Where Are You Going

"Giving Back" comic by Jelloween

 

A lot of folks believe in the well-worn adage, "everything happens for a reason".  But I can't subscribe to that, because it justifies every horror along with each happiness.

What should I be doing?  What am I supposed to be doing?

These are infinitely confounding questions because there really isn't something that you're supposed to be doing, at least as far as the universe is concerned.  You weren't put here for a mysterious purpose that it is incumbent upon you to figure out before you squander any chance at fulfilling your destiny.  It's the people around you, and the society at large, that want you to be productive in particular ways that will enable you to be financially self-sufficient in the world we've created for ourselves.  Yet it is the community which requires your fealty who leave you largely adrift in making that happen.

For at least 300,000 years — 98% of the time we've been on earth — humans led a paleolithic existence.  It's only within very recent history that we've invented civilization and technologies that have dramatically changed the fundamental ways in which we live and function, and it's happened with such unnatural speed that we can't even evolve fast enough to keep up.  This is one reason we're constantly in conflict with ourselves: we're adapting in real time to our present environment, which often runs counter to the ways we've developed over centuries.  Our modern lives are rewiring our brains to expect and crave constant stimulation, to conform to strict schedules and erratic sleep patterns, unnatural diets and sedentary lifestyles, rigid protocols and rapidly changing social norms, and completely novel and abstract ways of thinking... while our bodies increasingly lag decades farther behind.

So what are we supposed to be doing with ourselves?

There are social obligations.  There are personal ambitions.  But there is no One Thing, one Ultimate Destiny for each of us to succeed or to fail at.  Sometimes it feels like we're swimming against the tide and sometimes it feels like we're swimming with it, and when things seem to be working in our favor, it's easy to feel like we're doing something right; that we must have meandered fortuitously onto our intended path. But struggling against the tide doesn't necessarily mean mistakes have been made or the direction is wrong.  It's just the world going its own way while you go another.  The people and the pebbles, the roots and the stream, all have someplace to be, too.

When you work hard in the direction of some particular goal, with luck those efforts will gradually generate their own momentum, drawing things necessary for your success into your own current.  Stumbling blocks and detours are the growing pains; just a part of the learning curve.  Sometimes it's having to work against our own dispositions or the systems that we find ourselves tangled up in. Life is a wilderness; it's shadowy and chaotic to navigate, and sometimes the river's gonna carry you farther from, and sometimes closer to, your destination.  But barriers are just brambles in the path, wending their own way to someplace else.  They're not a formal judgement or final determination about what you're supposed to be doing.  You're just an animal that came into existence by an astronomically unlikely string of circumstances, tracing all the way back to the beginning of the known universe, into a really fucking weird and difficult time to be human.  Give yourself a break.

I sit here asking myself: what am I supposed to be doing?  What are my next steps?  Where am I going to and how do I get there?  And I ask not in the conventional sense of moving from point A to point B in physical space, or meeting my immediate bodily needs.  No, I demand knowledge of myself in the abstract; in existential terms.  I am asking myself, who am I supposed to be, and how am I supposed to become them?

Yet the truth is, you are becoming yourself just as long as you're living.  But that future image you've cultivated in your mind is the one that will haunt you, for good or ill.  They are the angel you wrestle with.  You are the angel, and you wrestle yourself.  The self that has internalized the demands of society.

Everything doesn't happen for a reason.  It's a wilderness.  But that's why you're free.  Life is a boat and it will arrive at its final shore whether or not you are paddling.  Where along that shore you make landing is the piece that remains unknown.  That shoreline is infinite, its possibilities as multitudinous as the stars.  Whether you wind up on Wall Street or a cabin in the woods, you did what you needed to do.  Which was to be you, alive and interfacing with the universe through your centuries-defined senses in this cosmically implausible moment.

Kiite Kure: The Reason I Write

Walt Disney's "New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", 1988

I was eleven when my family relocated out-of-state. Before this I lived in a neighborhood with several kids close to my own age, and had an intimate group of friends at school. After this I briefly became a charity case to a small group of fifth-graders assigned (in my presence) to my care, and my awareness of the fact ignited the first embers of some serious social anxiety.  To keep a long story short, by the following grade I had lost motivation to brute force my way into any pre-established peer groups. 

I listened to the other kids echo their parents' disgruntlement at the steady stream of immigrants from my state and I internalized their disapproval, transitioning my perspective on the move from one of adventure to estrangement. Instead of the intrepid explorer that had set out, I came to think of being Californian as something inherent and inalterable to my identity, making me an outcast among my new peers. 

Prior to the move, my only frame of reference came from children's television; which taught me that I would be welcomed with open arms. Naively, it never occurred to me that these fictionalized depictions might not be representative of reality, and I was naturally unprepared for the bullying, rejection and exclusion.  The shock left an indelible mark on my outlook; if things on tv weren't true, what else couldn't be trusted?

Edwyn hiding under the covers

This is when my introversion first asserted itself.  Rather than defy the negative rhetoric and forcibly ingratiate myself to my new classmates, I retreated internally.  This is also when my sexual orientation and gender incongruities first became a social impediment, since neither the over-loud and rambunctious boys nor the over-cautious and delicately dressed girls held appeal for me.  Gone were the days, it seemed, of coed games of "Red Light, Green Light" and "Red Rover", of monkey bars and jungle gyms.  Now the only game was "Dodge Ball" (a survival game where the object is to avoid being energetically assaulted by a targeted volley-type ball), and the teams were always gendered.

I spent my recess periods, Eeyore-like, posted under a tree, contemplating how much had changed and what it all meant.  What life was actually about and what truth really was.  Of course, my anti-social behavior was quickly flagged and reported to my parents, and I was discussed by the adults in hushed tones of growing concern, which informed me that I had become a problem.  I endeavored to correct my behavior by identifying and establishing a relationship with another outcast among my classmates, without knowing the reasons for her own alienation among the kids she'd grown up with.  

I soon learned.  She would say anything that would play to her advantage, and smile sanctimoniously as she tore others down to improve her own standing.  Friendship brought no immunity from the machinations of this young Rita Skeeter.  Impervious beneath her halo of self-certitude, she twisted and manipulated the truth expertly before she was even into her teens, betraying my secrets and besmirching my character to anyone who would listen.  Any conflict I shared in confidence became outsized evidence of my social delinquence on her tongue, which she promptly reported with enthusiastic embellishments in order to then educate me on my deteriorating reputation and wayward ways.

Looking back on it today, I don't know how I got out of it alive. It was like descending into hell every morning. Only to come back up in the afternoon just in time for my snack and the afternoon tv animated serials."
— Zerocalcare, Tentacles at My Throat

 

Photo by Annemarie Horne. Be kind to rats.

At the end of that year I mustered the courage to inform her that our friendship was over—which earned me a graphic depiction of how her brother had tortured and killed a pet rat I'd entrusted to him (subsequently confirmed false)—and I had thoroughly lost all interest in pursuing relationships just to satisfy the adults that I was not, myself, dysfunctional.  Barring one or two further anemic attempts, my self-imposed isolation largely prevailed for the duration of my adolescence.

I think the only things that prevented my complete social impairment were my family, peripheral osmosis of my extroverted father's easy manner with people, and the much more manageable social province of the pre-corporate internet.  I carved out my niche on Geocities and cultivated a small handful of close friendships with others who belonged to my obscure corner of the unbridled "world wide web".  We chatted daily over ICQ while watching Nickelodeon and MTV together, and developed our html shrines to the unsung celebrities of the American voice-over industry.  We were animation nerds.

All of this is to say that the majority of my life became very internal.  My activities were independent: reading, drawing, watching cartoons and developing my code.  And thinking.  I had a lot of time to think, and I let the words in my head tumble and percolate and weave themselves together into interesting ideas and patterns. In the absence of external distractions, thinking became a hobby unto itself, and no subject was out of bounds.  Love.  Death.  Sex.  Religion.  World politics.  Social justice.  Subjective experience.  The more complicated or under-examined, the better the philosophical knots it preserved to be untangled.

Consequently, I had ideas about things.  And when a subject arose in company that I had given some scrupulous thought, I was eager to share and have my contributions considered.  I was able to find traction in certain forums online where I could anonymously debate without age or appearance influencing my credibility, but at home was another story.  And I suppose because my father was the least receptive to my input, his validation became, in a way, most important.  His opinion was the glass ceiling that I needed to shatter.  It galled me to no end when I would go unheard on an issue only to have him adopt a similar perspective because of an article or book where a complete stranger proposed similar points.  My mother and I joked about getting ourselves into print to be heard... if only it were our words that were sanctified on the page.

There was one extraordinary exception to this pervasive sense of irrelevance.  When the unmoderated bullying and violence at my high school became sufficiently egregious, my father gradually agreed to take me home with him for the lunch period.  Those were some of the only times that we would talk one-on-one.  I would ask him about what he was reading, which was usually politics and world news, and he would listen and engage with me seriously in discussion.  We joked that we would solve the world's problems each day on our lunch hour.

The World is Saved music video, 2011

But these interludes were a strange aberration.  By the end of the day, we were both at wit's end with our own stress and respective misery, and exchanges were more often terse and argumentative, relegated to the sordid affairs of ordinary life.  Homework, chores, rules and expectations.  Attitude and gratitude.  He and I fought.  He and my mother fought.  He and my mother fought about he and I.  Alice was no longer in Wonderland.

As my teens wore on and my misery increased, so did the volatility of my moods and the emotional component of my words. These things outraged my father and diminished me in his estimation as a rational agent.  I became much more reluctant to open my mouth or reveal my own thinking.  My listening skills, already honed to perfection in public school, extended to the home as I shared little and less.  Instead I allowed the tempest to rage unchecked in my own head or, at best, unloaded the overflow into journals. For years I screamed, insatiably, into the void.

And that is the origin story.  That is, in a nutshell, why I overthink and the reason I write.  Why I've sometimes wandered down paths that others have yet to tread.  And why, at bottom, I have the excessively common, incurably human, but arguably obsessive need for my signal to be received by other islands of consciousness in the cosmos.  I don't put a lot of weight on my own importance; just writing these words feels laughably egocentric.  My experience is as unique and as universal as all the rest. And yet, with the rest, I labor under the burden of existence; of being a mote of light in the universe that is curiously, inexplicably, self-aware.

I suppose in the end, it is all just to say, listen to me:

I was here.

 

But it's also to say, this is who we are. Because there's millions of us trapped in our own heads and parallel, fractionally alternate realities — quietly living the same convoluted invisible existence. 

cave art photographed by Tory Kallman

 

The Tree Spirit

 

A great, gnarled tree stood silhouetted in the growing autumn twilight, treetips softly kneading the stream of an evening breeze, even as they stemmed from a pillar as unwavering and composed as the gods.  The trunk, larger at its base than ten solidly built men, rippled against the tapestry of dying light in knotted fists and rolling swells of sculpted time, so that it was not apparent that a barnacled slope, clustered in the crook of a rugged cradling arm, was only a guest in its embrace. The vagrant gradually pooled into a distinct set of swells as it separated itself, branching away from the steady firmament of earth's own cathedral arch. Like a tree spirit taking shape, head and shoulders solidified in the goblin light — when colors run and lines bleed as on wet canvas — so that the extremities seemed to remain conjoined to the tree, even as the second trunk resolved itself in miniature.

The onlooker, enraptured to bear witness to this supernatural scene, observed as the colors receded with the waning sun and the contrasts settled into a soft monochromatic collage that was momentarily more discernible in the gentler afterglow of the star's over-saturated kiss on the horizon.  The tree-turned-tree spirit now appeared to her a ragged boy with shaggy hair, barely out of his tens, yet gazing down at her with eyes as old as his host and as tired as the ancients'.  

Though hesitant to shatter the ethereal silence, she lifted her voice with the deference of one before an altar to inquire who he was and where he'd come from.  Either in reticence or reply, he raised his head, eyes leaving hers to settle on the distant stars just beginning to assert themselves as the local star receded behind the veil of Earth.  "Perhaps," she ventured, still unsteady in her own newfound adolescence, "you should come down from there and head on home."  The whites of his eyes circled back to hers and seemed to consider - whether her person or proposition she could not tell.

The silence surrounded them as thoroughly as the river resumes the contours of the riverbed, and for a span of heartbeats the space seemed untethered from time.  At last his small frame flexed against the billowing branch, hands coming to rest on his perch as his shoulders slouched forward into the posture of one preparing to jump.  It was in the breadth of this small movement that the dying throws of light articulated the reedy ridges of rope wreathed about his neck.  "Wait!" she commanded — but too late.  The small figure had thrust itself forth from its precipice and sliced an inevitable arc through the air, falling to earth.  

Reflexively she turned away, reluctant to decipher the soft "thud" that cut through the siren scream of her own racing heart.  Turning back, she found a scarecrow of a boy stood before her, a head shorter but with eyes resolute.  The noose about his neck resting abreast his collarbone as innocuous as a necklace, the business end hanging unfrayed and impotent at his back.  "Did someone put that one you," she asked as the tempo of her pulse gradually recovered its customary rhythm, "or did you put it on yourself?"

The word returned so softly she was not sure it was heard so much as felt: "Yes."

Slowly she lifted her hand, reaching for his. As he did not recoil, their fingers connected - the back of his hand conforming to the curve of her encircling palm as neatly as it had blended to the crook of the tree.  She compressed it in hers.  It was as solid as the branch that had born it and as warm as her own.  Gritty with the dust of the earth, it impressed an answering pressure.  She thought something flickered in the hollow of his pool-black eyes, though it might have been just the sky reflected there.  

The wind rose, rustling the grass and decay around them, and enshrouded within that timeless whisper came the strange words: "I found you," but she could not tell whether they originated from the woods or within.