Fish vs. fishmonger
The call is coming from inside the house, and other exercises in being responsible for yourself.
My skin knows the season is turning before the weather changes its mind. It starts to feel like I have scales, and if I could only scrape them off then I might discover what creature I am become beneath all this. When I put my fingertips to my wrist or my ear or my thigh, I experience the sensation that either what is touching or what is being touched might not belong to me. I’m not entirely sure and I also don’t really care to work it out — can I tap out of this particular pattern of existence instead? Can I take off my meat suit for a minute?
I confide in my friends about what hurts so we can do a little bit of it together. Sometimes our pain is acute and the causes are clear, sometimes many acute pains pile up like a multi-car freeway collision, sometimes the everyday of humaning is just too much to bear. Too many moving parts, too much to feel, too much to hold, manage, care for, too hard to do it well. When I returned to high school from a period of being largely unable to function, Ms. Knox was teaching The Great Gatsby. “If it is too beautiful to be borne,” she whispered, “just read the SparkNotes.”
Although I think it is often a legitimate option, there is unfortunately a lot about life I cannot persuade myself to TL;DR. I have to go deeply or not go at all. I want so much, by which I mean both that there is much that I desire and also that I desire it vigorously. But in the same way that love is not enough, neither is wanting. I am learning to distinguish between desiring the thing and being prepared to receive it, because no amount of ambition can till dead dirt into healthy soil.
Is this a thing I want? Or is it a thing I am ready for?
I am not addicted to cigarettes but I am addicted to the pursuit of perfection. I am addicted not to the thing itself but to the striving — to aspiring to a state of being I know very well I will never achieve — which is to say, perhaps, that I am addicted to failure. No amount of internal work or personal growth or self-help or self-care can supplant that addiction to chasing an impossible ideal, and after every fleeting fallow period during which I successfully enact quitting by convincing myself that I am enough, I am as likely as ever to return immediately to the self-flagellation of never really allowing it to be true.
And I am impatient. I am both the sushi chef and the tuna belly. I carve and am carved, I am descaler and scale. I would like very much to rest, but the idea of taking a break just makes coming back to face it all more frightening than it was to begin with. So I do not unzip my skin, for now, and the creature percolates.
Since both the air and the date have declared summer dismissed I pull the sweaters and scarves out of the box in the back of the closet. I yank my long sleeves down over my forearms while I type to hide this baffling human container from my view. Maybe I can exist in this meat suit a little longer if I stop obsessing over it, and maybe I can stop obsessing over it if I’m not looking at it all day long.
Maybe if I can stop myself from popping off each new scale as it appears, if I can resist picking at the scab it leaves behind, maybe then I will be able to allow this feeling to be what it is.
In the meantime I try to direct my energy toward something else, anything else, not as a distraction from what hurts but as a tactic for abiding it. I am an animal beset by feeling, oversaturated and overwhelmed, but I have been down this road enough to know that the only way out is through. Can I slow down enough to hold it? Can I speed up enough to balance it? Am I brave enough to sit in it? Are you?