At Least for Me
These days I am tense. Not mildly: more than I am used to, more even than I can bear. If you follow me on my social media accounts, you will see a young woman with a generous smile, making clever remarks, out and about, a crowd around her. What shows, though, is only a small part of the truth. As usual.
All through the past month I struggled with a violent pain in my back, one I had never known. It kept me from a room full of my high-heeled shoes, from going out, from wandering about, and after a while it left no room for any feeling but itself. Pain was, thankfully, a stranger to me, so at first I paid it no attention. When it reached a point where it could no longer be ignored, I went to the doctors. When nothing physical turned up that could have been causing it, my doctor, who is also the father of a friend I love dearly, looked me in the eye and said that my pain was not actually "real". Because the pain was not real, because the pain centre in my brain was playing a trick on me, none of the medicines prescribed to me over that month had, of course, cleared the symptoms either. My instinctive first reaction was to run through the habit doctors have of calling "psychological" anything whose cause they cannot pin down, to find the diagnosis wanting, and to think too much of myself. Then I did what is hard for me. I "really" listened. The astonishing thing is that the pain was gone by the time I left the consulting room. I had barely been able to sit when I arrived, and I walked out light and laughing. I still feel well.
These days I am tense enough to make myself ill, but I notice that I am not the only one who is tense. Almost everyone around me is tense. Breathless, choked and weary from the feeling of not being understood at the core, from being unable to tell the person next to them what they hold to be true. Even the climate of the country is like this. Everyone thinks similar things of the person opposite: if only they saw the world through my eyes, they would understand how rightly I think, they would grant that I am right, they would find the true path. For this very reason each of us has driven one foot hard into the ground, like the needle leg of a pair of compasses, and we seem to be drawing circles around ourselves. In truth we go on living without ever shifting our centre, thickening the line around us with every turn.
Yet I do not like sorrow, or melancholy, or being turned inward. Not in the least. Nor can I keep them inside me for long. For that very reason, as the line around me darkens, I thicken my shell and go on pouring the distress and the conflict in me further inward. Clearly the rest of them go on living this way too.
Over the past month, one after another, a friend I had not seen for about eighteen years and with whom I had only occasionally been in touch on social media since high school, another friend I have seen at most ten times in my whole life, and one of my closest friends called to say they had seen me in gloomy dreams that pressed in on them. I used to find notions of the energy, reiki and karma kind rather shallow, and in some way I looked down a little on people who held that sort of faith. All of it felt to me like agreeing to be less intelligent. In these days, as I enter my thirty-seventh year on this planet, I sense a strange energy binding all of us to one another, like the roots of the trees in Avatar. Somehow we pass strong feelings, gloom, joy, hope, from one to another. When we are left alone, what we are deprived of changes from person to person, but the basic feeling that settles in us like a residue is anxiety. I do not know when the focus of my anxiety was coded into me, but its essence is "not being enough".
By the power of social media, those who were near have grown distant. For some time I too have been in conversation, through this medium, with close to a thousand people, some of whom entered my life this way, and some whose closeness of heart I discovered this way. No small number of people around me have applauded those comments, short and to the point, and have thought them clever precisely because they are brought off that way. Some have phoned to congratulate me, and told me I absolutely must write.
I, for my part, could never bring myself to have a place where I would write two lines. I produced excuse after excuse, and the essence of why my hand would never settle into writing regularly is the same as my own essence: "the anxiety of not being enough". My remarks, which sting like a bee and flit off like a butterfly, my habit of a ready answer that sets the word just where it belongs, might not have existed in reality at all. What is more, anything longer than three lines might not have interested anyone. If I had once begun a thing, it had to be complete in every part, its length and its breadth, its beginning and its end all thought through. Was that not so?
And yet, whatever I do, "being enough" is not possible, nor is it necessary. The journey of life exists only while we are waiting for something. When the waiting and the effort end, life as we know it ends too. So this evening, putting a stop to my own lethargy, I leave my own safe waters. A small step for you, a giant step for me.
Even if it is to mean nothing to anyone else, I am beginning to write for myself.