On Change

An excerpt from Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday conversation with Tara Westover, the author of Educated, popped up on my IG discover page the other day. At one point, Westover referenced a scripture from the Bible. She identified the passage quickly, but it took her a moment to remember the words. It was clear that a good number of the audience were, or had been, church-going people because as soon as she said, “Hebrews 11:1,” an almost audible murmur of appreciation ran through the room. It ran through me as well. When she finally recalled the passage, I recited along with her from memory: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for. This evidence of things not seen.

I have not been able to stop mulling over that scripture. I haven’t thought about it in years, but it’s all I hear these days. This definition of faith most succinctly summarizes my current existence. In a world dominated by uncertainty and upheaval, all I have is faith: this unshakeable belief that the world I see in my head can and will be real.

My dreams have gotten so vivid. Most mornings, I wake up with an acute pain in my chest because in my conscious state, I am reminded once again that, for now at least, the desires of my heart remain unfulfilled.

Every so often, someone will reach out and ask me how I’m doing and the question never fails to triggers a quandary over how best to respond. I don’t really know the answer. In one sense, life seems to be progressing along, but in another, more true sense, I feel myself to be existing in a purgatory of sorts.

There are levels to this purgatory. My first year in Los Angeles, I was just trying to keep my head above sea level and my feet on solid ground. I felt like I was running really fast all the time just to stay in place. The name of the game was endurance. Then, that phase passed. I achieved some sense of stability. I know enough people now to ensure that I can always find a couch on which to crash if the need were to arise and that’s significant.

After I reached stable ground, it was like I was Charles (known to readers of Little House on the Prairie as “Pa”) Ingalls, one of the early pioneers, staring out at the uncultivated lands as far as the eye could see, preparing to set up camp and, in time, build up the homestead. A couple months into my first year, one of the writers on The Mayor and I were on set talking about what brought us to California and at one point she said, “It still feels like…the last frontier to me.” I think of that often because it holds true for me as well.

It is a bit ridiculous to equate my experiences in this city that is stuffed to the gills with people and buildings and cars with the world the early pioneers had to contend with, but still, I can’t help but to relate to the concept of trailblazing, even if my journey is more spiritual than physical. Once I found my footing in LA and realized that this is where I was prepared to settle for the long haul, I put down my load and started to unpack my baggage. Then, I began to dig, dig the foundation of what will be home.

The months of digging were both tedious and strenuous. I had an opportunity to leave this life for a week back in January and when it was time for me to come back, all I could see in my mind’s eye was that blasted shovel resting in the ground where I had left it. I imagined myself returning to LA after the time away and asking God, “So what now?” hopeful that I would have graduated to the next task in absentia, but He merely gestured to the shovel, “Keep going.”

I hated those months. Digging out a foundation is grueling and gruesome work. Gutting out the rot meant that all kinds of dark and shameful thoughts were being pulled out into the light day after day and I just had to keep reaching in and laying it all bare until the space was completely stripped. Finishing the task didn’t bring any pleasure because then, I was left with an aching emptiness.

These days, I’m waiting. Technically, I’m building, I guess, but I don’t have the blueprints. Without the full picture, all I have are my gut intuitions telling me which way to go on a daily basis, how to deal with different dilemmas as they arrive. But mostly, I’m just waiting. Waiting for my life to begin, it seems.

I don’t like to wait. I don’t like the uncertainty. I feel powerless in my own life and I hate it. Some days, the feeling of impotence is too much to bear and I start wishing that I could turn back the clock on this whole affair. I want to go back to a time when I felt more confident and in control. How far back would I have to go to completely reverse the tide?

I see the events of the last fews years play on a reel in reverse. Playback stops on an ordinary afternoon during the last semester of law school. I chart the last five years of my life from this day.

A friend and I had gone to my favorite independent movie theater in my favorite Boston neighborhood to see Enough Said. It was probably one of the first warm days of the year and we were having a great time, strolling through the streets, hanging out at the bookstore before grabbing lattes at the coffee shop and sauntering in. It was a great movie. We laughed for an hour and a half, thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

But ten minutes before the credits rolled, Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ character was sitting on a bed with her daughter and the sight of them there side by side pierced me with a longing and grief so profound that I immediately felt the urge to burst into a hacking sob right there and then. I have seen that movie many times since then and I have studied that scene to try and figure out what set me off that day, but I’m still not sure. All I know is, in that moment, two things were true: 1) I was missing something and 2) All my previous attempts to procure that thing had been futile.

I was so tired. Tired and sad. When I got back to my dorm room that evening, I started to pray. I prayed for a wilderness experience. If I could just leave and go off into the woods for some period of time, learn to be self-sufficient, I could come back and live in peace. But, I had to go away.

When the isolation of my current existence starts to feel like too much, I think back to that afternoon and wish that things had been different. I wish I hadn’t taken myself so seriously that day. I wish I had been able to brush off those tears or that I could have found a reason to be angry and let that anger distract me. But the sadness juxtaposed with the joyfulness of the day made it impossible to ignore. And my friend was too understanding, too willing to sympathize for me to lose myself in a righteous anger on her, try as I did. No, the conditions for a spiritual and emotional reckoning were aligned that day and I had no choice but to heed the call.

But if I hadn’t had to face my situation that day, I would not have prayed for the wilderness. And had I not prayed, I would not have gone to Guatemala. If there was no Guatemala, then I would not have found my life so intolerable when I returned.

I never meant for the time away to implode my life. I left with the hope that solitude would wear down my sharp edges, so that my square peg would fit in the hole. My life was not working. I knew that, but I thought it was me. If I could just fix me, all would be well.

The first year I was gone, my friend sent me a Rumi quote that he said made him think of me:

“It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.”

The choice to share this quote with me demonstrated how both of us were perceiving my time away as nothing more than a detour that would bring me right back to where I was. Certainly, I never imagined that it would carry me on.

But indeed it did. The deep solitude I experienced down there brought me in touch with myself, a self from which I had been estranged since childhood. Encountering myself and connecting with myself set me on a path of realignment. I stopped relying on external validation and started to depend on my own inner guidance. And from there, I lived my way into the truth of Audre Lorde who said:

“…when we begin to live from within outward…we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we being to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation.”

That was the point of no return. It sounds foolish, but sometimes, I wish I had not reached that level of responsibility. A part of me misses the satisfaction I found in the suffering that stemmed from self-denial. I wasn’t happy, but I was confident and certain. I miss being so sure of myself and my place in the world. I don’t have that anymore. These days, my life looks like a choose-your-own-adventure story and I’m tired of all the blank pages.

But it’s too late. I can’t go back. That’s the only thing I’m sure about. My first year back in the States after Guatemala was a nightmare of gargantuan proportion. I was sleeping all the time and when I was not sleeping, I was in a constant state of rage.

It wasn’t just the self-discovery that made it impossible for me to return to my old life. My father’s death was a key factor as well. For months following the funeral, I kept envisioning this thick rope, lying in an empty field. The rope was looped at the end. In that loop was where my father had been when he lived. The other end of the rope was tied around me; I had tethered myself to him for safety. I could run far and away from Memphis and the experiences I had there, but I would never go beyond the length of that rope.

And to be sure that I didn’t put too much tension on the line, I wove the rope between the fingers of all the people in my community, giving them leave to yank the rope whenever they felt I was going too far. I would not be like Icarus. I would not get too close to the sun.

But then he died. And I was left, tied to a rope with no one on the other end. I had tried so hard to never leave him and he ended up leaving me. Now, I was just a girl bound to a rope with no anchor. Periodically, I would feel light yanks on the line and I would look up to see friends and family, still pulling on the rope. Fools! I wanted to scream. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter anymore?

I spent that first year back winding up the rope and unbinding myself. Once that was done, I took off in a sprint, running at the sun. I don’t care about getting burned. The worst has already happened; there is nothing left to fear.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I used to joke to people that I was like Cortéz who, when arriving in the Americas, burned his ships, thus eliminating any chance of returning, so that his men would face their front and focus on the task at hand. I was all in on my new life because I had set fire to my old life. With nothing behind me, I had no choice but to concentrate on moving forward.

That romanticized view of mine has sustained great damage within the last few months. I had not completely set fire to my life. Still clenched in my fists were fragmented pieces of the past that I have been slow in relinquishing. As the events of the present forced me to surrender the pieces bit by bit, I feel myself shrinking, growing more vulnerable to the world. It’s just me; alone to face the elements.

I would not wish this type of isolation on anyone. I am happier in this here and now than I have ever been and still, at least once a day, I feel like someone has dumped a bucket of ice water over me and the shock of sensation makes me want to crawl back into a hole, any hole at that.

It’s silly to have found happiness and entertain thoughts of rejecting happiness in favor of comfort. Still, I have those thoughts. And I’m grateful for them. They humble me. It would be easy for me to wax on about how fantastic I am for living out my hero’s journey while deriding other people for living lives of quiet desperation because they are too cowardly to make the leap, but those moments of longing for easier days kill any such inclinations for self-righteous prattle.

This life is hard, harder than I can ever articulate. Starting from scratch is quite painful and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I don’t advise it as a way of life. It’s my reality and I’m grateful for it, but I also feel overwhelmed by it. It’s a curious paradox of feeling like my life has been saved and ruined at the same time. It’s complicated and not easy to explain. All I can do is try to accept all the facets of my reality and carry them with as much dignity as possible while being compassionate and understanding of those I have left behind.

“And crossing on that high and rotting and shaking bridge to identity, with whatever degree or quality of fear or courage, is the ordeal that makes empathy possible; not a false sympathy of abstract self-indulgence, a liberal condescension; but a way of seeing others for who they are by seeing what their own lives have cost them.”
~Andrea Dworkin