A second, gayer prodigal return
Thirty(-one), dirty, and dying
Happy birthday to me
The energy of spring is intemperate, and I believe some of that influence made its way into me at birth. My intellect is strong but my mind is restive. I’m rarely at peace and, like an unbroken horse, will bolt at the slightest provocation.
Perhaps, then, its cosmically appropriate that I hate my birthday. What could be an opportunity for earnest reflection invariably becomes an audit of my existential fears. It’s an annual review, and I can be a cruel boss.
This last year being an especially hard one, I clenched my teeth in anticipation of my 31st. On the eve I barely slept. At 4am I woke for the third time and laid catatonic, thoughts that were irreconcilable at that hour rolling around in my head. Around 5am I decided to get up and take a walk. A simple act like this would remind me of my agency, I thought. I can’t control my mind, I said to myself, but I can remind myself of my physicality.
As soon as I made it out the door I was hit with a kind of wooziness that crept toward nausea. Apparently, I can’t control my body either. But I took some deep, if shaky, breaths and walked on.
I was relieved there was no one out at 5am to see me quietly gasping, clutching at my sides attempting to regain equilibrium as I walked down the sidewalk. In retrospect, my blood sugar was low and I was anxious after a night of tossing and turning. But in the moment, I felt I may have been dying.
It’s clear to me now that it was a panic attack. These, for me, are not cinematic events but an evolving apprehension of something amiss. It is not a cathartic fall from miles above but airplane turbulence bouncing me up and down.
Sad little club
I’ve lived with anxiety and depression for decades - a sentence I’m finally allowed to utter now that I’m in my 30s. I wish I could say that I have become better at handling them with age, but as I gain more tools, they seem to become more adept. I persist in hoping that I’ll one day be rid of them, but I’m beginning to suspect it is a matter of begrudging, lifelong cohabitation. I ask myself what it has to teach me, trying to make meaning of it.
This - the meaning making impulse - is foundational for me. My worst fear is that I’ll have gone through a life of ornate and consuming mental illness and attending trauma with nothing to show for it. That I will fail to end up a van Gogh or a Plath is simultaneously terrifying and, given the quality of their lives and manners of deaths, aspirational.
I have a vague memory of being a morbid little child carrying around a heavy book of Edgar Allen Poe, having sensed a kinship of some kind but lacking the words and concepts to describe the feeling. The formative artists of my life all seem to have a definitional sadness, and I wanted to be part of their sad little club.
A chimerical blood oath
The work now is to write my own counter-narrative. Suffering of this kind is not a precondition of creative fulfillment. Meaning-making would simply be to go on living and attempt to thrive. The meteoric standards set by extreme outliers are not a rubric for a successful life and, in fact, sabotage it. We don’t all begin the race from the same starting point, so comparison is neither accurate nor helpful. By failing to acknowledge its impact on daily life and relationships, characterizing mental illness as a catalyst for artistic expression is harmfully reductive.
But, like everyone else, I have an undeniable impulse toward immortality locked in a demonic, chimerical blood oath with capitalist ideology. And for fuck’s sake, it would be a real shame to have invested all this time stewing about pain and discomfort without alchemizing it into something that exists beyond my own skull. What form this may take is to be determined, and I suspect will necessitate the rerouting of some deeply-entrenched ways of thinking.
My hope for myself, and for us all, is that we one day find ourselves able to apply the same rigor with which we analyze and deconstruct ourselves to the creation of new joys, opportunities, and connections. From quiet, ruminant growth to celebratory growth.
I’m back! Thank you for sticking with me [forgetting to unsubscribe]. I won’t be making any more foolhardy promises about a posting schedule, but I hope you’ll stay on board for the occasional drops and evolutions to this old Stew (and I do have more in the pipeline)! I’m so thankful to you for reading uwu