the habit of being

I did not think I would ever be happy. I did not think I could ever be happy. I was sure I would and could never be happy. I was wrong, but then again I was not wrong. I did not know what happy meant. I thought happy was the opposite of sad. It is true that I will never be the opposite of sad. But then again, why would I want to be? I cannot conceive of what the opposite of sad would be, but the idea of it is very disturbing. I have a hard time with the idea of opposite, as well. The real happy, which is not the opposite of sad, is the opposite of opposite. I am overwhelmed. I become transparent. For moments at a time, I can actually see that there is no boundary between me and other people. It is as if all the air between me and you is sucked out in a vacuum and I can really see you, in high definition. It is even more than that, because there is no me and no you but only the thing that we both are, and I am not talking about a philosophical idea, I tell you I can really feel this, it is fuzzy and glowing and sharp, and I tell you that this feeling is the greatest joy I have ever known. I am not talking about a religion, but religion means something different to me now, because I cannot help but worship. I want to worship. I need to worship. I sing. I move. I pray. All these words are just words and yet they are more than that. My life is just my life and yet it is more than that. It was not until after I had given up that I realized that giving up was faith. I want to tell you, oh I want to tell you so much, I would do anything to tell you. All you have to do to change the world is be in it. All it takes to be in the world is leaving it. All it takes to live is to die. This is not a riddle.

When I am sitting in the car at night and it is raining and you are driving us to see someone and the drops are streaking down the windows and we are not talking to one another because talking would be too loud, I think that all the rain must come from women who have lost their babies, and if there were no more tears, if there were no more sadness, the grasses would become brown and the ground would become sandy and all the trees would go thirsty and the world would stop going. But that is not really what I think, I know it isn’t, because that sounds like a story and actually it isn’t like that until I try to tell it. It is a wordless hum and a hollow sphere of cloth in my head. From the center of the sphere, I am grabbing at the cloth and pulling it toward me from many angles all at once. I look out at the raindrops. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops. I follow the raindrops as they leave the edge of the window. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops and through them at the same time. I become the raindrops and the window and the blurry wet red tail-lights going and the blurry wet white head-lights coming and the highway and the sadness and the shadows of trees that I cannot see because it is too dark out but I know they are there. It doesn’t matter where we’re going or who it is we’re going to see, because I can already see them, I can see everyone, and I can hear you even though we’re not talking, and I can hear my thoughts even though they are wordless and I can hear the silence and the hum and the engine and the crying of women who have lost their babies. I see now that I am not the only such woman. I leave the raindrops with my eyes but I do not leave them and I look at your thigh. You’re wearing new jeans and they have lighter stripes on them to make them look older than they are. I put my hand on the denim and I can feel the heat of your skin underneath and I look at my hand on your thigh and I cannot believe how beautiful my hand is, how it seems to glow more brightly even than the little blue lights on the dash or the red tail-lights going or the white head-lights coming, and you know not to talk to me because that is how well you know me.

It’s weird. It’s as if I just woke up one day and realized that everything is fine. I know that isn’t really what happened. In fact, it took an absolutely absurd number of good things happening to me, one after another after another, to get me to even entertain the possibility that maybe my life isn’t awful, that I’m not perpetually stuck in the shithole that was 2002, that my life isn’t Ruined Forever.

But it feels like one day, maybe last week or the week before, maybe yesterday, I just woke up and everything had changed. I can’t say which day it was, because that didn’t happen, and in fact just last week or the week before or yesterday I was crying and feeling terrible. But it’s like that doesn’t even matter, because right now I can look at my life, my whole life as it is, and say: this is good, this is as it should be.

Normally, I can’t see this at all. At most, I can, even from the mud of my self-pity, force myself to admit that at least one thing is going alright: At least I live in New York. At least my boss thinks I’m smart. At least my mother loves me. At least I’m not ill. At least my fish hasn’t died. And my favorite: I am so lonely and so miserable, so damaged and untouchable, but at least I’m not boring. The problem is that I can’t even look at one positive aspect of my life without weighing it against that seemingly unbearable load of all my baggage and problems, such that the good thing seems so tiny and feeble in comparison that it’s no longer worth acknowledging, let alone celebrating, at all.

When I was 11 or 12 or smaller, I really thought depressed people were fascinating. They wrote all the really moving stories and had all the intense feelings and they seemed so honest and so interesting. And I knew I had some of this stuff in me too, so I played it up. I wrote the kind of stories that depressed girls wrote, and I wore the kind of clothes that depressed girls wore. But, somewhere, for years, even as the sad stories started coming true, in the back of my mind I was worried that maybe it was all just pretend. Maybe I was only pretending to suffer so I could be edgy and cool.

But the suffering got worse and worse and at some point I decided there was just no way it couldn’t be real. Not only was it real, it was everything I had. My suffering became who I was and what my art was about and what made me make art in the first place. To know suffering, I thought, was what it meant to really get it in life.

In a lot of ways, I still believe that. I believe that if you can really go deep into what hurts you, you can learn to understand much more than your personal sadness: you can understand why the world is in the mess it’s in, why people sometimes do horrible things, why religions exist, all sorts of things. I fully believe that suffering is the way to compassion, and that compassion is essential.

But now, I also know I wasn’t wrong when I was 11 or 12. This whole notion of worrying about being a “poseur” is something that seems so adolescent, so immature. And it’s supposed to be some triumph when we stop worrying about whether we’re really being who we really are. But maybe that worry is a real insight. Maybe, even now, my suffering is just pretend.

By “pretend” I don’t mean it’s worthless or it’s dishonest or it’s fake. I just mean it’s something I made up. Pretending about sadness really can lead to real sadness. My reality has always been something I made up. I’d like to think that there’s some outside of me reality, some essential truth or whatever, but I don’t really know. Maybe someday I will feel more sure about that. But for today, I’m just going to pretend to be happy instead.

Nothing is really any different. It’s just that I have this amazing job and this warm, supportive family, and I have this healthy body and these brilliant friends and I live in this endlessly fascinating place, surrounded by beauty, everyday, and my mind is capable and flexible and compared to all that, a little pain, even a lot of pain, just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Modern teenagers seem to be universally concerned with artifice - the greatest insult one can receive at this stage in life is to be called a “phony,” a “poseur.” As an adolescent, I was greatly concerned by the prospect that I was trying to artificially recreate art in my daily life, that my entire existence was insincere, “affected.”

It was not even that I was was trying to live someone else’s art; I only wanted to live my own.

But art follows life, always, not the other way around. It is both impossible to live art and impossible not to. So what was it I was so worried about? What is it so many young people are so worried about?

I think the confusion must come about when one gets too stuck on terms, on definitions. For years, I had my pet concepts (namely beauty, stillness, smallness), and the task of coming to understanding them obsessed me. My greatest desire was to be able to answer the question “What is beauty?” - a question philosophers have been working on for ages, perhaps for always.

My goal in understanding these ideals was to practice them, to embody them, to distill them to their purest forms and drink the elixir that would color my world anew and turn me transcendent. (This selfishness must drive even the most noble quests for knowledge - do it for yourself first, let the salvation of the rest of the world follow, if it will.)

In any case, what escaped me was that these terms were created to explain life. Beauty was there before “beauty” was a concept. There was nothing I needed to do to create beauty in my life or through my life. Everything was already as it should be.

Maybe the artifice here is in trying to explain something that one has no need to explain. Maybe the artifice is in making a concerted effort to live a certain condensed way when, in fact, the condensed way was only “designed” to portray the way one lives quite naturally.

At the same time, this struggle itself is quite natural. It is also as it should be.

It must be impossible to live a “phony” life, even at fifteen.

* * *

Love affairs operate in dimensions all their own, in bubbles built for two (or one, as we all have our love affairs with ourselves). Though a couple in love still, to some extent, interacts with the rest of the world as per usual, within the landscape of the affair, perception is altered entirely. Love creates a new language, a new mythology, a new symbolism. From the outside, onlookers can see this in the form of pet names and “inside” jokes. From the midst of it, the scope expands indefinitely, creating an entire universe to contain the love, for nothing smaller could suffice.

Couples are sometimes criticized for trying to live out a fairy tale rather than reality. But a fairy tale is only a short and incomplete attempt to capture the level of surrealism and fantasy which envitably plays into every affair. We all have our aesthetics, and relationships become our canvases when all other media has failed us.

Love inspires the imagination like nothing else. The love story is the pinnacle of all art forms, in my opinion. The sad or doomed love story is even better, because that is essentially what life is.

Symbolism we think of as a tool of art, but in an affair especially, we can see clearly how it is there in life as well. If symbols did not exist in the world, they would not be effective in literature or art or anywhere else.

In a love affair, assigning complicated, sentimental, and often bizarre meanings to animals, jewels, tokens, places, and words is quite normal. Art (including fairy tales) only follows this vain. A lover should not seek out a fairy tale, because in the simple act of being in love, she already has one.

Girls who like girls like girls because they are so girly.

I have a new cousin, Bridget, who is twelve and straight as a board, with a back not much broader than a grown man’s hand. She is delicate and precisely spoken, her hair is long long and brown and shiny without a single curl. Her walls are covered in horse show ribbons, arranged by color. And she has a green feather boa from the dollar store draped over her mirror, and the feathers are molting, so the end is just a green string.

I lay in her room, in the extra bed covered with pillows, and read her copy of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and she said “Do you happen to like grape Pez?”

I gave green and white treats the size and shape of chocolate chips to her pet rats - Mimi and Aria - and she was really my favorite person in the whole world, while I was visiting Delaware, for her mom’s wedding to my Deadhead uncle.

I drank champagne and took blurry pictures of her, wearing high heels I could never manage myself. She rubbed my shoulders - she’s proud of having strong hands from riding, so she’s always offering people massages. I wish all relationships could be like this.

. . .

Girls who like boys like boys because boys are not girls.

The why of #5: It has some to do with the way you make me like me. First of all, there is that you are not skinny. Your not-skinniness makes mewithyou skinnier. Feeling skinny and small makes me happy. Your hugs render me crushable and weightless; they are very good. Then, there is the way your hands are rough like loofas, which make mine feel a little smooth and pearly. Your hairiness makes me meticulously groomed. Your boxiness makes me circly. Your embodiment makes me airy and transparent, floaty and flighty.

And, there is how your words are flowery and vibrant but, well, not very literary. Maybe because you’re too happy. Men have less trouble being happy, sometimes. I know so many words to convey sadness. Words about obsession and words about desire. Words about hatred, words about lust. I have written so many words like these, but I simply do not know the vocabulary of happiness. Perhaps there is not one. Happiness is just too small - happiness is staying under the covers when it’s cold outside, and being half asleep in that way that makes every five minutes that go by feel like an hour.

Oh! I like going through my day smelling like your shampoo, which reminds me of your hair, which I like to have my hands in. I like that I can just barely touch you and suddenly your entire self is reacting all over the place, like you can just barely stand it, you are so.. touched. I like that I can make you react. I like that power. Relationships are so great before they are complicated.