Welcome to the 2026 Summer Bummer Olympics!
We begin, as tradition dictates, with the Parade of RumiNations.
One after another, the delegations march past, waving their flags in matching Ralph Lauren tracksuits. Bespoke for the Games or liquidated TJ Maxx merch? Neither retailer has confirmed the provenance of the tracksuits, and representatives for Ralph Lauren and TJ Maxx did not respond to requests for confirmation before airtime.
Miscarriage. Infertility. Brain surgery. Cushing’s disease. The dog dying. Bodies flailing. Memory failing.
Kara has apparently been writing again. That is certainly good news for the proliferation of bad news, sports fans!
And with that, the Opening Ceremony has come to a close. Let the Games begin!
Up first: the grief slalom.
She’s coming into the anniversary gates now. She’s known this section of the course has been coming all year—
Oh! Tears in Heaven over the supermarket sound system. She did not see that gate coming. Can she hold her line through Produce?
She’s fighting to recover—
Oh, that was a close call! She held on through self-checkout and made it safely to the privacy and comfort of her car.
I would like to be very clear: when I started this stack, I did not set out to steal Wednesday Addams’s vibe.
But, I guess years of being a writer who didn’t write, when the floodgates opened…
WOOSH!!! the backed up stuff comes out first. One piece opens a door to another, which reveals a hallway I apparently haven’t inspected in twenty years.
And there, waiting patiently behind every door:
another fcuking bummer.
At some point I looked at the growing pile of published posts and working drafts and thought, sweet mother of all that is melancholy… somebody get this girl a cocktail and a snack.
So much oy, but where is the joy?
The joy is very much there but the lighter fare has a lousy paper trail.
Pain generates documentation. Illness produces charts and lab results and appointment summaries and patient portals. Infertility produces binders. Miscarriage produces dates you remember even when you would prefer not to. The surgeon’s knife cuts life neatly into before and after. The hard stuff keeps asking you to reconstruct the timeline. What happened? When did it happen? What happened next? What did I know then? What do I understand now?
Joy is much less administratively demanding. Nobody hands you discharge instructions after an excellent afternoon. There is no patient portal documenting the time you laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe. Nobody orders follow-up imaging to determine whether a friendship remains delightful.
You don’t generally save evidence proving that Tuesday was perfectly ordinary.
So when you start excavating a life by following the things that still seem to require explanation, you can create a remarkably convincing record of a life composed almost entirely of calamity.
Mine wasn’t.
Yes - there were terrible things.
There were also dogs and weddings and friends and ridiculous nicknames and places we kept returning to. There were projects that worked and stupid inside jokes. There were tiny obsessions and enormous plans. There was falling in love. There was becoming a mother. There are currently an unreasonable number of fake fingernails in my house.
All of this is also evidence.
I don’t want to manufacture balance by following every sad story with a happy one. I don’t want to slap a smile emoji over the hard parts or pretend the things that hurt didn’t occupy enormous amounts of space when they were happening.
I just don’t want the things that demanded the most explanation to become, by default, the things that get to tell the whole story.
Because they don’t.
There were days that weren’t turning points. Things that delighted me without teaching me anything. Jokes that don’t become metaphors. Places I loved before I understood why.
Ordinary evidence of a life being lived rather than survived. Healing isn’t the part where the bummers stop being true, it’s the point when they stop being the only things that seem important enough to write down.
The Bummer Olympics aren’t canceled. I’ve trained extensively and am in serious contention to medal.
But I think it’s time to add some exhibition events. Breakdancing anyone?