The other day I was walking down Shattuck in Berkeley. Ahead of me, two people were strolling very slowly and talking to each other. One of them caught sight of me behind him out of the corner of his eye, stopped walking and started rapidly repeating a rhythmic three-syllable phrase that at first I didn’t even understand. Then my brain made sense of it: “Come on, sir! Come on, sir! Come on, sir!” he said. “I see you straggling.” He had stopped to insist that I pass, and my soul curled up a little tighter inside me as I did. Finally turning to face me fully, he offered up an awkward correction. “Or ma’am, whatever.”
When I’m misgendered, which I am all the time, I retreat from the world, even as I am out in it. My spirit tightens into a little ball and hides somewhere deep in the core of me, leaving my body a kind of ghost ship, navigating physical space but not really inhabiting it. You could say that I take this approach to every aspect of life. My birthday was earlier this month. I turned 43. But I don’t like to call attention to my birthday. In my darkest, most self-pitying moments, the voice in my head says things like, “Another lonely, empty year. Toss it on the pile with all the others.” It was definitely a year in which I felt the lack of what Bresson called “the bonds that beings and things are waiting for in order to live.” There were few new memories made, no close connections, no seeing and being seen, no knowing and being known, no intimacy, no touch, no affection, no warmth, no love. Will 43 be the year that my life starts? Only time will tell. Maybe the key at this point is to find a kind of meaning that isn’t rooted in close connection with others. But what would that even look like? For me, right now, love is all that matters.
So: I’m extremely guarded against the world largely because I don’t feel seen by it. But the one thing I need more than anything else in order to feel like my life has meaning is close connections with others. I hope you can see my dilemma.
When the pain is at its worst, it sometimes seems to me that there is a choice I have to make between anguish and anger. The anger is much easier. It’s more seductive. It feels more powerful. The anguish leaves me open, aching, yearning, wanting, needing. It hurts like hell sometimes. But in the anguish, there is still the possibility for connection, for salvation. The anger cuts me off. It puts me at odds with the world, with other people. The anguish is better, infinitely better, I assure you.
On the final page of Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, there is this:
Maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.
And the thing is that at times, in fleeting moments here and there, I am still so fucking grateful to be alive, even though I’m most definitely not always “so glad to be here,” because though I truly do seek to be free of the loneliness and alienation and anguish in my life, I can sometimes see a strange kind of beauty even in my own spectacular failure of a life.
I found The Goldfinch frustrating for the ways in which it was entirely about whiteness and wealth and privilege but didn’t seem to know in the least that it was entirely about these things, a novel that had the privilege of passing off its experiences and insights and truths as universal when in truth so few of us get to live lives unfettered enough that we can reach for such truths the way Theo Decker does, flying from posh hotel to posh hotel, never really acknowledging that the people behind the counters of those hotels have inner worlds as worthy and wondrous as his own, that they, too, live lives worthy of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. And yet, I adored it in the end. In the novel’s final moments, as Theo reflects on everything he’s been through and the now that all of that has brought him to, I finally understood where the word “breathtaking” comes from when critics use it as a superlative to describe the impact of a work of art. Sitting outside the little neighborhood coffee stand that is part of my daily routine, I felt my breathing shift, so awestruck and exhilarated was I by the truths Tartt was holding up to the light.
In the closing pages of the book, Theo says,
…I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it–although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
Yes. Yes. Those are the truths that matter to me, too. After finishing the book, my brain and spirit buzzing from its ending, I walked into a Target, and my phone shuffled up the song “Pobody’s Nerfect” by Wolf Parade. As with so much of Wolf Parade’s music, there’s a point in the song when the sound just gets so vast, it encompasses cities and mountains and forests and starry night skies and also the most intimate truths, the look in the eyes of a trusted friend, the lowering of defenses between people, the past, the future, a freedom from crushing expectations, all of it, all of it at once, and I felt my soul, normally so very small within my body, so guarded, so tense, so vigilant, sweep out to fill the Target and the town and the universe and I thought, that’s it, that’s where it is, that’s why I’m here, the mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable truth that is microscopic and cosmic all at once and that I will never be able to hold in my hands but will never, ever stop grasping for.
Here’s the thing: My life is so fucking small, just me, here, alone, in this little studio apartment, the solitude stretching like a gray gelatinous blob from day to day to day to week to week to week to week to year to year to year to year to year, and yes, I’ve built a fortress around my heart because I feel besieged in the world, and yes, there’s only very few who can breach it, people who bring my guard down, who make me feel safe and seen and free from expectations that I can never hope to meet. Isn’t it strange how living with the fear of failure, the fear of being deemed too much of a fuckup and cast aside as a hopeless case, has done nothing to motivate me to change, has succeeded only in turning me inward with shame, yet the absence of that fear is what I know could motivate me to change? I’ve lived with the fear my whole life. It doesn’t make me a better person. But love? Yes. Love could do that.
On very rare occasions people try to claw their way into my life but they’re all wrong to me. They’re people who have me raising the drawbridge, flooding the battlements with archers. Then someone strolls by for whom the drawbridge lowers itself, someone who carries the password to bypass all the magical fortifications our enchanters can devise, and they don’t even wish to enter. So it goes, for what’s true for me is as true for them. Again, from the final pages of The Goldfinch: “We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”
But if at some point the drawbridge lowers and someone enters and we come to some sort of understanding, both of us clear that though there are limits to how well we can know ourselves, much less each other, we’re willing to live together in the full wondrous ambiguity of that, appreciating the beautiful inexplicability of it all together, I will be so grateful, and so glad I lived long enough for that to finally happen in my life. And if it never does, and if I live out the remainder of my years as lonely as the last many years have been, well, it won’t remotely be the life I want for myself, but even that, I suppose, will be inexplicably beautiful in its own way.