Where do you find relief?

When living through heavy times, how do you stay positive?

One of my early violin recitals

As I dive more deeply into the reporting of the Pelicot book, friends (and my therapist) often ask me if I’m okay, if I’m being careful to take care of my mental and emotional health. “It’s heavy, but I’m fine,” is my usual reply. “I’m used to it. I’ve been writing about this stuff for more than 30 years.”

That’s all true. At the same time, this is proving to be a heavier lift than previous projects have been. Writing the Trump book was torture and exacted a significant toll, both on me physically (I broke out in strange bumps all over my body) and on my relationship. But part of what made it so difficult was also the saving grace: I had less than six months to write it. That period was intense and profoundly unpleasant, but it was over relatively quickly.

This, on the other hand, is much more drawn out. I wrote my first piece on the Pelicot trial more than eight months ago and have been living with it on a daily basis for more than six months. The finish line is well out of my line of sight. And, for multiple reasons, this book touches me more personally than the Trump book did.

I’m also in a different place in my private life. When I was writing “All the President’s Women,” I was married and in love. My long absences certainly put a strain on that relationship and what happened between my husband and me during those months surely contributed to our demise, but I came home at night to someone who was a physical reminder that plenty of men are not sexual abusers and that not all relationships are predatory. It’s one thing to know that intellectually, and another thing entirely to live it and feel it.

This time around, I’m single. Dating, even—though that is becoming less appealing with each passing day. One of the first new men I went out with after the trial kept making Sleeping Beauty jokes (not remotely funny, in case anyone was wondering), and the most recent man with whom I shared my time turned out, not unlike Dominique Pelicot himself, to be living a double life.

Still, I’ve never been someone who writes about light subjects, and I’ve always managed to find ways not to drown in the difficult topics I was covering. My kids and my friends have long been a refuge for me, and I’m fortunate to have a pretty positive outlook on life naturally. And when things feel really heavy, a little mindless scrolling can be a great distraction.

Or could be, I should say. Past tense. These days even 60 seconds on Instagram makes me want to hide under my covers. Gaza. Ukraine. US politics. Endless stories of sexual abuse. There is little uplifting content in my feeds these days. And given the seriousness of everything happening, the light stuff feels annoyingly inconsequential. I don’t have the patience to be entertained.

There are, of course, moments of relief. The trick for me has always been to find the interludes of beauty and to cling to them. Often, it’s the view from the window of my Paris apartment and the way the light reflects off the rooftops. Or, on the rare occasion that I make it to a museum, a work of art. A few week ago, it was an aria from the performance of Puccini’s Il Trittico that my friend Jonathan took me to see. It left us both in tears.

I am not the only one struggling to keep my head up in these dark times, not the only one who needs to find moments of beauty to hold on to. Unfortunately, just as our collective craving for respite is at a high, the Trump administration is cutting funding for the arts. That makes creation an act of resistance. Whether personal or public, anything we do now to put beauty into the world, on whatever scale, has an element of salvation in it.

While I don’t think I’ve ever experienced full-blown Stendhal Syndrome, the two moments I can recall in which I felt moved to transcendence were both while listening to music (the recent Puccini was the second; the first was a long-ago performance of the prelude from Lohengrin at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with Sir George Solti conducting).

My parents put my first violin in my hands when I was four years old (actually, at first it was a Kleenex box with a ruler glued to it), and I played pretty seriously until I was 16 and my teacher told me I had to decide if I was going to go to college or conservatory. I put down my bow.

I’ve tried on a few occasions to pick my violin back up, but it’s just frustrating. I can’t do what I used to do, can’t play the pieces that make my heart sing. And, while there are a few works that used to bring me great joy and several others I would love to be able to master, I have long preferred cello music to violin music (okay, that might have something to do with my decades-old mad crush on Yo-Yo Ma and his beautiful hands). Picking up the cello, I have long thought, would be less exasperating than returning to the violin. I wouldn’t expect to be good.

Aside from finding out where one can rent a cello, I have done nothing to put my plan to play Bach duets with Yo-Yo Ma in motion. But earlier this week I went to see my friend Pamela kick ass on stage at the Olympia Theater at a Live Magazine event. The spoken word performances were punctuated by musical interludes. Front and center among the musicians was a cellist. No violin, just a cello. In that moment, I decided that what I needed to get me through the Pelicot book without losing myself was to finally learn to play the damn thing.

I’m not really sure where to start. I plan to visit luthiers later this week. I’ll begin searching for a teacher. In the meantime, I’d love to hear any suggestions any of you may have about learning a new instrument at this point in life, or where you find relief from the dark moments.