Buried, Alive
As long as there's light, we'll reach toward it.
I live in a place where everything thrives. That means the things I prefer to live amongst and those I’d rather not (I’m looking at you, cockroaches and centipedes) are equally teeming. From the mote-est of beings to sunken swathes of earth that spit fire, it’s all alive and living aloud. Because life just can’t help itself. It always finds a way.
Which is why I feel particularly offended by my inability to keep plants alive.
Over the course of the past few months, I’ve bought seven different plants from the farmer’s market with the promise that they’re easy to care for. I ignored the naggy voice in my head that said yeah, but not for you and purchased them anyway.
I followed the care instructions, watering when dry, but not overwatering, and keeping them in the right light conditions, only to be disheartened by their eventual shriveled state. I did my best to revive them, then ultimately faced reality, feeling like I’d let them down.
With each new purchase, I play the familiar game of convincing myself that maybe “this time will be different.”
It never is.
And since the common denominator is me, well… how can I not take it personally? How can I not conclude that I am a hopeless black thumb, a kiss of death for anything green?
I talked to a friend yesterday who had just gone through a round of layoffs at her workplace. “This is the fifth or sixth time,” she lamented, shaken by the experience. It didn’t happen to her, but she felt it, because that’s what tender-hearted people do. She knows, just by being human, how much rejection — whether personal or not — hurts. She understands the lonely grief journey that follows the initial anger when external forces make major life changes on our behalf.
Later that very day, I received an email from a job I recently applied to. I wasn’t looking for this job. I signed up to volunteer for hospice, and the person checking my background references called me, practically begging me to apply. I read the job description and thought “Yeah. I can do the hell out of this job.” It was a cause that I cared about and a role that aligned with my skills at an organization doing meaningful work. It was a way to have an even bigger impact and would still allow for occasional volunteering.
It was the best of all worlds.
I applied immediately and someone in HR called me the next day. They needed my medical records, which I didn’t have handy. I scrambled to get them over the course of the weekend, all the while stressing that not having them would preclude me from being considered.
In the end, due to what can only be described as divine timing, I was able to produce them. Because my mom, in cleaning out a drawer of the hutch in the upstairs hallway a few days prior, happened to come across them and thought, “Do I need to keep these for any reason?”
There was no reason she could think of, but she did. This and several other signs that are personal to me led me to believe this was a layup from the universe. It was meant to be.
Instead, a rejection in the form of a boilerplate email arrived thanking me for my time and saying they’d decided to go with another candidate. I didn’t so much as get a real interview.
My initial reaction was outrage. But they asked ME to apply! I was just sitting here, minding my business. They made me jump through all these hoops up front! And they couldn’t even extend me the courtesy of an interview?! They didn’t give me a chance! They wasted my time! THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE MISSING OUT ON!
In true “you can’t fire me, because I quit!” energy, I thought “If they don’t value my experience, my heart, and the skills I clearly have to do the work they need, they don’t deserve me as a volunteer, working for free.”
And I wanted to tell them that.
So I wrote out all my real, raw, unfiltered feelings and fed them to ChatGPT to craft an email that would strike the perfect balance of professional, emotional, and cutting. That, I thought, would show them. In my mind, this wasn’t tit for tat. It was on principle. It was about mutual respect. It was about bending over backwards for a backwards organization that lacked transparency and decency and now me.
After about 10 versions, I asked Kev to read it. “It’s good,” he said mildly, and suggested instead of sending it tonight, maybe I should sleep on it.
I’m not going to change my mind, I thought, searingly. But I closed my computer anyway and went to bed.
I woke up in the middle of the night and rewrote the email one last time, telling myself now it was perfect and intending to send it first thing in the morning.
But in the morning, I felt differently.
I was still surprised by the outcome, but the anger had softened into sadness.
The deeper feelings — the ones hidden beneath my first-line defense of outrage-as-protection — sat quietly, anchored in a wound beneath the surface, rooted in all the times I opened my heart to something or someone and received back a “no.”
Those moments have composted themselves in the soil of my memory like tenacious weeds: not being seen, understood, or appreciated crowding out the seeds I’ve intentionally sown.
“You’re not enough.”
“Other people are better and more preferable than you.”
“We don’t want what you have to offer.”
“You don’t belong.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the evidence that reinforces these narratives. And although intellectually I know these are old stories that don’t warrant my attention, the storm of emotions a situation like this stirs up is real, and you’re stranded in the middle of it until it passes.
Lurking beneath the scorched earth of these emotions are buried truths we don’t often see or want to face. Uncomfortable truths like the fact that nothing is guaranteed and toil does not always yield results. We can tend carefully and still be at a loss. And much of life happens underground in cycles and timing beyond our control. It’s rare to get to know why things happen as they do, let alone have any influence over them.
I sat with these thoughts and the new layer of emotions that accompanied them until a patch of clear sky broke through and I decided:
I won’t send that email.
But I will wake up early on Sunday morning, excited to scour the booths at the farmer’s market. I’ll see some plants that I’ve seen before, some I’ve already tried to keep alive, and I’ll see some new ones that hold the possibility of a different outcome, the chance that something beautiful might take root.
And I’ll take that chance.
I can’t help myself.
As long as I’m alive, I’ll keep buying plants.
Definitely keep buying plants! Might I suggest a Christmas cactus. They bloom over and over and are a tropical cactus so might thrive in your Hawaiin climate. Best of luck! 💙
This is excellent. I'm impressed you didn't send the email. Never stop buying plants! xoxo