It's September and I have to apply for things. Funding mostly, for the next year. There is a mostly-written PhD project proposal. I have to submit computer science assignments and endure gross indignities, by which I mean interact with the UI of the Canada Common CV. The sun sets at 8pm now: so much the better, since I don't have to apply sunscreen on my nighttime walk. My bum ankle is stronger than it used to be. My deadlift 1RM is still 2 plates, but who knows, I'm peaking soon. I just got COVID and then got better.
O is in France. I long for him in a nearly physical way. It's been a while since I felt any kind of yearning. There used to be this infinite gap in myself, something born of my childhood or teenage years, Tumblr, the boring residential neighbourhood I grew up in, the formerly blue-collar city I grew up in with its craft breweries and gentrifying real estate. It manifested in a desire for eternal love. I don't think that ever left me, not till I met K, and even then it only permuted, transformed. I was hardened somehow by early life, or rather I hardened myself, for no apparent reason: actually, I have always had a privileged life.
But now I'm loose at the edges. I soften all the time. It's O who has done this to me.
I used to have many problems. Or rather I used to think I was mentally ill. This was in a sense true, because I probably was mentally ill, sometimes to the point of causing myself physical problems. With the words I had, I could understand my permanent mental problems via an array of symptoms, which I didn't necessarily try to dispel. Everything in my life felt recurrent. But sometime over the last few years, the words emptied of most of their meaning, became thin and pale shadows of what once was.
I recently read a Tweet that said: "there's a whole class of women who think they're inherently wildly emotionally dysregulated but actually have trained themselves to ignore basic signals from their body telling them they need to eat lunch". This is more or less true to my life.
No, or maybe it goes deeper than that. I do have to think about this sometimes: that most of my problems are solved. And the weird thing about this is, none of them actually resolved. Rather, the intense emotions around them unspooled. This is O, I know this, who taught me how to feel this kind of peace.
Okay, but here is the truth: I was born a very serious person. This is totally at odds with my social persona, which is generally extraverted and not particularly sombre or impressive. But internally, I mean, my disposition to my life was that everything was important, every action I took. I can describe it best, actually, in someone else’s words. I am thinking of a passage in Simone Weil's notebooks, where she reproaches herself for being a pacifist activist in the lead-up to WWII, and therein not reacting appropriately to Nazi Germany:
I had so often succumbed to laziness and inertia in small things that when i was faced with something important I felt I must blindly resist the temptation of inertia—instead of coolly examining the possible advantages of action or inaction.
Thus the weakness of not writing a letter, or not making my bed one day when I felt tired, by accumulating in the course of many days, finally led me to the sin of criminal negligence towards my country.
This is an example of a universal mechanism.
Once we have understand how it develops minute personal failings into public crimes, then nothing is a minute personal failing. One's little faults can only be crimes.
Which is appalling, because one commits faults.
We ought never to cease feeling criminal so long as we lack perfection, and we ought to beseech silently with our whole soul to obtain it, until death puts an end to this torment or until God's patience is exhausted and he grants us perfection.
Reading this passage gives me a feeling beyond tragedy. It’s admiration mixed with repulsion, I suppose one could say. In these words already is a portent of her death. One could say she died of anorexia, or one could say she died in solidarity with those suffering in Vichy France. I would say the real etiology is too much purity.
For the first 20 years of my life, this line of thinking was my essential orientation to the world. There was so much that I had to deny myself, and so much inherently about myself that was wrong. I became a vegetarian because I realized it was immoral to eat animals (I write this though I now eat fish). I decided I would never have children, because they would strain Earth's resources. I starved myself to attain perfection of the body. I wondered if it was moral for me to have money, to spend it on coffee, I flirted with the idea of effective altruism although I also had serious problems with the idea that non-profits would dismantle all the effects of late-stage capitalism. It seemed incumbent upon me to save the world.
When I gave up that idea, I did not come closer to saving the world, but I did save myself.
Anyway. All this to say. Recently I celebrated 中秋节, or mid-Autumn festival, with a bunch of Korean friends (and some non-Korean ones too). They call it Chuseok. We ate hot pot and drank milky white Makgeolli mixed with Sprite.
I’ve been listening to Ben Howard’s cover of “Video Games”. I’ve been listening to SZA’s song “Snooze”. Anything that reminds me of love, which is thrumming in me, which runs through me constantly now. It’s funny what reminds me of O. The groundhog near the gym. Some random paper I read. My own life, which I see now as intertwined with his, even in his physical absence.
Owen, you taught me to wake up and see the goodness of my own life.
“My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry.”
-Susan Sontag