Crazy in Love with My Man Muse, My JAM, Justin Aleksander Miernik

Leirah and the Wild Man is dedicated "to Justin," my husband, not only because he was an extremely helpful alpha reader for that book but because he has always wholeheartedly supported my artistic dreams as well as my personal happiness and health. He is my ultimate creative partner, in art and in life. Everything is easier with a mate who shares our values, dreams, joys, and motivations to make life better, not only for ourselves but for our child and all who come after us. And so, it is my pleasure to introduce you to my man muse Justin Aleksander Miernik, pictured here with me on a Florida booze cruise in the early years of the 21st century.

When this photo was taken, we had been friends for a decade, a couple for almost four years, and married for just over two. It took me so long to date him because it felt like an impossibly big decision. I knew that the moment I dared admit my feelings for him, worlds would collide and I'd end up married and pregnant. I even said that out loud to one of my college roommates, who thought I was silly for making such a big deal out of it and then served as a bridesmaid in our wedding not long after graduation. See Beth, I told you this would happen!

Over the years that Justin pursued me with worshipful patience, most of my friends could not understand my internal conflict, like I was a badly written rom-com protagonist. But I had a lot of beliefs to overcome as a young person, that my desires were inherently shameful, that I didn't deserve love or happiness until I earned it with high achievements and status, and that it was selfish to choose a life partner to please myself before the other stakeholders (older family members who treated me like a family shame liability for being born). But if I learned anything useful about romance at my fancy college, it's that born-rich guys are insipid and you can't date scholarship genius bootstrappers without their mom putting a bounty on your head. So get yourself a hot dropout!

Fortunately, the perfect-on-paper, secretly alcoholic graduate student I was dating senior year became so emotionally abusive that he shattered my resolve to resist the powerful charms of my favorite free-spirited Oberlin dropout freak.

We recognized in each other the toxic glow of Golden Child Syndrome and saw clearly through each other's carefully constructed self-negation, common to heirs of complex family trauma. Our inner children made eye contact. I saw in him not ambition to hustle for the man but rather the most powerful lust for life I'd ever witnessed in another human being, a desire for joy strong enough to overcome any kind of suffering. The clouds parted, the sun beamed down, and a chorus of angels sang this Chemical Brothers song:

Please forgive me. I never meant to hurt you.

Those last lines echoed through our memories of our ancestors, our own inner voices, and our past behavior toward each other, and not only did I marry him, reader, I also dropped out of graduate school and never again worked for a soulless corporation, submitted anything to a cutthroat academic department, or spent a summer confined full time within a gray cubicle.

We have been rich, from the start, in time and freedom and healthy love.

He proposed to me with an heirloom emerald ring in the Northern Michigan woods just months after our first kiss, and we married after a year as a couple. We took the advice of a friend's devoutly Catholic grandmother in Mexico to hold off on having children and enjoy each other for a few years, and then five years later, when we owned a house and a reliable car (thanks to creative risk-taking and hard work on forging healthy, healing relationships with friends and family who could help us achieve stability on low cash flow), we felt "adult" enough to create a new family member out of our eccentric ingredients. And we were far enough along on our own internal healing journeys to be confident that we could pass along our resilience and our strengths without replicating our intergenerational trauma. We broke the cycle so we wouldn't break our daughter. Here she is, happy and free to grow into a whole person. Here we are, thrilled at every way in which she surprises us by growing up into a unique and fascinating person we are able to love unconditionally, marveling in all the ways in which she is different from us as well as the ways in which we are similar.

Now that she's nearly a teenager, we are happy to give her the space to develop her own identity, interests, friendships, and powers of independence while we parents enjoy our own increasing freedom to deepen our relationship as a couple again.

That means reveling in our own shared preferences and values rather than trying to prove ourselves to anyone else. For example, Justin and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary by going out for tacos dressed in clashing vintage prints. We don't need to be fancy to have fun.

We look ecstatically happy in all of these pictures because we are ecstatically happy—some of the time. Because here's the thing about deeply creative and eccentric people: We're not "normal" or uncomplicated. We don't live happily ever after at a pleasant emotional plateau. We are constantly wrestling with our shadows. My husband has been given the honor of having one of the most complex and severe cases of PTSD his therapist and psychiatrist have ever seen, and they specialize in treating war veterans. (He is a Holocaust survivor's son, among other things.) I have been in treatment for trauma and anxiety on and off from age four through college, and now my husband is sharing his intensive treatment process with me, which is both exhausting and deeply healing for both of us.

And we can handle all of this and enjoy frequent moments of bliss through any disaster because we have not only inherited trauma but some unique powers of resilience as well. In addition to undoubtedly inheriting some positive traits from the heroic survivors in our ancestry, we both had parents who, despite their own horrific childhoods shaped by parental abuse and neglect, loved us intensely and put a great deal of effort into being better parents than they had.

And what children of our generation cannot relate to some degree? Whose family has entirely escaped the traumas of all the 20th century wars and immigration waves and the scourge of postwar lead poisoning? It surprises me when I meet people my age who had lovely childhoods with all of their needs met (and no signs of desperate denial). But the fact that they do exist gives me strong hope that it doesn't have to be this way for the next generation.

I feel grateful that Justin and I have managed to hang onto the lucidity and emotional sensitivity to be able to squeeze every last drop of joy out of every little blessing that graces our lives. We believe that it is more valuable to be able to be happy with less than it is to have the ambition to always grasp for more. We believe that it is more important to grow through challenges than to avoid them at all costs. Through the pandemic years, we have grown wiser and even happier despite the relentless tragedy and difficulty we have faced. As researchers at Yale recently found, artistic weirdos like us "Are More Anxious ... But Better at Coping With Challenges." Artnet News reports,

The results show that... artists ranked moderately higher on... stress and anxiety measures, but also on those indicating hope, ego resilience, and psychological well-being.

In other words, the artists were both “crazier” and “saner” than the non-artists... (The artists did not rate any differently in depression, and they rated higher in all of the positive categories except “environmental mastery,” which indicates how much control people feel over their life circumstances.)

...Most of the time, individuals who have more vulnerabilities also have fewer resources. “It makes sense that if people experience more symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression, they are less likely to have hope or be psychologically well,” writes study co-author Zorana Ivcevic Pringle. Only about 10 percent of people have higher degrees of both. And it is that interaction, on a moderate level, that tends to predict creative achievement.

...

“Psychological vulnerabilities give people a different perspective,” Ivcevic Pringle told Artnet News in an email, “perhaps a perspective of understanding suffering or knowledge of a broader range of human experience.”

But for these experiences to also enhance creativity, people also need to have strengths “that enable them to respond to the challenges of their circumstances,” the researchers write. So, in short, a little bit of adversity can go a long way—but only if it doesn’t break you in the process.

Even the job-hunting site Indeed holds up "12 Traits of Creative People" as resources we creative types can use to produce profits in the business world (ugh, right?), but I have found that these traits shine the most when our careers are not going well and our income is not rolling in. 

For example, we don't overly identify with our careers/earnings/economic status, so when something happens to our employment, all we need to worry about is the money itself, not a whole dramatic identity crisis. We're not materialistic or addicted to shopping, so we don't live beyond our means and set ourselves up for total disaster at the moment of our next unexpected expense or interrupted paycheck. Not only that, but every time we can't afford something, we come up with new ways to make do with less, so that when our income recovers, we are better off financially than ever before.

We are never bored for long; we are fantastic at finding interesting things to do, books to read, music to appreciate, films to watch, topics to discuss, etc. We are good at finding humor in even the darkest of times and playful opportunities for fun in any change of scenery. We sincerely enjoy learning new skills and concepts, especially when they are immediately applicable, which mostly happens when something goes wrong.

We're anxious when things are chugging along just fine (when there is nothing to distract us from the fear that it will all be taken from us), but we excel at facing actual dangers, as if our insufferable brains have been training us for these moments all our lives. We might not like surprise problems exactly, but unexpected challenges stimulate us to come up with solutions far more satisfying in the end than our Plan A would have been. We have renovated our house in unique, exciting, and personalized ways during the pandemic era that we would have missed out on if we had access to timely and affordable contractors and traditional materials. We learned how to do our own demolition and drywall. My husband learned how to source and construct live-edge, bark-on Michigan black cherry wood shelves for our self-custom-designed kitchen.

We transformed our kitchen from "worst DIY home reno trends of the '90s" to "cozy cabin in the woods" as we were continually forced to come up with creative solutions to supply chain interruptions and economic volatility. For example, my husband built the black cherry shelves because he found a guy out in the country selling inexpensive boards from trees in his yard while lumber prices at big box stores were astronomical. All of our kitchen’s most striking features came out of value reimagining.

I love being in my kitchen so much now that cooking healthy meals for my family is more of a hobby than a chore. And it's easy to keep those open shelves clean and dust-free because it's so fun to redecorate them as the seasons change. It's a metaphor for how we take care of ourselves--with flexibility, finding joy in constant renewal so that "doing the work" feels more like simply living the good life.

The therapists and educators at Verywell Mind have good news: You don't need to walk through hell to develop resilience. Everyone, not just individuals already labeled as "creative," can increase their creativity through practice. "17 Ways to Increase Creativity" suggests a list of methods to stretch the mind and soul for greater flexibility and life satisfaction.

I can confirm that all of these tips worked for me to complete both of my pride-and-joy novels. And having a deeply creative partner at my side was also essential for me to trust in my creativity and commit to a labor of love. He helps me feel that my unique personality, values, and goals are always important, no matter how crazy the world goes around us. He is my muse, my joy, and the best decision I have ever made.

I love you, Justin!