on ad infinitum — none of it, no final product, will never be able to encapsulate the effort, the hope, that pulsed through those who worked to bring it to fruition. And this, of course, is the tricky part about being alive, isn't it? We celebrate big moments: births, weddings, anniversaries, promotions — wins. If these moments don't happen, we don't get a participation trophy. We aren't really recognized for trying, or for growing, which often times is the equivalent of failing, or losing.
The truth about my nearly nine-year relationship is far more complex than "it just wasn't working anymore," and there is no part of that breakup that was easy. We'd just signed a lease on a new apartment together two months before we split, and our objects, our pieces that built a home, were intertwined in ways that felt impossible to untangle. The logistics alone should have swayed me to stay, and they almost did. I spent the summer in a kind of gauzy dream, crashing at this friend's place, then that one's, talking with my ex on multiple occasions, each talk leaving me more broken than the last. I loved him like I loved the sun, and needed him just as much. But I also knew I no longer felt hope in who I was becoming, what I was making. My Gap was not shrinking, my growth was stunted, and I had to leave.
The specifics for feeling the way I did aren't to be aired here. The fact of the matter is simply that I left. At the end of last summer, I cried for days on end packing up my half of our life together, putting it in a storage unit, and leaving New York to assess my situation and recalibrate. All I could think was: how do I move on, how do I grow past this? More sincerely, Can I?
It didn't help that I was simultaneously experiencing a stubborn bout of stagnation in my career, and because of it, any faith I had in my work — and myself — was at an all-time low. When I left the Post in 2018, I dove into a kind of freelancing life that prohibited any kind of growing or learning; there was no space for exploration of craft when I was juggling five projects at once. The money, not the growing, became my purpose. So, post-breakup, I forced myself into situations I hoped would harbor growth: I shot a documentary with no real shooting experience, I directed two commercials with no prior commercial directing experience, I applied for the art residency. I felt a bit like a fraud, putting myself back in a place of learning, reassessing the length and width of my creative Gap, and I asked myself questions I never would have asked myself in my twenties: was I too old for this? Shouldn't I be more... settled by now? A friend of mine said to me on the phone during all these projects, all these attempts to remove my growth blocks, You don't have to believe in yourself, you just have to do it. It ended up being a crucial ear worm, a catalyst to get me in front of the camera, or the ad agency, or the computer, when I felt I couldn't — which was often. It was a trick of the mind to get me going.
But the moment I was creating again, something like magic happened: hope set in. Excitement surfaced. When I was really trying, when I was well and truly in it, I did believe in myself and what I was doing — even if progress was slow, or the final product was going to be, by anyone's account, just okay.
One of the hardest parts about breaking up with a partner, or losing a friend, or realizing a project you worked on in earnest isn't the great thing you thought it could be, is mourning the possibility of what could have been. But of course, so much in life is out of our control, and sometimes it isn’t in the cards that we fulfill our vision of a relationship, or a creative endeavor. As it turns out, the only part of the future we can control is how we grow.
Because growth is not a choice; it is an inevitability. If we do not respect this divine fate, if any one of us tries to stop it, our tree only shape-shifts into something ugly, or harmful, or just plain strange. Our branches, instead of reaching towards an open sky, can distort like a broken arm or crash through the window of a nearby home or twist around the trunk of a neighboring tree, and our roots, instead of spreading like fronds into healthy soil, can gnarl and rot and cause the withering and weakening of the parts of us the world can see. Intuition is powerful; all of us have it, and most of us know when something in our lives is hindering our growth, even if it’s something, or someone, we deeply love. Whether or not we are willing to take the steps to remove the hindrance is another story entirely. Whether or not we can be brave enough to leave the project unfinished, to face the optics of failure to grow more mightily, is also another question.
In my case, I wrapped my fist around a single nugget of bravery. I left. And what my ex and I could have had became just that: what could have been. Sometimes, even now, eight months after the breakup, I still have moments where this feels unsatisfying, even frustrating. But the truth is, the end result is not, and will never be, the full measure of the endeavor.
Because to measure the endeavor is to take into account the time my breath caught in my chest at the entrance of the G, right there on the corner of Manhattan and Greenpoint, the first time he ever walked me to the train, when I hoped he would lean in, press his body to mine, and kiss me. It is to remember when I lightly fingered a hole at the elbow of his green sweater on our first date, a night I was so electrified with nerves I told him secrets I swore I would always keep to myself. Or when we jointly leaped from our seats and grasped at each other with the wild fanaticism only sports can ignite, the first time I ever watched Liverpool FC score a goal, or the look of love on his face when, later, I shyly opened my coat in his bedroom to reveal a jersey I'd bought to wear when we watched them play again. Or when he first gently removed my glasses on the subway and cleaned my lenses with his shirt, or when I watched him wear those glasses, in the blue and yellow disco lights of a karaoke bar, as he sang Buddy Holly like it was written for me. Or when I fed him a bite of my salad at lunch the day I met his sisters in Texas, with their joint shock and horror and joy that he just ate a bite of food from another fork, or when I watched him, with a heart on fire, walk one of them down the aisle because his dad was not alive to do it, imagining the wedding we'd have one day, too. It is to take into account when I kissed him deeply, both hands on his cheeks, the moment after he asked me to be his girlfriend, that resounding and wordless yes, in the back of the cab on the Brooklyn Bridge, or when he helped me paint my bedroom after I moved to his neighborhood, or the overwhelming happiness I felt when he later asked me to move into his place, to live with him, to wake up with him every day.
To measure the endeavor is to take into account when we bought an aquarium on a whim off Craigslist and, after a joint experience learning about the importance of cycling a tank, buried my pet snail in our yard with a spoon. To remember when we sat in the back of his bar talking about which animal arms we would choose to have if we couldn't have human arms; to remember when we, curled in bed together, made up a list of band names like Scat Gasket and Thrilling Me Time and Hot Tub Supernova; to remember when we traveled to California just to see the live concert of a metal band we thought had stopped touring forever, turning into the lens of my camera in front of the stage. To remember when we smiled for posterity countless other times: in Ireland, in Jamaica, in Scotland, in Spain, in France, in the bars by our home, the home we shared for six years, the home that I now cannot pass without a twist in my gut. It is to know that I internalized his likes — roulette, lukewarm coffee, veganism, Garner's Modern American Usage — and his dislikes — washing silverware, location detecting services, anthemic family band music, cats. It is to understand I knew his past like I know my own face: that he used to LARP as a teenager, that he once set off fireworks on his high school campus, that he once dyed his hair orange, that he has never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It is to say, with honesty, that I once wanted to know every intricacy of his being like I know my own soul: that his favorite store in all of New York is one that sells hefty metal contraptions like cash registers and bandsaws; that his favorite use for cupboards is as space for experimental food ferments; that his favorite kind of reading is a lengthy PDF about cloud formations over inland mountain ranges; that he can rarely go to sleep without listening to a podcast — but it can't be a podcast about Dyneema composite fabrics, because that's too enthralling, and will keep him awake until 2:30 a.m. It is to remember when we fought. When we fumed. When we disagreed on small things that got bigger. When I first felt the unstoppable force that was change in me, coming for us both.
The measure of the endeavor can, in fact, never be measured. And even though the future those moments seemed to be leading to is no more, the endeavor itself was big, beautiful, blinding.
I never heard back from the art residency. Soon enough, I will forget the script I wrote and memorized; I will forget most of that application video altogether. But my Gap closed just a little in its making, and the work I make next will be stronger for it. The endeavor mattered in this creative work, and it mattered in the nine years of my relationship. I know I will always love him deeply. I know I will love again, and differently. I’m hopeful that the distance between who I am and who I want to be in a relationship will get smaller with time and effort, and I’m eager to put in the work, even if that means experiencing bouts of defeat.
But no matter how much solace I take in knowing I did what I had to do to keep growing, the heartbreaking part is, I will start to forget things. I will forget the specific pieces of footage that made up the reel of our life together. I do not know, in three years, in five, in ten, what memories will remain.
But for now, right now, I remember this: the hope I felt the moment we saw each other for the very first time. I remember how deeply I trusted that whatever would come from this, whoever I would be with him, would be great, even though I knew nothing about him, and so little about myself. He sat across from me on a faded couch in a sun-soaked room of an empty bar, stuck out his hand and said, "Nice to meet you, Maple." And I took his hand in mine. I smiled the first smile of thousands we would share. And I thought, clearly, brightly, like the strike of a bell:
How could anyone ever be happier than I am right now?