Around November, I was tiring of the loneliness of Zoom University and craved a different space and state of mind, the smiling faces of people who craved my presence.
On the phone with my mother, she’d tell me how much she missed me. And I missed my parents, too, but I didn’t miss being at home. Exchanging pleasantries with my father’s nurse. Watching my father hunched over his walker. Straining to hear his voice over the static emanating from his throat. (The disease affects his vocal chords, and so much more.) My mother rising before 5am every morning to a stack of dishes in the sink. My mother feeding my dad his dinner at 4pm.
…
I watch and watch, slip into passivity and the inertia of a neighborhood populated with retirees who, themselves, watch and wait.
At home, I am responsible for nothing, really. Because Supermom is here, handling everything with grace, a song in her heart.
…
My tone sounds contemptuous. I don’t hold my mom in contempt for being an excellent caregiver and all-around Good Person. It’s just that her excellence makes me wonder, as I watch her, as I wait — for what, I don’t know — what we’re going to do without her. How we’d manage. That is, how I’ll manage with my father.
…
Just before New Year’s, Mom got sick. With flu or with COVID, we’ll find out in three days. So, she hasn’t been doing her usual Supermom things. Namely, it’s fallen to me to feed Dad dinner. (My brother, mind you, has been home with us for Christmas. But, if asked, he would never agree to feed Dad. I know this from experience and, apparently, Mom senses it.)
A selfless person would jump at the opportunity to help Mom here. But I have realized something about me: I am horribly selfish. I watched Mom standing in my bedroom’s doorway, mustering all the energy she could to present her pitiful case, and I flashed immediately back to when she was still working, when she’d appear in my bedroom doorway in her work clothes, her head tilted heavily to the side, her eyes creasing at the corners, her voice with a sigh in it asking if I could please feed my father for her. And when she’d gone, I’d turn to my brother, standing in his bedroom doorway, saying, Can you do it today? I did it yesterday. And he’d sit staring at his television screen, his mouth a hard line, saying nothing. And I’d feel so helpless I wanted to tear my hair out.
My mom in my doorway now, I flashed back to that and grew heavy. This heaviness is what I take with me back to school. It reminds me not to hurry back home. The grass isn’t greener; it’s a parched, sickly yellow.
So, she’s sick, coughing her lungs out and sleeping most of the day. I can’t ask my brother for help: he moves through this house like a ghost or a vampire, appearing only after sunset and sleeping after sunrise. And my dad can’t help himself. I’m alone, even here.
…
I feel so sorry for my parents that I can’t (won’t?) be more than I am.
…
I wish I were a better person. Someone else, entirely.
It’s incredible that I should care this much about what other people think of me.
. . .
I have incredibly low self-esteem. I wonder where it came from. I’ve had it and low low low literally since I was a child in kindergarten.
Since, I have always compared myself to others. Or: I have always suspected that I can’t measure up.
He she they always with an edge. I, perched always on the edge, very nearly found out. Yes, very nearly.
. . .
I am a high achiever. 4.0 GPA all the way through high school and college. Accepted into the top creative writing program in the country. I’ve made my parents proud, I know that. My future is bright, I know that. But I am afraid to be found out and expelled. I have been walking in the shadow of an inferiority complex my entire life.
I am tired of myself, wish I could step outside, away.
. . .
That’s childish.
. . .
And yet.
. . .
How do I show up for people the way they need me to when I’d rather escape…
. . .
Man, on paper I look good. In la vie réelle, I am a child, I am very small, and words don’t help at all.
à ma limite, vous êtes là, m’attendant, m’entendant, fumant votre cigarette.
je ne sais personne qui fume, mais cette image fait partie de mon imaginaire: autrement, comment faut-il exprimer la fatigue qui bourdonne partout et dedans?
oui, la fatigue. (oui, je commence à dire des bêtises, des n’importent quoi.)
c’est dans cette langue que la fatigue s’exprime (et m’exprime) de façon indéniable.
c’est dimanche soir, et la semaine qui n’est pas encore arrivée, je la porte déjà sur mes épaules.
je pense à eux qui doivent maintenant s’endormir doucement, et à moi et mes yeux ouverts qui s’ouvrent ce dimanche soir.
D’où vient ma peur? Quelque part, dans mes premières expériences de vie, j’ai supposé que la chose que j’ai eu offrir au monde ne serait pas suffisante. Que moi qui l’ai offerte n’étais pas suffisante de plus. Je m’ai comparé à tout le monde qui m’entourait: je ne suis pas aussi intelligente, drôle, vive, aussi talentueuse, gentille, belle, aussi adroite, heureuse, sociable que tout le reste que je rencontre.
Et c’est le cas aujourd’hui. Aujourd’hui, et en face de la raison qui me dirige de comprendre les motivations d’autres personnes, je raisonne que c’est impossible d’être le meilleur. Oui, le problème est la comparaison, où à chaque fois que j’entre une pièce pleine des autres, j’ai l’impression que je monte ou tombe automatiquement dans l’échelle sociale et je dois prouver que je mérite une meilleure place sinon la meilleure place. Il y a toujours la peur qu’on pensera que je ne mérite pas la place où on me trouvait au début. La peur aussi de tomber vite et loin, où personne ne me prend en compte car personne ne pense que ma présence contribue à la scène. Et après, cette impression touche ma conception de soi, mon comportement, mes relations avec les autres, et surtout leur relation avec moi.
Comment gérer cette suspicion que je suis toujours inférieure, tant bien que mal? Comment la gérer quand c’est la vérité?
Je vois l’infériorité de ma position lorsque je m’assieds dans les groupes de discussion à l’université et entends comment mes camarades s’expriment et se servent de leur immense et diverse connaissance de la littérature, de la philosophie, de la science, de la vie. Et moi, je dis la vérité quand je vous dis que parfois c’est comme si je n’avais pas d’une seule pensée dans ma tête.
Ma mémoire me fuit entre le moment où j’obtiens la connaissance par la lecture et juste avant le moment où la connaissance devient la mienne pour de bon. Je vis dans cet espace. Là-dedans, il est profondément silencieux.
Je ne sais pas tout à fait quoi dire, quoi faire. Je ne sais que penser. Par ailleurs, je me fatigue du “je” en fait, parce qu’il est faux, incomplet, et le “je” me ridicule avec son apparence d’une totalité sauve et fiable.
Le “je” qui existe en moi a l’air vide, inconnaissable et ignorant de plus. Une silence profonde m’enveloppe et me consume. C’est la silence de laquelle il s’alimente. Ce n’est que la silence qu’il sait produire. Même si tous les restes ne peuvent pas manger sur le vide, c’est ceci qu’il leur offre.
En même temps, il espérait que le vide suffirait, car c’était tout qu’il avait de lui-même de donner. S’il projette une personne pleine de la possibilité de la plénitude (et pas forcément la réalité de celle-ci), peut-être il apaisera le monde entier, voire le trompera.
Bien sûr, l’image est illusoire, vide comme toute autre chose. Mais plusiers du monde voient la manque et supposent qu’elle montre la presence, entendent par la silence une sagesse énorme et attirante. On peut dire qu’il est trop facile de tromper la plupart de gens.
Pourtant, le plus facilement qu’elle achète l’image, le plus que le “je” veut être concret, réel. Et bien qu’il rêve d’être plus qu’une ombre.
Rien ne peut fleurir dans le vide. Comment l’échapper? Comment remplir la silence vaste?
I watch myself do nothing with my endless time and I am truly astonished.
I applied for and received a (paid) summer fellowship to conduct research (from home) on a topic of my choosing, and I am squandering my time.
Problem 1 is I set my expectations too high, set a schedule so demanding that I would barely have time to eat in order to meet an insane self-imposed deadline. That is, I set myself up to be disappointed by how little I can accomplish in a day, week, month.
Problem 2 is I need someone standing over me, someone to hold me accountable, in order to do work. Mentorship ought to be part of this fellowship, and I thought my chosen mentor would reach out to me to see what I’m doing, but it’s been a week and I haven’t heard anything from him. Either I’ve got the start date of the fellowship wrong or I’m the one who needs to contact my mentor.
What worries me–it’s almost never the immediate situation that disturbs me but always what it means for me, as I’m figuring out my personality and learning my mind–is that I can’t motivate my own self.
I will not be working in an industry that takes kindly to my nonsense. Why can’t I begin? If I am so afraid of failure that I cannot allow myself to try, how far am I going to get in this life?
I’m optimistic about the future–my future–only because it’s not here yet and there’s still time to make it good. But as for the present…
I tend to watch television shows about mid- and upper-career professionals who know what to do when they walk into a room, who possess an incredible wealth of knowledge that lends them presence wherever they go. House and Cuddy (House). Olivia Dunham (Fringe). Annie Walker (Covert Affairs). People (characters) at the height of their game. Most importantly, people (characters) who have already done the hard work to get where they are. They’ve already hit the books, passed the tests, climbed the ranks, proven themselves.
And I watch my parents–both retired now and with nothing to do. I think of how nice it would be to retire, to be finished climbing and to simply have reached the summit.
This is a worrisome line of thinking, as I’m only 22 years old. I can’t want to be done when I haven’t even gotten started!
My doctor told me I’ll probably need major surgery by the time I’m 30. So, I’m thinking…I need to quit screwing around and make something of my life. I need to position myself to arrive at a place of stability.
Because I will need insurance by the time I’m 30. Insurance in several senses of the word.
I’ve got my 4-year plan mapped out: I’ll have to market myself as the crème de la crème so the right people will trust me enough to give me a chance to succeed.
The thing is, I’m not sure I can work hard enough to deserve it (trust/success). I don’t know if I can make my future happen. So far, I’ve been operating on luck and on others’ belief in my potential. What happens to me when that’s stripped away?
Well, I know what happens. I’m watching it happen now: I make a choice (i.e., inaction), feel guilty about it, which makes me reluctant to act, which makes me choose inaction again, repeating the inane cycle.
If I just make a different choice…
I know that what I do now will have a direct impact on my future. I tell myself, act! But then I come behind and say, tomorrow!
I fear that I’ll be depending on my parents well into my 30s. That I’ll never find the will or the strength to stand on my own two feet or, worse, that I’ll find it too late in life to justify people’s faith in me.
My sister is turning 37 next month, and she still hasn’t figured things out yet, going back to school, starting a new career. She’s still relying on our mom for financial help. (And of course, my mom comes to me with her concerns, revealing the extent of my sister’s dependency to get the weight off her chest. I wouldn’t call this a burden, but I will say I wish she wouldn’t tell me as much as she does. It feels like an invasion of my sister’s privacy and paints her in a negative light, makes her look childish and vulnerable.)
I love my sister very much but I don’t want to become her. She often tells me, “Don’t be like me” and “You did things the right way. You stayed focused. You knew what you wanted to do in life and went after it.” And I stay silent.
She is full of regret for all the time she’s wasted. I feel very sorry for her. Then, I feel guilty for pitying her like I do, for being embarrassed for her.
And then, I fear I’m looking into my future: merely surviving, spinning my wheels.
I cannot afford to stagnate. I’ve got to get a move on!
Any challenges to my independence; any challenges to my intelligence can and will send me into an emotional downward spiral.
I struggle with last-minute changes of plan and off-the-cuff, spontaneous making-of-plans.
When I retreat to the relative safety of my bedroom, this retreat is seen as an overreaction. But this is my way to prevent an overreaction.
I am a crier; I am not emotionally mature; I don’t even know what that would look like.
Can having a short memory = emotional maturity?
I do have a short memory except for the moments that have embarrassed me socially.
I get socially embarrassed. Easily.
My classes are moving online due to social distancing measures to stem the spread of the COVID-19. Of course the online platform and my peers are pressuring me into turning on my computer’s webcam. It is difficult to explain the anxiety I feel about it.
I would rather keep my distance, while my peers are starving for the sight of each other, reaching out desperately for social contact. I really would rather not, but this I must keep to myself.
I realize all of this makes me an unlikable person. The people in my peer group at school who have so far looked beyond my textbook unlikability will be graduating this May. That has been the case in high school and in college. Now, it is the case in graduate school. It seems I have improved socially since middle school, but not by much.
Being back home again with my parents as I wait out the dissipation of the virus, has aggravated other anxieties–my belief in God, my feeling that I am too dependent on others (i.e., my parents), my fear that my writing isn’t “useful” or grand in scope.
All the poems I’ve written this semester have been terse, truncated in style, minimalist, enigmatic–intriguingly but sometimes frustratingly so for my peer-readers. I don’t know that this is the direction I want my writing to take. I have been sending my work out for publication, and as I review the things I’ve written in preparation to send them out, I note how little of it is good.
No, I mean how recently it has gotten good. I’m still learning what it is I want to say and how I want to say it. That is, I’m still lost. I feel an imposter, like I’ve conned my way into a very prestigious writing program.
My peers light up at the mention of writers and works I’ve never heard of. My classmates use words in ordinary conversation that I literally wouldn’t know how to begin to spell. I am out of my depth here. I’m totally out of it.
I received my teaching assignment 2 days ago. I want to laugh to think about how I’m still figuring things out; yet, they want me to teach other people how to do this. I want to laugh and laugh.
I have begun an acquaintance with a young poet who is autistic and cannot speak. Every Sunday for the past month, I have gone to his 7th floor studio where we pass a piece of paper back and forth, writing with pencil in total silence. Because I’m home for the foreseeable future, we communicate now via email. I used the word acquaintance to describe our relationship and he responded that he was “annoyed” I kept him at a distance.
An autist who cannot speak except through writing is telling me I need to open up. Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me?
I get so angry sometimes I cannot speak. There’s just air in my throat. Hot air.
These are selfish things to say. I feel my selfishness like a weight. If I talk to someone about what I’m really feeling, I’ll only be burdening them and will give them a poor impression of me. So, I’ve got to keep it to myself.
Isolation helps me hold it in; it also gives people a poor impression of me.
What to do, what to do.
Usually, I take solace in the fact that my parents are there for me. But 2 days ago, my mom anointed my head with oil then asked me to drink a shot of olive oil, lime, and salt because the Holy Spirit said it would protect us from the virus. She and my dad had already swallowed the shot. She held the glass out to me. I wouldn’t drink it.
I refused mostly because I didn’t want to swallow oil. (I jokingly asked if I could instead fry up an egg with it. My dad laughed; my mom said no, it didn’t work like that.) I believed that she believed it would work. But really, the whole thing was too ridiculous. I felt she was acting out of fear.
She and my dad are in the at-risk population of age 60+, so naturally she would rely on her garlic-ginger-ACV-honey concoction more than usual in an attempt to stave off infection. But what she presented to me in that shot glass which she called “The Blood of Jesus” was not a logical solution.
Sure, as my sister later rationalized to me, “Well lime and olive oil [are] full of vitamin c and antioxidants too so win win.” But this was not at all the point. This was a religious “solution” born of fear.
Indeed, my mom had all that morning been singing, “When I see the blood” and other hymns. Where my mother is concerned, this is not a good sign. I even told her, “When you sing like that, it feels like you’re wrestling with your mortality. It’s ominous.” When she gets like that, I know her mind is elsewhere and it’s impossible to reach her. When she sings like that and fills the house with “When I see the blood,” I feel incredibly desolate and alone.
I wouldn’t drink the stuff. She said, “If you get it [the Coronavirus], it’s on you.” She dusted off her hands, her back to me. She said, “Lord, I did what you told me to do.” She began to sing, “In your hands.” I took my stuff and went back to my room.
Here is how she leverages her relationship with God against me. She framed it as a probability that because I didn’t believe her the way she believed God about what the Holy Spirit told her, I would likely get sick if I went outside.
I’ve been “hiding out” since then. Going back to my room immediately after eating dinner with my parents last night. Staying in my room most of the day. I was frustrated about what happened and wanted to keep my distance. While in my room this morning, I overheard my mom on the phone with someone (yes, she does talk that loudly on the phone), saying, “She hasn’t come out of her room.” She was there laughing about it. And so, this is a deeper emotional isolation, a serious disconnect.
I wonder how I would have fared, had I stayed in my apartment and not come home–Maybe I would have felt a little lonely, but a certain symbolic freedom of movement could have cured that.
As it stands, I have here encountered a worse loneliness.
Will I find someone who will take me as I am–not ask what’s wrong with me, not shame me into sharing more than I feel capable–who will not laugh at me? Someone like family, but one who chooses me as I have chosen them?
I’m asking for understanding here. Simple understanding.
My sister believes fervently in numerology, astrology, horoscopes–these and similar systems of belief based upon an external locus of control. Because you were born in mid-September, you will be loyal, logical, introspective, introverted, more ying than yang, a teacher, an activist, a master number. The planets aligned in your favor at the moment of your birth, and this sealed your destiny, charted the kinds of relationships you can and will have, mapped your hang-ups and disappointments before you had taken your first breath.
There is comfort in the thought: this, here, now is meant to be. But meant by whom, by what?
I am more comfortable saying this of God than of celestial bodies. I can say God has his hands on my life, speaking in the present tense. I can say God will make a way, talking of a not-yet that requires my effort and input to come to fruition. But what has Mars to do with me? If its position in the sky 22 years ago determines/had determined my personality and life path, then I have no agency in what happens to me; I am passive, as a rock in a roaring stream; where I end up is where I end up. How can I derive meaning from that?
But I talk out of both sides of my mouth: I believe God has a plan for my life, which means I believe my steps are ordered, which means that, in believing, I relinquish control.
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." Jeremiah 1:5
I have the power to step but am powerless to decide where I step. Is that right? Did I get that right?
I don’t know where I’ll be 2 years from now. I don’t know how I’ll be in a month, in what state or attitude.
The correct answer is to pray, wish, dream myself forward in any direction, though…
after a while I get tired of the sound of my voice my inner monologuing that striving to prove me right that need to see in your face that you understand me respect me think of me as smart and necessary to the conversation I am talking to you and regretting the way my voice makes me feel its leaving my throat and how I wish I could take back what I said please don’t think I’m an idiot an imbecile bête brute I’m having an off day I didn’t get enough sleep last night I had something else on my mind the sound of my voice distracted me as I responded I forgot the question what was the question now I’m searching for the question the quest for the sweet spot the word that makes me feel I belong in this space the quest for utopia a word that means perfect place and no place
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