I am walking around a store and I spot a mug. The mug says “extra special mom”. I pick it up, deliberate for a minute, and decide to get it. I walk home—it’s freezing, and I know it’ll take me an hour, but I do it anyway. And on the way home I think about my mother and I start to cry. This happens all the time. It doesn’t take much to get me going these days, and I have an overactive imagination. Doing the crossword, overcooking my rice, watching Gregory Peck walk away from Audrey Hepburn, a selfie from my little sister, the news, all of it makes me bewilderingly and infuriatingly tear up. But this is why I walk, even as I feel my toes numb; I forget myself and feel myself fading into the city, adrift on its currents and free to do as I please, even that if that is crying over a novelty mug.
A tactical retreat is how I have described much of this year to my therapist. The events of my year have created a feeling of alienation in me that I can’t quite understand. It feels implanted in my life, and even as I attempted to reject it, it hasn’t budged. “Somewhere in my body, a measuring system had identified danger, and now the slightest glitch in communication was registering as a potentially overwhelming threat”, writes Olivia Laing, describing a similar phase in her life. “…some vital part of me clamped and closed, poised to flee not so much physically as the interior of the self”. And there is hardly a shortage of places to flee to.
I dream of buses that take me to coastal towns, in which I forge an entirely new life for myself by the sea. I dreamt once of being dissected open so that my imperfections could be excised out of me, like Aylmer does Georgina’s birthmark. Another time, that I woke up to find a spaceship on my porch, and that I understood the aliens that stepped out of it perfectly, because they had come to take me home.
I’ve returned to reading the fantasy books I used to fly through as a teenager. Books at that age were a salve, a respite from, if not a cure for the malaise of teenagerhood. These pages take me right back to what it was like to read in my bedroom, my kingdom, back when I thought I knew what existential ennui was, and my imagination was a force strong enough to repel my self-doubts, and the prospect of my future—uncertain but unwritten—enthralled me as much as it made my stomach ache. There was nowhere to flee to then, no past to look back on, nothing to reminisce about, because I'd hardly lived. I wonder what that sixteen year old girl would make of the person writing this now, more than a decade later yearning for the awkwardness and supreme confidence of her high school years, for fearlessness and flights of fancy once more.
It hasn't escaped my notice (I am one of the very few that have noticed) that I haven’t been writing regularly. Spending months in what is essentially a heightened fight or flight state does that to you; either you don't communicate at all and remain concealed from the world, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether, your frivolous anxieties and tedious obsessions. Dejection is a repulsive feeling, one that I am desperate to keep on the inside so that I don't horrify myself or those around me. On the push and pull of intimacy, Laing writes — “It is a strange story, perhaps better understood as a parable, a way of articulating what it’s like to inhabit a particular kind of being. It's about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves into you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to main separation and control”. My own decision this year has been mostly to clam up, although occasionally I have blurted it all out to a friend or sibling, and otherwise fill up the pages of my journals.
“Admitting sadness feels stupid, it feels childish and needy and petulant, but in the confines of these pages, I want to say with my whole chest that I feel sad,” I wrote this summer. A few paragraphs later, it continues — “I’m sad because this feeling feels ugly, and I feel like I’m experiencing the whole world on mute, and that living this way is only robbing me of the present. I’m sad because I want to be the kind of person who lives with no regrets, but lately, I’ve been getting it all wrong, litigating every decision I’ve made and wondering when I fell out of favour with the universe”
Even as I transcribe this entry, I am aware of the hysteria in my words, and this is precisely why I have been averse to (more bluntly, failing at) confession. The thought of being misunderstood is agonizing, and I began to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge this chasm between me and the people around me, choosing instead to retreat, to say nothing at all than experience the electric shock of opening up only to find myself on the receiving end of indifference or confusion.
I dream that I discover one ordinary morning, that I have begun to turn into mist. No, not death, because I am afraid to die. This is better, because I am still here, but I just don’t have legs. I imagine that I will be confused at first, but will come to appreciate this new way of being, unaffected by the cold weather, in no need of coffee or a hot bath. I will never have to try on a pair of non stretch denim again. My friends and family too, will grow to love this about me in time, no longer bothered by my melodrama, or insistence that we get three appetizers, or by how long it takes me to focus on my camera. My presence will instead be a warm breeze, a heavy blanket, a gentle hug. It does not matter anymore that I have fallen out of love with running, or that my lower back always hurts, or that I got a pilates membership and never went, or that I scrutinize the spots on my face, or I can’t see beyond my own ennui in the face of the real horrors the world faces every day. I will cease to be a bad friend or an ungrateful daughter. I would be never be late for anything again, neither too old to get married, or too young to catastrophize every little inconvenience, and I would move so easily through the world, without disturbing anyone at all.