All the world’s farewells
Break behind us
Like wavelash on sandbank
My goal this year was to get a job that paid me well enough to afford my outstanding eye surgeries and not need any help. Needless to say, it is December and I have failed. I can tell you everything I tried this year to get a job including sending over 130 applications in a month but I won’t. It doesn’t excuse my failure and I failed.
I thought it would be different. In my head, I already saw myself as being self sufficient. I would have been happy to not be a liability this year, because for a while now, I have been a liability.
I always look back on my early surgeries with a lot of gratitude because it would never have been possible without help and this feeds my anxiety about the future. I have glaucoma now, it is a lifelong ailment that requires a lifelong patience and it's not something I can ask from anyone but myself. It will do a lot of good for me to know I can completely handle my eye issues by myself without needing anybody's help. I am enough. I am enough. I don't need anyone, I am enough. The force of my conviction is greater than the sum of my reasons.
I failed this year but I don't plan to fail next year. I have been asking myself a lot of questions. The major one was, what did I do wrong? My biggest failure was my joblessness and consequently my poverty. Why was I jobless? I didn't prioritize my career. I didn't prioritize my service to capitalism because I wanted to live a life of service, primarily to the one I loved and secondly to the things that mattered to me.
I was orienting towards a small life, a life in love, of service to my lover and for a while, there was no greater joy, no greater fulfillment than seeing them smile, knowing that somewhere behind smile was my own, watching them move meant that every breath I took in their presence was charmed with the elixir of the gods. This commitment was rock solid, it was forged in and fortified by years of friendship until it all came crashing down barely months after. But I was foolish, I wanted to be friends with someone who rejected me because that was the only friend I had in this new city I just moved to. It became a cycle of falling back in together and because of their deep-seated personal issues, they ran away and every time they came back promising that this was it, this time they were going to stay, I destroyed the fear inside me, I destroyed the instinct of self-preservation, I destroyed the trauma to make myself more habitable, more cosy, I expanded the boarding room in my mind, planted more flowers, more kisses, gave everything to make sure they didn’t leave, but they always did.
My tendency for abnegation and sacrifice to make people happy has driven me to mania this year. I am also bitter that I don’t have anything substantial or monumental that I did. I loved someone to the point of madness and that love is lost now. That loss and a diploma in German (that disgusts me), are my only achievements this year. I failed at being selfless and I also failed at being selfish, it leaves a clawable taste on my tongue and I am left grabbing at tufts of air.
Words, my words are the only thing I have left; the only thing I trust. I haven’t always honoured my writing, myself, my writing self. My words have given me and others far more than I have been able to nurture. I have to be more careful now. I am the most important person in my life and I need to act like it. I have tried to serve, negate myself to please and bring joy but it’s all for nought. I hope I have the courage to live selfishly now.
I'm trying to be reborn as someone with boundaries, who engages the world on my own terms. I'm learning to know what I want without subsuming myself in someone else's wishes which I have done for about a year now. I'm learning to insist on what I want.
How do you live for yourself after living for someone else for so long? This question kills me. Figuring out what I want. It’s the most maddening thing ever. It hurts trying to want something for only me. It feels so wrong. So painful, the idea that freedom for me lies behind wanting for wanting sake. My wants and needs have never been solemn absolutes for me before. I have always been willing to revise, satirize, compromise and camouflage my wants to consider another person’s or to be as close as possible to utility. This is why I’ll be stuck in med school and in a career that doesn’t interest me. I have always preferred cowardice. This is why I stayed even though I knew it was time to leave.
Love for me is still the most serious business in my life but sometimes you need to close shop if no one sees your value and is willing to pay that price to love you. That’s what I’m doing now. Taking a step back. My word, my promise is what binds me, what opens me up to be vulnerable in love. And for now, I will be withholding that. Not because of trauma but because I have things to do. Having a relationship now when this epiphany is just taking root will be me betraying myself. I don’t think I can do all this without the independence which a committed relationship is certain to circumscribe. I want to be really good to myself and whoever I love. And right now the kind of love available to me seems to require me to destroy myself in service to it. I say, enough.
But there’s a problem. I don’t know what this stage of my life requires of me. My instinct is to disappear, cut off all friendships, situate myself in the wilderness of loneliness until it becomes habitable. I know I don’t want to pursue romance for now but does this mean that I don’t want to pursue friendship too? What does this mean for the very few friendships I have left. Does this serve me?
If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.
— Oscar Wilde
A lot of people saved me this year but I was alone in the moments I thought I would die, in sickness, ophthalmic migraines, the nights I was choking to death, the depressive hallucinations, the manic episodes when pain drove me to uncharacteristic levels of insanity. When it mattered most, despite all my love (yes, most of it was poured into one person but I like to think my love overflowed and touched others), I was alone. I can’t remember being there for any other person in my life (except one friend I love so much and despite her reassurances, it feels inadequate) and I hate it. I hated needing to be rescued from terrible situations and I hated that I couldn’t comfort the few friends I have in their times of turmoil. I hope this changes.
For the new year, I have simple requests.
1. To do good work. As a writer, as a student, as an organiser and finally, as a slave to capitalism.
2. To be quiet, to be a gentle breeze at the centre of a hurricane.
3. To want and not be found wanting.
4. To mold myself into joy. I will dance, I will sing full-throated and serenade myself.
5. To be a terror to all who try to terrorize me.
6. To finally afford my life.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
— Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)
I’m writing this on the first day of the new year, in the bleakest of moods. I’m alone in my room and it is hard to muster good cheer when you are in debt and worried about starving. But hope persists, a little hard round pebble in wet soil, untethered from expectation, from ability, from my material conditions. Let’s see how good it gets.
