“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were
hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the
world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves
we have lost.” – Milan Kundera, The
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lately I am discovering that it is perfectly possible to congeal and compound
simultaneously. I appear to be driven presently by this odd, portentous and
rather stubborn sense of self that I have acquired ad hoc during the past year.
In some respects, I feel that I am rather too pig-headed about ‘picking up the
pieces’ of my life following my divorce and that I may have overreached far
beyond my capacity. I find myself somewhere in the middle of constructing an
entirely new existence. I am terrified of anything in myself or my surroundings
remaining the same as before because this may lead me down the same
inevitabilities I chose last year. I have always been at odds with my own
person but it is different this time. In the past my personality and my
surroundings have generally remained inversely proportional but now I scour the
edges of an odd prefix trying to fight myself and my surroundings
simultaneously. I suppose this is how one whittles a new self into being. Kind
of like instant coffee, Divorce can give you enough of a belated caffeine kick
to motivate instant personality.
You may or may not have gathered this by now but I have always been one
of those people who knew what they didn’t want from life much more clearly than
what they did. This approach served me well so far because it was constructed
out of the confusing confetti that was narcissistic, nihilistic and needy in
equal measure. Most people aren’t like that are they? After all one can deduce
that self love and self loathing are parallel emotions but there are few who
acknowledge both simultaneously. I now see myself trying to actively look for
things that I ‘do’ want from my life with a rather forced sense of desperation.
I find myself rudderless which pushes me into pretending I am ready to weather
any storm simply because I cannot abide acknowledging how terrified I am of
just floating through life.
It’s rather amusing if one is inclined to appreciate irony in the face
of crippling doubts. I hope you are such a person, I find being able to laugh
at one’s misery adds a somewhat endearing brand of gravitas and whimsical
idiocy to ones personality that is oddly affable. I know I always enjoy the
company of people who are equal parts self-deprecation, self-doubt, genius and
absurd. I always believed that the key to my own survival has been the fact
that I do not expect happiness from life. My childhood set me on a default path
where I don’t just expect things to go wrong. I know they will. This has almost
never phased me. It has always been joy that surprises and lifts me purely
because of how unexpected it is. I recall my therapist once telling me that
this was ‘such a cynical way of going through life’ while begrudgingly
acknowledging the sheer titanium durability of my coping mechanism.
The way I figure it, people who are ‘naturally’ optimistic have much
more cause for disappointment and are frequently crippled by the fact that
life, does in fact, often suck. On the other hand, those of us who work from
within the reality of that premise have a much better shot at enjoying the
small pleasures life affords when and where we get them. We are not perpetually
tip-toeing around the pitfalls of expectation. And who is to say that ‘real’ optimism
isn’t born out of that peculiar brand of perennial pessimism that can occasionally
laugh at life when offered the chance, rather than the hackneyed one-liners
about silver linings, and ‘God has his reasons’ that are much more likely to
lead to emotional collapse? I always come back to the pre-Socratics during
these proceedings. Heraclitus teaches us that everything in nature changes.
Parmenides, on the other hand warned us that the only things that are real in
this world never change. When you pit both ideologues against their ideas, you
are soaked with one reality: Nothing is real.
And that is why I make lists.
When I was a teenager, on the
throws of dramatics, I attempted to kill myself for a third time. My therapist
suggested perhaps the most kitsch, hackneyed cliché as a coping mechanism for
what I was going through. He told me to immediately list 15 things that would
make me happy. I recall, I started with a villa in Santorini and he immediately
haggled me down to 15 things I could do ‘right there and then’ that would make
me happy. My first was a cold glass of coke; my second was strawberry
ice-cream; my third was an animated Disney feature; my fourth was buying key
chains; my fifth was waiting for rain; my sixth was Dylan’s ‘To Ramona’ ....my
last was simply the colour Blue. To this day, all my dark days, are held at bay
by the same list. I maintain - as strongly as my grandmother does that Arnica-250
is the cure for all of life’s diseases – that a glass of coke is the cure to
all of life’s problems. It is the pithy, pesky absurdity of the exercise that serves
the formula for its success. Naturally, such silly measures are no adhesive for
soul-crippling complexes and yet the fact that one tries, every time, to not
give into the black holes that seem so determined to suck you in is what saves
us. It is the effort and choice to not ‘want’ to be depressed that outweighs living
in the dark.
It has worked well for me so far
but now I feel it fading. I suppose it is my unwarranted ambition that is at
fault. I have never really wanted much from life beyond the attempt to do what
makes me happy. I worked towards that right, I fought for it and I recognize its
value far beyond the new-age idiocy if self-help books. I learned long ago that
small goals were the only key to a steady happiness quotient. This recent break
in my emotions seems to have messed with that fundamentally. I feel myself
moving in and out of my comfort zones, trying to wrestle myself into a person
who can do anything she sets her mind to. I am not that person. And yet, there
is this pesky little voice inside my memories yelling at me that I will never
amount to anything. I remember it from years ago and I thought I had stopped
listening to it but it has amplified. Nabokov described it as ‘Toska’. There is
no English word that truly satisfies all its nuances but at its depth, Toska is a sense of great spiritual
anguish usually without clear cause. He used to call it ‘his longing of nothing to long for’. I am presently in the midst of
trying to create an antidote. Although I fear that I do not know how to live
with the weight of expectations. I have always remained so blissfully empty of
them. It is a bleaker canvas but at least I have copyrights to it. Colouring in
things, eventually means attracting an audience and adding layers. I fear my
inability to contrive such an elaborate deception and live it.
Recently, I have taken to
teaching. It is something I always wanted to do but never thought I’d be able
to do. I never tried it for this very reason. Mine is not a personality I
generally consider worth inflicting on the general populous. Yet, I am enjoying
it. It has made me feel oddly powerful and in control. This scares me
infinitely, as I do not relish the idea of informing other people’s opinions as
much as some people do. If anything, I have always resented the notion that it
is anyone else’s job to do so. Which is why I am trying desperately to push my
puns into profundity in class and serve up only a platter of wit. One cannot
really measure or critique irony and I am counting on this clause. I have patented
my faux penitent’s rabbinical voice, unleavened tones spread out with wry
smoke, pasted with self deprecation and induced with enough subversive wit that
my class laughs a lot. This keeps me from hyperventilating and I hope, them,
from slipping out of consciousness. I have been privy to a picture of myself spending
my mornings meditating over what I shall say to a group of strangers each
afternoon; my afternoons combating their questions; my evenings wrestling with
my muse and my nights seated in café’s where I eat and drink and speak to
actual, corporeal people rather than the phantoms in my coffee cup.
Sometimes I picture my future at
the helm of a class room in qarrtsiluni.
Iñupiaq dialects of the Eskimo employ
the word to classify ‘the act of sitting together and waiting for something to
burst’. I feel this is always an apt analogy for Pakistan. It has only
been a week but I am beginning to see myself here. Finally, engaging with
people in groups. The epitome of the social animal that has a corner to cave
into whenever the need arises. I am looking for housing on campus and I am
hoping that this is finally my calling. To teach and spread what I have spent my life
learning: doubt.
I have my pedagogues. I have my
pulpit.
All I need now is my own self-fulfilling
prophecy.
