I’m devoted to my French press. Most mornings, I get up early to write, but step one is always coffee. Sometimes I think this is the best time of the day: the hot mug in my hands and the opportunity to write some words. I drink those moments down each morning and drain that cup until it’s empty, which is exactly the way I want to live.

Poet and philosopher John O’Donohue says that the greatest sin is a life unlived, and I don’t know about a sin, but I know I want to embrace my life and live it well. I expect we all do. But we run into trouble when life hands us a cup that we weren’t planning on drinking: sickness, grief, infertility, job loss, a failed relationship, a loved one’s addiction, maybe a pandemic. When you’re draining life to its dregs and making the most of things because it tastes like a cup of strong coffee or the best wine you’ve ever shared with the person you love, that’s one thing. With everything on our side and going pretty much as planned, we don’t realize what a luxury it is to make the life we want happen. But sometimes things don’t happen as we hope. We’re handed a cup called Loss and it makes us gag. We don’t want to drink it, and here we see the truth: we have no choice.

The cup of Loss burns, and if we look for a cosmic why while we’re drinking it, the cup only grows deeper and more bitter. We’ve been drinking the pandemic cup for a year, and it has burned. There has been sickness and death, economic devastation, mental health impacts, and much much more. But even as this has gone on, people have been handed those other cups of Loss, drinking them down mid-pandemic: cancer, infertility, death of a spouse. These are just the stories I see on my friends’ social media; who knows what people aren’t talking about.

I’m drinking my own cup of Loss right now and trying my best to drain it. There’s no benefit to denying my feelings, to pretending the cup doesn’t burn as it’s going down. So to you I’d say, don’t bother with pretending, or with some kind of forced gratitude or even hope. Later there will be time for real gratitude and real hope. The cup of Loss is enchanted in the worst way—it tells us lies while we’re drinking it. It says the future is ruined, that time is running out, that everyone else has what you want, that despair is the truest thing. Just keep drinking. Someday you will have drained the whole poison cup, and you’ll find that what has burned you has transformed you. I cannot say when or how or who you will be. I just know that first the cup of Loss burns, and then it ignites. When that happens, who knows what you’ll do, the life you will live. But I expect you’ll realize that the way to live is to drain every cup you’re handed and to reject any feelings of shame for what you’ve been forced to drink.