I’ve been really interested in performance lately. The various ways that we are made to perform. Performance as an unavoidable game. They say that games are for kids. Being an adult, I’m realizing more and more, is about playing games you have no choice but to play.
In my early college years, my uncle once told me, “you have to play the game. I know it sucks, but that’s the only way you get ahead in this place.” At the time, I was hard pressed to do anything because there was no better alternative. And so I dropped out, but that’s not important.
How I felt about myself before and after that moment is important. For most of my life, and still to this day, I have been unable to set aside my emotions long enough to play games with society. It is exceedingly difficult for me to thrive in a professional setting because of my emotions.
It’s hard for me to maintain long-term relationships because of my emotions. I routinely burn bridges that I probably shouldn’t, again, because of my emotions. Playing the game of life requires one to operate from a place of un-emotion. I can’t fathom what that must be like.
My therapist once told me that I’m an emotional person, and sometimes the emotions drive the bus and I’m in the backseat just riding along, slave to the emotions.
I’ll read something I wrote 6 months ago and I can’t feel the same emotions which made the piece make perfect sense to me at the time. Probably this has to do with the subtext of my real-life struggles, the day-to-day drudgery that weighed each word down with a context unique to that space of mind. I don’t know. I just write.
Joan Didion said she writes just to find out what she’s thinking. If I knew what I was thinking, if I could articulate it easily to myself, there would be no need for writing in my life. If I was an un-emotional person, or, at least, one with better control of his emotions, there would be no need for writing in my life.
If I didn’t see the world exactly as I did, if I weren’t threatened to be overwhelmed by a flood of emotions in reaction to the slightest sense of abandonment, I would have no need for writing. If all these things were true, and if I were my ideal self every moment of every day, I would have no need for any of this wordplay.
But I know that I would still write. Regardless of circumstance, I write. Some people write to remember. I mostly write to forget. But, I write. What am I forgetting? I forgot.
But I’ll keep writing until I remember what it is that I wanted to forget. I don’t know if any of that makes sense, but that’s okay, because this is the one place I can be free of neuroses. You can sort the mess from the rest for yourself.
And so on my birthday every year I give myself a gift. I reflect on my past year and think about the highlights, the lowlifes, the limelight. Right now it all looks beautiful. Painful and beautiful. Just a flux of wild emotions, sending me this way and that.
Crying on the living room floor, crying at sunrise by the Mississippi’s shore. Crying in front of the Ka’bah, crying on our final descent into Medina. That’s alright, man, that’s alright. Crying seems okay to me. People seem to think of it as a weakness. People don’t know. I don’t know.
All I know is how to write and cry. So I cry when I write. Not really, but you know what I mean. Don’t you?
Hey, thanks for reading, whoever you are. You’re alright.