the habit of being

My Personality professor is charismatic and articulate and funny, but what I really love about her is that she uses the words human suffering on a regular basis. Without embarrassment. To talk about things other than the crisis in Darfur. To talk about ordinary everyday life.

It is, in fact, downright embarrassing for me to be as sad as I am sometimes. It wasn’t always. But now I am so far from being a refugee, and I know that. There is such vibrancy! A week ago, I was running to dance performances nightly. Buying lacy dresses. Lying on a slab of rock while a stranger scrubbed me from head to toe. Lying on a palate while a stranger walked on me. Missing the pink striated sunset over the Hudson River, right across the street from my apartment, because I was just too goddamn busy to stop a minute and look at it. I was walking around out there with my neuroscience text in my arm like a badge of honor, though I know as well as anyone that that’s not really who I am.

I spent last weekend in DC, feeling things. I hadn’t been down there in over a year. I walked around my old neighborhood, walked by my apartment in Georgetown. It was so fucking beautiful. My walk to work, everyday, went past all these gorgeous, gorgeous, homes, brick sidewalks, leaves on the ground, the whole cliche. And it was so quiet and so calm. Peaceful. People walking their dogs. I often think about how lucky I am to live in the West Village now, but, honestly, that part of Georgetown wipes the floor with West Village in terms of sheer loveliness of the environment. And I was living there for a third of my current rent.

It’s hard to believe that I lived in all that beauty during one of the saddest periods of my life. I spent nearly a year there before I started to appreciate it, even a little. My second year in DC was better, but still, people would try to tell me how good I had it.. working in this pretty yoga studio, living this pretty life… and I didn’t believe it at all. All I could think about was how I’d fucked up my life in New York, how I had to make up for that somehow, how everything was ruined and I so far behind, such a disappointment.

So I figured out how I could fix it. And, on the one hand, I am incredibly proud. I’ve built my version of a New York lifestyle out of toothpicks. I can look at where I am now, compared to any other time in my life, Georgetown included, and I can see the progress. The obvious progress. And yet I’m not satisfied! I want this. I want that. I want to write, to create, instead of “working” in that other, lesser, sense. I want a family, a home, security.

And everything, every small step, I actually attain becomes meaningless as soon as I’ve got it, and I’m still left with this misery of wanting what I cannot have. And then, maybe, two or three years later I can look back and realize what I did have, all along. But in the meantime I’m just missing it.

Greedy, juvenile, insatiable, ungrateful.

These are the same old feelings I have already experienced and analyzed, over and over, but recognizing them for what they are doesn’t actually help. It may be a step, but it doesn’t help. I feel like I’m too smart for this, too old for this, and I pile that guilt on too.

I just want the anxiety to end. I want my destiny taken out of my own hands. I want to choose not to choose. I want to feel taken care of, completely. And I don’t even see how I can stand to admit these things to myself, when they go against so many of the other facets of my self-image. The selfishness in it all. The backwater lack of feminism.

I want a cocoon wherein I am truly free. A space where I can concentrate on my work, my real work. Not just a physical space, but a mental space. It doesn’t really even matter exactly what shape it takes. I am not certain such a thing is even possible, or if it is, whether I’d even have anything left to say after I attained it. Yet I continue to want it, and the wanting makes me continually unhappy, and the unhappiness defines me. Confines me. Stops me.

And I know it’s all just a big story in my head. A big story of disappointment I see my life through, distorting it all so strangely. I know that, but I can’t turn it off for longer than a few minutes, a few hours maybe, at a time. I’m always trying to teach myself to stop expecting things, and I’ve had some success with that strategy. But I can’t seem to stop the yearning.