More Life

On no longer wanting to leave

This post was written while listening to Freesoul by Pasteboard. I recommend putting it on while you read. It’s one of my favorite songs, one about continuing to move forward.

Watermill Pinwheel 10 by Mary Judge

I remember the first watercolor painting I composed. It was a landscape of the sea. In the dead center was the setting sun, big and orange. The middle, a block of azure. And in the bottom right corner, a small pair of flip-flops in the sand. And from the flip-flops, a trail of footprints leading into the sea.

I must have been around eight or nine.

I tell people that children are astonishingly bright. They may not know much about the world on the level of facts and logistics, but they know when something is wrong. They know when they are trapped, and naturally look for an escape. Finding themselves closer to the womb than the end of the long miserable life they see laid out in front of them, they wish to crawl back, but it is impossible. Death to a child is another womb.

There was yelling in the house, always yelling. I grew up in a working class town in the suburbs of Baltimore. All our parents were seamstresses, hairdressers, electricians, postal workers; people who served others. After a long week of crack cocaine and waitressing you’d walk into the tiki bar and hope to meet a guy who hit you less than the last one. My mother’s boyfriend had the letters spelling “FUCK” tattooed on his fingers under each knuckle. I was in elementary school when I first saw it, and I asked him what it meant. He seemed flustered and quickly covered his hand with the other. I could tell he had a lot of anger, but also a good heart.

My mother took me to church a few times, not because we believed, but because she thought it would be good for my cultural education—“when in Rome.” I would sit there and listen to what sounded like drivel. I didn’t believe in God then. One of my friends growing up did, sweet girl, and she still slit her wrists.

My closest friends growing up were girls, and we all wanted to kill ourselves. There was no pact. It was independent evolution, the carcinization of our hometown. Running from the cops, running from our parents, running from ourselves. In my sleep I saw train platforms and ascending staircases that never ended.

But I was lucky; I had been born in America. Because America is where you can always dream of leaving and making another place your own.

It got worse when I was seventeen. My own voice spoke to me in my head telling me “I want to die” thousands of times a day, like a mantra. I would scribble it in the margins of my calculus notes during class, usually in English, sometimes in Japanese, but never in Chinese. My grades were perfect, always perfect. I took 19 AP classes and would have taken more if they had let me. Everyone thought I was crazy, they didn’t understand. What was I running from, and how was I pulling it off?

From The Lover: “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

When it got bad I’d take a shower in the dark, navigating by touch alone. I’d move slowly, reaching for the slippery shampoo bottle or cold metal handle. What is death but the erasure of your senses? For that brief period I disposed of my sight. In my head I was a fifth of the way to dying, and it was sublime.

When it got really bad, I’d close my eyes and imagine a room of pure white. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all cushioned, and it was quiet, so quiet. I imagined that I had been taken to an asylum, and that no one could hurt me, not even myself. I would be wearing a gown of white linen that ran down to my knees, and I’d gently lie down, crawl into a fetal position, and pretend time had come to a standstill.

That was the year I learned to meditate. My best friend shared that it had been helping her, but she didn’t really give me instructions. So I Googled “how to meditate” and clicked on the first thing that popped up: the WikiHow article for how to meditate. The first time I tried it, nothing happened and I wasn’t sure if it was working. But the second time, I sat for 40 minutes. I knew I had found something special, because the voice would go away.

When it was time to apply to colleges I knew I wanted to go out of state. Anywhere but here, but preferably somewhere good. Leaving home helped a lot. I would spend the next decade meditating. Casually for a few years, then seriously. After a lot of therapy, psychedelics, and journaling, I got to a point where I barely thought about ending my own life. Many days I’d be so happy I’d cry.

But there was still this subtle, nonverbal impulse to leave whenever things got hard.

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After last March, that went away.

At first I didn’t know what to do. I got so used to living with that impulse that not having it felt foreign. My escape hatch, my phantom limb. What was I to do?

And wasn’t this supposed to be a cause for celebration? I mean, I made it, right? I expected the credits to roll, or a “You Win!” screen to appear. There was nothing. Life just kept going.

I finally got what I had wanted my entire life, the thing I felt the other kids had that I didn’t and after so much time passed began to think maybe I never would: the sense that it was okay to be here, to be alive. With one foot out the door my life always felt provisional; not mine. Something loaned to me. But now it was mine.

I was sitting in Dolores Park, talking with a friend who had spent time in Zen monasteries. The same shift I experienced he also had a few years prior, and I had one question for him: For the people who experience this and quit after all those years meditating, who leave it behind to live normal lives, how do they do it? Because for me it felt like the relief of most of my suffering only made the remaining bits more obvious. I could feel, more viscerally and clearly than ever before, the contractions of my conditioned impulses. It was like a mosquito buzzing in my ear. Don’t they hear it too?

He said they probably do, but they ignore it. That they got what they came for.

I don’t know if I can do that.

So, what now?

Well, whatever you want.

Wait, what the hell do I want? If this life really were mine, and I could live it exactly how I wished?

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I decided I’m going to keep meditating. Not because I am trying to get someplace, but because there is joy in it. There is a lot in me I haven’t yet learned to let go of. With every movement of the mind I observe with loving awareness, a bit more opens up.

It’s the same with my writing. I used to write because I had to. For a decade I couldn’t go a day without journaling because life was so overwhelming I needed to dissect and understand it, to take life piecemeal. But now I go days not needing to. But I still do. Isn’t that strange? Maybe this is what it means for your life to belong to you.

As for my public writing, I partly used to do it because I wanted to prove myself. But that wasn’t the case anymore, and I had to find new motivations. What remained was the ecstatic enjoyment of writing itself, and how other people seemed to find clarity and comfort in the things I shared. Sometimes I print out the messages I receive and hang them up above my desk.

A few weeks ago, I quit my job to focus on writing. Even if I need to get another one, I’ll still be writing. I’m going to figure out how to make this work.

And with my friends—I think it is tempting once you unlock enough personal liberation in your moment-to-moment experience to almost prefer a lack of entanglement with others. Because, well, I don’t really need other people. Not in the way I used to; I don’t need other people to give me validation or regulate my emotions. And with my introverted temperament and how much I loved writing, I really could be a hermit.

But I found that once I didn’t need them anymore, I could begin to love them. I could see them more clearly, in their radiance as well as their flaws, which did nothing to diminish their radiance but rather amplified it, like facets on a jewel.

In my journal I wrote: “How did I love anybody before when I needed them so badly to love me?”

Now I want, more than ever, to stay and fight and show up, to go on spontaneous road trips and stay up texting about nothing in particular. That seems to me more beautiful than an undisturbed, isolated peace. I want people I can come back to, over and over and over. And when they’re gone I miss them, and when I’m gone they miss me. It doesn’t have to be serious or dramatic. It’s just delightful and free. What could be better than that?

Iris Murdoch: “What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

I think San Francisco is the first place I’ve ever chosen. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be here forever. It just means I want to be here for now. When August comes I’ll get a group together to watch the meteor shower. We’ll eat mangoes in the dry grass and pretend like we still have our whole lives ahead of us. If a parking cop gives us a ticket we’ll just laugh about it. I am going to listen to jazz, and read lots of books, and melt my eyes into the sunset. The writing will come, and so will the pain, and I will keep choosing it. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, there will be more life.