My devastation wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t listen to music. I set out to cut off all my hair but then, after a friend gently counseled restraint, decided to color it platinum blond instead. There is a photo of me, taken during my first year as a divorced woman, which I find every now and then in the back of a drawer. In it, my hair is metallic, my skin is gray, and my smile looks like a bruise. I’m thin, but not in a good way.

“This is temporary,” read the Post-it note that was stuck for months to my computer during this period. My friend JR had dictated it to me one day as I wept over my desk, whispering to him into the phone. He was right. Over time, if we let them, old habits wear out, and we replace them with new ones. As if our psyches were banjos and we were restringing them. But for me, that process seemed to take forever.

JR helped me turn the corner by giving me faith—not religious faith, exactly, but a resolve to believe that things would get better. “Happiness is a choice,” he told me, about 5,000 times. At first, I mocked him as a spouter of New Age pap. When that didn’t make him agree that I should continue my self-destructive (but self-sufficient!) behavior (wearing a rut in my brain by repeating all the things that had hurt me), I whimpered and cried and told him it was just too hard. But slowly, his words seeped in. And the more I thought about it, the more he made sense. You’re not in charge, he kept saying. It’s not your job to fix it. It’s your job to choose not to fix it, to trust in the future, to let things come.

I thought about Harold—about how he appears to be alone in the world, but really isn’t. You know about the crayon. But there’s also the crescent moon he draws early in the book. Everywhere Harold goes, every page he walks across, the moon goes with him.

Harold was not alone. Maybe I wasn’t either.

“But, luckily, he kept his wits and his purple crayon. He made a balloon and he grabbed on to it.”

I started eating again. And listening to music. Which is how I ran across this country song by Carrie Underwood, “Jesus, Take the Wheel.”

A warning: It’s sappy as hell. In the song, it’s Christmas Eve, and a young mother is driving home to see her mama and her daddy (in Cincinnati, of course—it rhymes). Her baby is asleep in the backseat when, with 50 miles to go, she finds herself “running low on faith and gasoline.” She’s going way too fast when she hits an ice patch. So what does she do?

The opposite of what Harold woulddo. At least that’s what I used to think.

“She threw her hands up in the air,” Underwood sings; then she tells us what the young mother cried out: “Jesus, take the wheel/Take it from my hands/’Cause I can’t do this on my own.”

And of course, he does. And the car comes to a stop without even waking up the baby.

Now, when I first heard this song, I believed that in the church of the purple crayon, there could be no throwing up of hands. When you hit an ice patch, you took your foot off the accelerator and cut your wheels sharply in the direction of the spin. Then, for good measure, you used your purple crayon to draw a gas station where you could fill up your tank.

But I have to admit that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that self-serve is overrated. I knew I wasn’t going to get baptized or to accept any deity as my personal savior; that’s just not me. But I was pretty tired of pumping my own crude.

I thought about the end of Harold and the Purple Crayon, when our hero feels tired and wishes he were home in bed. He’s been searching for a way back for pages and pages when suddenly he remembers the location of his bedroom window.

“It was always right around the moon,” the book says, as Harold sets to work drawing two panes of glass and two curtains.

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