Your whole life you always had your hand on the brakes. You never let yourself careen freely because you were terrified of the crash. Even when you left school you brought excuses, a return ticket, a safe landing. You had a knack for moderating your thrills.
You felt desire before you learned how to properly inhabit yourself. Instead you learned to inhabit other people's desires. You discovered that books, movies, pleasure and pain were tunnels into your body and mind that could take you out of your body and mind. Engulfment as a form of escape. When you held still you were an object that other people could project their desires onto. You became fluent in fantasy and projection.
After a while you were so good at not being there. When someone you loved said, “You hurt me when you did this..." When your best friend told you you were selfish. When you saw the first line of the email and your anxiety was instantly punctured by disappointment: pop. When you felt his hands in your hair. You were already zoned out, thinking about a beautiful line in a book, thinking about sinking into your bed and pulling the soft sheets over your face, thinking about nursing a glass of milk and vodka in the dark while sprawled on the cool hardwood floor. You had mastered the double life of the mind. Present without being present.
People were always telling you how intense you were: you had so much energy. You must be nervous, boys commented, surprised by how every line of your body was buzzing with tension as they leaned in. And you smiled politely and said I'm always like this. You always experienced life, daily mundane life, as unusually intense. Constant sensory overload. You got a lot of stimulation from your surroundings and you craved even more. But the intensity you needed also made you feel out of control. You didn't like that.
You learned how to disappear because you loved to be in control. There was a word for this: compartmentalization. Or suppression, maybe. You figured out over time that men were often good at it because from the time they were about five years old there was always someone telling them they shouldn't cry, shouldn't appear weak in front of their friends. So they created drawers inside their minds and hid their soft underbellies. Women were usually more expressive, not quite as good at dividing themselves from themselves. But you had a talent for this particular trick.
If something made you feel bad you simply stopped thinking about it. You kept on disappearing and for a while it worked fine. You went through all the markers of time passing: books, boyfriends, failures, small victories, heartbreak. Haunted by a certain malaise, aimlessness despite your efforts. The truth was that you were embarrassed by the intensity of your desire and shame. So you tamped it down. But desire is always impossible to suppress forever. Like liposuction: if you sucked out the fat cells, they simply reappeared in a different place on the body. You developed obsessions that you funneled unbelievable amounts of time and energy into, and it took you a very long time—you were never such a quick study in matters of the heart—to realize that you used obsession as convenient suppository for desire. You needed to control your weight, to obsess over work, to fantasize about the future. You needed something just slightly out of reach to work towards with manic intensity. You needed to delay pleasure as much as you could because you had become unable to fully feel it.
When did it change? A lot of things in your life were in motion the year the dam finally broke. It could've been yoga in the little studio in the Presidio with the big glass windows that got all lovely when they fogged up. It could've been the work stuff that you took up, abandoned, took up again, knotted and unknotted like a R.D. Laing dialogue. It could've been the health scare. It could've been the visa problems. It could've be the stupid morning runs, the Murakami essay, the Erica Jong book on Henry Miller, the slightly bitter bread at the New American restaurant in Hayes Valley, the psychedelics and the anarchy of experience they thrust upon you.
The obsessions you nurtured so carefully began to sicken you.
You weren't really sure whether you believed in what you were working on because you weren't in touch with your feelings enough to know what you really wanted: you simply mirrored other people's desires, straining towards what seemed to provide maximum payoff. You dated men your friends proclaimed very cool, feeling lucky they adjusted their busy schedules to see you, and you discovered months later that you had been pining for someone who spoke a vocabulary so different from yours it was almost comical. You loved words enough to believe God was an act of language. You sought out people who were dismissive of any fiction that wasn’t scifi. Liking them alienated you from your own interiority.
You used obsession as a form of control. This wasn't so abnormal: you were young and you lived in a boomtown. Everyone you knew had way too much money and wanted way more. All your friends had slept with all your other friends. All around you companies bloomed and wilted like weeds. It seemed only natural to be in love with yearning, with delayed gratification, with violent obsessions divorced from happiness. You had believed for a long time that obsession and focus was enough to fully sustain you.
But you started to release your obsessions instead of replacing them. You let them slough off like unnecessary skin.
It was hard, letting go. You had spent so much time handling beauty at a remove, and now you were asking God to let you feel it up close. One sweltering summer in Toronto you went to a fortune teller and asked her if you should stay or go. She told you to leave: you were someone who would keep moving forward. You thought about her words as you stood on a beach in late September and made a promise you had no right to make. Thought about them the night rain came down very slowly as you walked home in the dark and you cried because you felt unworthy, like Mariette when Mother Saint-Raphael asks her whether she found it a tremendous surprise that Christ would choose her of all people for His ecstasies and she said, “Yes, because I have been a terrible sinner.” Thought about them as you sat in a hotel room with seersucker sheets and felt every narrative within you decohere. Thought about them in LA as you tilted your face to the sky while the crabapple blossoms tumbled down like snow and decided finally that you did not need to be perfect to be loved.
You started noticing in the middle of the conversations, in the middle of kissing, in the middle of running, that you were actually there. You were inside your body. You were watching yourself think and you weren't trying to escape from your thoughts. You didn't like what you saw most of the time, but you kept watching.
You had spent your entire life relentlessly trying to control your desire, trying to control what other people perceived. It was the only way you were taught to function. You had always subconsciously thought that the moment you let go of the brakes everything would collapse in the ugliest possible way and it would be your fault. You were always trying to find the words to say that would unlock everything. Thinking: if I was better I'd be happy. If I tried harder I'd be happy. Living in your little self-created purgatory of anxiety and control and denial where there was no space to breathe. And now there was space and you found that all you wanted to do was see what happened when you paid attention without letting yourself get in the way.
The thing you were given in return for letting go was that you were able to write again.
The other thing you were given was the conviction that there were so many things you could've done in the past that would have been “better”—more prudent, less hurtful—but nevertheless you had been granted an unreasonably good life.
The thing you lost was the ability to believe that obsession would lead to salvation. It was harder now to live in your head, to live in the future: you were pretty tightly locked to the present. That was a big change, but you were optimistic because at least five religions claimed that living in the eternal present was pretty great.
It felt new. You felt new. You stared at your phone's neon screen in the dark, reading until your vision blurred, sure that someone smarter than you had articulated what you felt already. You waited for them to slip you the answer in a poem. You wrote incessantly.
It was strange how you didn't get the things you thought you wanted—how even the wanting was stripped away from you—and you were somehow perfectly okay with that.
Fuck it, you decided. You would write your own life into existence.
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