26. All My Rage

On the myth of bad timing

When my ex-husband and I separated, I was about two months into a new job. The life I’d spent two decades building was falling apart. My friends and family, familiar with the cycles of volatility in my marriage, were convinced I could fix this, just as I’d fixed so many other things in that relationship. But did I want to, or had this love just run its course?

I was devastated, stressed, worried I might seriously fuck up at work. I told my boss about a week into the separation, nervous I may not be able to show up as the best version of myself. I wasn’t sure I’d survive this. After 17 years of being told that this love was my primary identity, I was worried I’d be nothing without it. She read this worry in me and reassured me that I would be fine, more than fine. In fact, I might like it too much! The freedom, the joy of divorce at my young age might cause me to never want a relationship again. In that moment, uncertain I could even see the divorce through, it was hard to imagine joy at the end of this.

She was right though. It happened exactly that way, and much more quickly than I could have predicted. The freedom was decadent. The intellectual freedom in particular was almost too delicious—I didn’t know that I’d be able to give it up.

Mere months after that conversation, I’d hear some version of the same general sentiment about my ex-husband from lovers: “I hate that guy.” They hated him for having “turned me” into someone who no longer wanted a partner, someone who was afraid of being trapped, someone who would run at any hint of commitment.

They hated that we’d met when we had. “Why couldn’t we have met a year from now when you might be more ready?” “Why couldn’t we have met before you got married?” They blamed it on bad timing. As if time—the primary metric of our human experience—could be at fault for anything.

This week, I read Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage, a story whose main characters Noor and Sal face tragic circumstances at every turn. They’re given small moments of joy and peace, conversations and interactions that provide brief breaks from their stressful lives. Reading the book reminded me of those conversations with former loves. They reminded me of the way we sometimes think of ourselves as victims of time.

It feels like we’ve so bought into the concept of bad timing that we’re constantly blaming it for things that don’t work out. But what might happen if we gave up on this idea altogether? What if there’s no such thing as bad timing?

What if it all happens exactly as it’s supposed to? What if there’s nothing at fault when things don’t work out?

I found myself returning to this idea as I read. Noor’s and Sal’s childhoods are dressed with layers upon layers of uncertainty, with immeasurable violence and grief. It’s a wonder they find ways to act with love and compassion again and again. Even those acts of love are often misconstrued. Their attempts to act compassionately and to affirm others’ dignity are misinterpreted. Society cuts them no breaks.

As readers, if we’re not careful, we might misread these circumstances as a case of bad timing, or of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the book doesn’t actually treat Noor and Sal this way. Instead, we readers grow to understand that these simply are the realities of their lives. This is how it has to be. And our job is to bear witness to it, to not turn away.

There’s a place in the book where Noor and Sal are safe, a place where they can quietly talk in a car at night and forget for a few hours about how terrifying the world is. We readers might know that in real life, these moments don’t last. Maybe they remind us of our own quiet moments in cars at night, of things we wished we’d asked or stories we long to hear, of times when we mistakenly believed, “there is no rush; we have all the time in the world.” Sometimes, I want to go back to the place in which the characters were safe, to keep them there, to protect them from what comes after.

But I know it’s not possible. Maybe Tahir is training us readers to understand that if we face the pain, if we allow ourselves to witness the tragedies, we will find that we, too, survive somehow. That if we keep reading (maybe crying all the while), we may keep having hope because it’s what Noor and Sal deserve.

If everything happens as its supposed to and if there’s no such thing as bad timing, what do we do with the things that didn’t go the way we’d hoped they would?

What do we do about the things we lost? How do we reconcile the losses and commit to forging ahead? What would it take to accept that some things simply don’t work out?

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What events in your own life have you blamed on bad timing? In what ways has that framing helped you? What things that didn’t work out continue to linger in your mind and memory? Click below to like, comment, and share.