glass half empty

Early in May, it seemed like my life started to come apart. I often feel like it’s all haphazardly stitched together anyway, a feeling that is exacerbated by my financial precarity, my ambivalence about my career and about living in New York, my flight instinct, my tendency towards self-sabotage. I like reading stories about people who blow their lives up in spectacular ways, often for nothing. I think they do it just to feel something, as people say. And although there are a lot of things that concretely hold a life together, love and friendship, personal responsibility, feeling grounded somewhere, an idea of higher purpose, a lot of the things that make up our lives are also artificial. That doesn’t make them less real. You have to live in the life you’re in after all.

I was thinking about this because I saw Past Lives in June, which I really liked and also found devastating. There’s a lot of narrative threads to it about immigration and about destiny and being an artist. But the core arc to me is about accepting that there are no alternative lives beyond the one you’ve been given or the one you’ve chosen, that at every second a million different things could have gone differently and yes, then you would have been a different person in an entirely different world, but in the end, that has no impact on the here and now.

This is kind of a truism but it’s harder to accept than it may seem. Some of the fragility of utopianism rests upon how difficult it is to fully inhabit our lives. To be functional, utopian ideologies require acceptance, of limitations, of mortality, along with unbounded hope that there can be a different kind of future. It’s what Gramsci famously called pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. It’s at once glass half empty, glass half full. Choose your adventure if you will. The optimism part is important because the capacity for different outcomes can be paralyzing otherwise. It is certain that there will be outcomes, uncertain what they will be. The future is random, but to some extent predestined by us and our choices.

In terms of my life, I was reading Heartbreak by Florence Williams on a plane. In my defense, they didn’t have TV screens. I cried on the plane and my sinuses got gummy. If you’ve never cried on a plane, it’s very unpleasant, but apparently something about the altitude makes you more emotional. Williams, whose husband left her after 25 years of marriage, sets out to understand the social, medical, and cultural aspects of heartbreak. She suffers tremendously in the book, losing shocking amounts of weight, developing diabetes, drifting around in the world. Trying to date for the first time in her adult life (she met her ex-husband on her first day of college), she is disoriented and confused by expectations. In the course of her investigation, she goes looking for remedies, answers, distractions, tries to understand other forms of heartbreak than the romantic ones we tend to imagine and to understand the impact of loneliness. In one scene, she goes hiking with a philosopher friend who recites to her a Simone Weil quote about emptying your mind to be more receptive. According to Williams’ friend, Weil “believed that much suffering in the world occurs because we attempt to ‘eat beauty rather than see it.’ What she meant, he explained, was that when we pursue something, when we try to possess it and make it serve us, it becomes about our needs and our ego, and then we can’t really love what we are seeing.”

The drive to possess things, I think, correlates strongly with the impulse to blow up your life. I wondered throughout Heartbreak about Williams’ husband, about what he was thinking and feeling, about why he had left her, how it was working out for him, if he ever regretted it. Williams watches him dating, moving on, seemingly effortlessly, and contrasts it with her misery. But I think this is slightly self-indulgent, giving in a little bit into the temptation to glamorize suffering. It can seem like those who suffer more have purer, less ego-driven feelings, like they’re really experiencing something. Literature is riddled with heartbroken lovers and their righteous pain. In the ballet Giselle, the eponymous character dies of heartbreak and joins a group of ghostly women who return to haunt their lovers. In Samanta Schweblin’s short story “Headlights”, a newly married woman is left on the side of the road by her husband and ends up in a field of similarly discarded women. In Mati Diop’s film Atlantics, the protagonist’s lover tries to migrate and drowns on the way. She continues to commune with him, believing in his survival and eventually having sex with him while he possesses another man’s body.

Maybe these heartbroken lovers are feeling things more deeply. Causing someone suffering seems on the face of it ego-driven. Williams’ husband doesn’t seem to care much about her pain, at least in her retelling. But what Weil is referring to is clinging on to something past the point in which it belongs in your life, trying to make it yours: in the pursuit of possessing something, in the process of fetishization, all those feelings become refracted through your ego. It’s an act of generosity to be able to let go. And when Williams starts thinking about her marriage in these terms, she realizes she maybe was never wildly happy or truly fulfilled, just somewhere in the middle. According to one scientist she talks to, if relationships can be correlated to life outcomes, hers wouldn’t be a particularly positive predictor. Tiny but continuous instances of alienation, of being let down and unsupported, of feeling unseen, lead to much larger feelings of loneliness.

Once, I was on a plane which did have screens and I started watching a soap that I had never heard of. In it, a woman was in a car accident, fell into a coma, and then woke up from it around ten years later. This all happened in the first episode or two. I can’t really remember the details of it but I remember that her children, who had been little, were now adolescents and that she regained her ability to function normally remarkably fast. I found the show extremely confusing and incredibly sad. I think I cried over her lost decade of life. Characters seemed to appear from nowhere without being introduced and plot lines proliferated. At first my confusion seemed understandable since the protagonist was also confused because she had just woken up from a coma, but it only increased as the show went on. Eventually, when an episode ended, i realized that I was many seasons into the show, and that the coma was only a blip in the twists and turns of this character’s narrative life. I felt embarrassed for having been so invested. It felt like I had stumbled into someone else’s personal drama, an emotional saga that didn’t concern me and that I didn’t understand.

That can be comforting sometimes, faced with your own emotional saga. I was trying to explain to someone recently how I always imagine the worst possible outcome, a constant intrusive thought process. Although I’m pretty sure I seem anxious and neurotic, it often surprises people when I tell them this because I don’t think I live in a particularly fearful way. I cross the street on red lights, I walk around alone at night, I go out with strangers, I make stupid romantic declarations, I break the law in various ways. I know that I’m living by some invisible rule of luck though, that I was born in a fortunate time and place, that I have angels, so to speak, on my shoulders.

I’ve been off work, which is why I’m worrying about all of this, about how to live well. Whenever I’m off work and away from New York for a long time, I start trying to blow up my life. I look for apartments, I think about career changes, I daydream, I become anxious about producing publishable writing, which isn’t something I worry that much about the rest of the time. I thought maybe I should go to medical school, maybe I should go to Cuba. I became convinced a blood blister on my foot was malignant. I went swimming, got a tan, ate my body weight in tinned fish.

In the meantime, New York has cycled through wildfire smoke, through tropical storms, unbearable heat. So some things are beyond my control. But I did go to the pharmacy when they had a 2 for 1 deal on supplements, in many ways the bargain of my dreams.