In the Middle
I’m not where I was last month… neither am I where I hoped to be now.
Somehow I managed to pull myself through one of the hardest months I’ve passed through in a long time. It was dark and dreary, cold and painful in ways I never thought possible. It’s as if pain came in its own body and laid itself over mine. I could not get up from under it. When I walked, it followed closely. If I slept, it woke me. When I was with friends, it found itself a place between the two of us.
And it’s not that she has left me, or that I have recovered, whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. Instead, I wake up to her every single morning and I choose to fight her, not because I harbor the strength or the will, but because it’s either I fight or life ends. To live is to fight when you have struggled with depression your whole life. It is rising every single day and saying no and then desperately hoping you have enough energy to last you through a day long of resistance. Each hour, you fight against that tug that holds you against the bed, that keeps you from working… that fog that clouds your mind and your thoughts are a mile off and nothing you can find in the white air. A day is never simply a day, but a war, fought in the name of life. On a good day the fight feels natural, easy, normal even. On a bad day, I resent the challenge, envy those who simply wake up and live, and give myself every excuse to do nothing. It can’t be told or described, only felt. I never understood what it meant, how involuntary it is, how crushing and utterly consuming the sadness could be, how on many days there is simply nothing you could do about it, at least not alone.
And on days when I do resist, I worry endlessly about the days that will come when I will not be able to. I tell myself, today you are good, but what about the days when it will be otherwise. If a little happiness leaks into my life, I never truly enjoy it because I’m constantly worrying about the certain flood of sorrow that’s on its way, not that I can see it, or feel it even, but just because that’s been the cycle of my life. And maybe it’s the anticipation that makes it come. Maybe.
“They knew how to close the door so that no seem showed, no light gleamed at the edges.”
“I watched the Thunderbird all the way down the hill to the main road, watched it as a a man might watch a woman he’d just met leave his life, taking with her some hope of change that she had made him feel.”
“I would have surrendered if I only knew how.”
“To be looked at that way is unsettling when you feel in danger of being seen through and exposed.”
“My life was a mess and because I understood the problem as one of bad luck, I could imagine no remedy but good luck, which I didn’t seem to have.”
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
I had a dream the other week. I was driving my van in the west. I thought it was Idaho, turned out to be Colorado. I parked on the side of this narrow road. There was fog floating through the trees, mist above the ground. I’d never seen a place like that before. I started to walk. The air was white, the trees curved inward. Walking slowly turned to floating, then flying and I was far above the trees, looking down until I came across a sudden parting and there was a hostel, and a house. I realized I’d gone too far and would need someone to take me back. Right then, when that first worry entered my mind, even in my dream, it was disheartening, depressing, that sudden pull back into a world where nothing ever goes right and there’s no room for fantasy, for beauty, for life. But, it was also a choice, that return, and I chose to return to what I wanted so desperately to be far from. I did the same thing, two months ago, when despite my love for the island of wild horses, despite my ability to stay, I chose to leave, to return to the world I hated, where I have to behave like an adult, do serious things, think seriously, behave seriously. This is not where I belong. It is not for me, but I chose to return. And though I always have a choice, I am always very good at making it seem to myself that I don’t. I told myself I had to go back to DC for the sake of all the work that needs to be done, and that is exactly I’ve turned my art into—serious, heavy work.
The dream goes on. I am trying to get a ride back to my van. I get into a car with a girl who has clearly never driven before. She is reckless on the turns and the car ends up veering off the road and landing in the water. But just before it landed, I managed to open the door and jump out. Somehow we make it back on the road, and we get to this little town. I have no idea where we are and it’s starting to get dark. I’m worried my van’s been towed, or that I’ll never find it.
It was all too familiar, but this dream stunned me in its obvious clarity. Usually my dreams are ambiguous, and if you’re like me and think there’s important meaning attached to dreams, then you’ll understand what I mean. They often need to be sorted through, thought over, talked about endlessly until something comes of it, if it does at all. But this one was clear, and it’s the brutal clarity that made it seem all the more urgent, the source of my trouble all the more obvious.
So I know now, I do. What makes me miserable, what kills the artistic process, what keeps me where I am not meant to stay. But there’s more to it than knowing. There’s the verb that has to follow, an action that proceeds naturally. But what if the courage I thought was there isn’t, and the will to leave is not as solid and determined as I thought it was. There’s not much to lose in leaving, but there’s something, and can I lose it?
I think I can, because if what is lost is lost because of my desire to live my life my way, under my conditions, along my dreams, then what is lost is hardly worth the trouble of keeping. And it is a choice, my staying here, keeping certain people in my life that should not be there, working in a way that makes me miserable. It’s all a choice, and it could be otherwise. But approaching it honestly and saying truthfully that this is my doing and not God’s or providence or my family means there’s something I have to do. There’s a preparation that has to begin taking place, a severance that starts before the physical one, a departure that begins before the van leaves.
Meanwhile, I can’t neglect the work I’ve come here to start, and finish. There’s a script that has to be written, a story, my story, that needs to find it’s final form. Then there’s the film I came to work on with my dad, and all the experimental work I want to try with calligraphy. There are classes I want to teach, poetry I want to write. But when is right to stay and when is right to leave? Can one ever be incorrect?
And while I stay, I struggle to work. What if I have the time and the place to do what I love, but not the concentration, the energy. What happens when time is passing like water, and the hands can’t move? How can work be done at a time when no work feels possible, complete? And what if everything that begins resists an end and every project begun goes on and on forever?
Cinema
The first Syrian feature film by a woman.
Waha el-Raheb
“What is remembered lives.”
“There is no final goodbye…I’ll just see you down the road.”