The Book

I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being nearly five years ago because a woman I was falling in love with gave me her copy.

We were in those early months of a relationship when another person still seems inexhaustible. Every preference contains a history. Every story opens another room. You stay awake too late asking questions because it feels miraculous that another consciousness, one that existed for all intents and purposes in a vacuum before you arrived, has suddenly made itself available for exploration.

In the gusto of trying to understand her, I devoured the book, vigorously attempting to the decode her little notes in the margins of the text, and trying to come up with wise enough talking point to make myself seem more interesting.

I don’t truly remember what I thought of all of it then. I remember being taken by the central opposition Milan Kundera constructs between weight and lightness, and his characters that enact the full spectrum in between those polarities.

But I understood it intellectually, which is another way of saying that I did not really understand it at all.

Five years later, the relationship is long gone.

Strangely, it has become heavier.

This is the first paradox.

Something that happened only once, during a particular configuration of two people who no longer exist in quite the same form, has somehow acquired more gravity with time. A relationship that proved too much for us to carry remains one of the most profound experiences of my life.

And so, five years later, I find myself returning to the book she gave me.

Not because I understand it better. But because I finally understand Kundera’s questions better.

Weight

Nietzsche asks us to imagine a demon visiting us in our loneliest loneliness and who announces that this life, exactly as we have lived it, must be lived again and again, innumerable times. Eternal return.

Nothing changes.

Every embarrassment returns. Every doomscrolling afternoon. Every betrayal. Every orgasm. Every conversation you wish you could have again and every one you wish you could erase.

The same people arrive. The same people leave.

And there is no later version of you who finally gets it right.

This is eternal recurrence.

The interesting question is not whether such a fate would be horrifying. Nietzsche assumes that it might be.

The question is what your reaction to it reveals.

Could you want this?

Could you look at your life in its entirety, not merely the beautiful parts but the humiliations, failures, griefs, cruelties and stupidities, and say:

Yes.

Again.

This is the terrible weight of recurrence.

Nothing disappears because everything returns.

A choice becomes infinitely heavy because you will choose it forever.

Nietzsche pushes toward amor fati, the love of one’s fate. Not merely accepting what happened because it cannot be changed, but affirming life so completely that you would not ask it to be any different.

There is something terrifying about that.

And there is also something weirdly reassuring.

There is a significance to everything.

Under eternal recurrence, nothing simply disappears into the past. Every choice returns. Every moment bears the weight of eternity.

Nothing is lost.

And so everything becomes meaningful.

Lightness

Kundera begins by turning Nietzsche upside down.

What if there is no eternal recurrence?

What if everything happens exactly once?

Einmal ist keinmal.

Once is never.

We have no rehearsal for our lives and no second performance against which to judge the first. We make the most consequential decisions of our existence with almost no information. We choose careers before understanding what work means. We choose cities before knowing who we will become inside them. We fall in love without knowing what love will ask of us.

And then it is over.

The moment recedes into a past we cannot revisit except through the increasingly unreliable instrument of memory.

At first this sounds like freedom.

If nothing returns, perhaps nothing ultimately matters.

But absolute freedom from consequence begins to resemble meaninglessness.

This is Kundera’s unbearable lightness. A life liberated from eternal weight can become so light that nothing anchors it at all. Moments disappear as quickly as they arrive and we drift among possibilities without any cosmic mechanism declaring which one mattered.

We want freedom.

But we also want our choices to mean something.

We want lightness.

But we keep searching for weight.

Perhaps much of modern life can be understood as an attempt to resolve this contradiction.

We cannot bear the full weight of existence.

But we cannot bear its weightlessness either.

So, we manufacture representations of weight.

The Second Tear

The word kitsch came from the midst of the 19th century German Industrial Revolution and became associated with the overly sentimental, mass-produced, commercially appealing art brought on by the rise of factories.

Kundera takes the word somewhere a bit stranger. For him, kitsch is not merely gauche or bad taste. It is the aesthetic refusal of everything unacceptable in existence - what he provocatively calls the denial of shit.

Shit matters because it ruins the picture. It smells.

People who model have angles where they look nothing like their comp card. Parents can resent their children, and children can live worse lives than their parents. Lovers can become bored with each other. Revolutions can produce bureaucracies. Paris can smell like spoiled wine and piss. Gurus can become jealous. Your idols do cruel things. Martyrs die in car accidents.

Kitsch removes this.

Kundera describes kitsch through two tears. The first is the ordinary emotion of seeing something beautiful. The second comes from recognizing ourselves as part of humanity moved by that beauty. It is this second, self-reflective tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

The distinction is subtle.

The first tear says:

This is beautiful.

The second says:

How beautiful that I am the sort of person who finds this beautiful.

Kitsch is therefore not merely sentimentality.

It is sentimentality looking at inself in a mirror.

And this gives us a way of extending Kundera beyond the political and aesthetic world he was describing.

Kitsch begins with something difficult to represent honestly: love, grief, history, nation, spirituality, success, beauty.

It abstracts it.

It removes the contradiction or cost.

No boredom in love, doubt in ideology, discipline in spirituality, or suffering after success.

Then it returns the purified representation to us in a form we can consume.

Kitsch lets us consume an image of ourselves experiencing meaning.

It manufactures the appearance of weight without requiring us to bear any of it.

And once you start looking at modern life this way, kitsch is no longer confined to the ceramic cast figurines and sentimental paintings of the era in which it the word was coined.

It’s the old-money aesthetic that you can buy at Zara without inheritance or the complications of dynastic wealth. The authentic neighborhood sanitized from the problems of the people who made it interesting. Therapy language used to assert our inner demons. The rise of a national identity without the differences of the individual citizens. Travel without disorientation and the horror of difference. Optimization without vitality or profound ChatGPT prose generated and distributed en-masse.

If industrial capitalism learned to mass-produce objects then consumer capitalism learned to mass-produce displayed identities. We then used social media to mass-produce experiences and algorithms to mass-produce attention.

And now generative AI may allow us to mass-produce something stranger still: interiority of self.

The kitsch has been moving creeping inward.

The Kitsch of Things

A house increasingly needs to be many things.

Assetized.

Resellable.

Rentable.

Photographable.

Mortgageable.

Airbnb-able.

Legible to strangers.

This creates a peculiar pressure upon the objects around us.

Particularity reduces liquidity.

Paint the kitchen an eccentric orange and some hypothetical future buyer may hate it when the job market no longer favors your city. Install the strange tile you carried home from Morocco and you have imposed your memory on someone else’s possible future. Keep the scratched table, the mismatched cabinets, the old chair whose upholstery has faded where a body sat for thirty years, and you have allowed a particular life to interfere with the abstract value of the property.

The safest home is therefore one that offends no hypothetical person.

Gray floor.

White wall.

Black fixtures.

A suggestion of maple.

Perhaps an Edison bulb if we are really performing trendy nostalgia.

This is not an argument against millennial gray and BILLY Bookcases. They have committed no crime.

What interests me is what this represents:

maximum optionality.

Anyone can live here.

Which also means:

no one can really live here yet.

There is a waiting.

Compare that room with the house scarred by a life.

The yellow kitchen your grandmother adored.

The notch in the doorframe marking your sibling’s heights.

The scratched table from youthful boredom and mechanical pencils.

The inherited chair from the era of typewriters.

The wall you dad painted badly and never quite retouched.

These things have weight precisely because they constrain the future.

They refuse interchangeability.

The desk that you studied on in college is not replaceable with the same model from Amazon. The lamp found in the thrift store can not capture the memories of your mother studying under it in a far gone era.

The same mechanism appears at the scale of the city. Former factories become luxury lofts while retaining enough brick, steel and exposed pipe to signify the industrial labor that has otherwise disappeared. A neighborhood’s history can survive as an aesthetic after the people and activities that created it have become economically impossible there.

And naturally, the second tear:

“How beautiful it is that everyone can see me drink a $9 latte while feeling connected to the brutally raw, edgy historical image of working class New York”

We retain the representation of grit.

We remove the grit.

This is kitsch’s peculiar relationship with history. We want history’s weight without necessarily wanting history’s inconvenience. The shit.

But the distinction is not really between expensive and cheap, tasteful and tacky, old and new.

It is between possession and relationship.

Do you know who made the thing? The story of the toil and interactions and generations necessary to make a simple artifact possible.

Have you seen its failures and repaired it?

Have you lived with it long enough to know it? For every curve to feel natural in your hands.

Did it acquire meaning through your life? Through the lives of everyone who encountered it?

A plastic chair can possess tremendous weight because your father sat in it every morning for thirty years to read his newspaper. A tattered blanket can garner its weight from keeping your childhood dog cozy. A bar of chocolate can bear its significance from the giver of the gift. And a forty-thousand-dollar watch that looks indistinguishable from the knockoffs can remain completely weightless because price itself does not create weight.

Relationship does, and those layers aren’t easily chargeable to your credit card.

The Kitsch of Experience

Something extraordinary happened when we began describing paintings, essays, photographs, jokes, films, political arguments, thirst traps, recipes, wars and someone’s Istanbul breakfast with the same word:

content.

Their differences collapse at the level of the feed.

Everything comes as fodder. Slop.

A friend’s engagement.

A GLP-1 advertisement.

A poem.

A child dead in war.

A meme.

The one spot in LIC you can’t miss.

A breakup announcement.

A get ready with me video.

All back to back.

Scroll.

Scroll.

Scroll.

Everything becomes equivalent at the level of delivery.

The flattening extends beyond what we consume and into what we experience.

Travel once imposed foreignness upon the traveler almost by necessity.

You do not know this language.

Breakfast isn’t what breakfast is supposed to be.

The train has its own mind on when it will leave.

You mispronounce something, repeatedly.

You eat something egregious and discover it’s the local staple.

You are lonely, jet-lagged, and lost.

For a little while, the assumptions that quietly organize your ordinary life stop working.

Foreignness destabilizes you.

Much of modern travel infrastructure is designed, quite reasonably, to eliminate these inconveniences.

Uber.

AirPods.

Google Maps.

Instant translation.

International hotel chains.

Reducing the storm that just affected everyone at your destination to a two hour delay.

English menus.

Instagram pinned itineraries.

Global coffee aesthetics and the latest global pastry trend.

The same clothes.

The same music.

The same phone.

It is increasingly possible to travel thousands of miles without undergoing much displacement at all.

You can move across the Earth while remaining psychologically at home.

And then, having protected ourselves from foreignness, we can photograph the journey as evidence that we encountered it.

We can queue to produce nearly identical photographs of supposedly singular experiences: Almafi Coast. Dumbo. Taj Mahal.

Thousands of unique journeys converge upon the same representation.

The first tear says:

This place is beautiful.

The second tear:

Look how worldly I have become.

But there is another trap here.

Perhaps the exhausted American eating McDonald’s in Kyoto because he genuinely wants fries is less kitschy than the traveler forcing himself into the “authentic hidden hole in the wall ramen shop” he found on TikTok so that he can perform the aesthetic of having another authentic Japanese experience.

Authenticity, once made legible, becomes reproducible.

The crying selfie.

The messy carefree bedroom.

The analog Fujifilm camera.

The handmade ceramic.

The obscure wine that’s now trending enough to secure a distribution contract at Target.

The local coffee shop owned by Nestle.

The unfiltered photograph that required fifteen attempts to look unfiltered with cameras arranged around the room to capture every perfect angle.

Even rebellion and counter culture develops a recognizable performative visual language

We wanted to escape mass culture by becoming individuals.

The market responded by giving us thousands of ways to purchase individuality.

Therein lies the second paradox.

The Kitsch of the Self

To optimize something, you must first make it legible.

You need a variable.

Health becomes VO2 max and HRV, peptide stack, steps and sleep score.

Beauty becomes jawline, skin, QOVES analysis, muscle, symmetry, and the number of steps in your skincare routine.

Career becomes salary, pedigree, title, funding rounds, network, followers, and LinkedIn reposts.

Travel becomes countries visited, points accumulated, statuses matched, restaurants saved.

Intellectual life becomes Goodreads challenges, podcasts consumed at 2.5x, Kindle notes captured, and the raw accumulation of data in your second brain.

Eventually the self becomes a dashboard with different variables to tinker with.

There is nothing inherently wrong with measurement. A metric can reveal something our mind filters it out of reality.

The danger begins when the proxy replaces the thing it was supposed to measure.

You start stressing over your cortisol response.

You stop understanding books and start completing books, bottoming out at the easier and more salacious the better.

You buy a phone swinger to get your steps in.

You let AI give you an A- essay, instead of massaging your thoughts long enough for taste to develop.

You stop developing taste and start acquiring tasteful objects. The more niche the aesthetic the more edgy you are.

You stop building relationships with people you enjoy being and building with and start maintaining a network.

In sum, you stop living a good life and start optimizing for the measurable associations of a good life.

Optimization can produce the measurable appearance of flourishing without flourishing itself.

Here kitsch ceases to be merely aesthetic.

It becomes epistemological. A simulacrum.

We replace an unruly reality with a legible representation and eventually forget that the representation was an abstraction.

This may explain some of the absurdity of contemporary maxxing culture.

Once every part of the self becomes a variable, nothing is too intimate, ridiculous or anatomically obscure to escape optimization. Jawline. Skin. Hair. Sleep score. Social status. Sexual marketplace value. Even one’s apparent imperfections can become strategies posted on forums.

The joke almost writes itself because the logic has already become comic.

We can max everything now.

But optimization is only one manifestation of something larger.

Modern life offers an expanding marketplace of ready-made internal experiences.

The corporate layoff becomes a strategic realignment.

Despair becomes a growth season.

The difficulties of relationship becomes a problem of boundaries or attachment style incongruity.

A mandatory corporate retreat manufactures trust on a deadline.

Loneliness becomes an opportunity to work on yourself.

None of these languages is necessarily false. Boundaries can be necessary. Growth can follow suffering. Teams can become communities. Metrics can improve health.

Kitsch begins when the representation becomes incapable of admitting what contradicts it.

When every failure must become a lesson, we lose the right to have shit failures that remain failures.

When every wound must become growth, grief loses the right to remain irrecoverable grief.

When every year must become a narrative arc, life becomes intolerably good at foreshadowing.

And yet the shit returns eventually. Reality insists.

The Kitsch of Thought

The original Luddites were not simply people frightened by machines.

They were skilled textile workers confronting an industrial transformation that changed not only how cloth was produced, but who possessed skill, how workers were paid, where production happened and who captured the benefits of increased production. Many objected to particular uses of machinery and labor arrangements rather than to technology in the blanket abstract.

Their struggle raises a question that has become newly important:

Which friction is merely an obstacle to remove, and which friction is secretly constitutive of the thing we value?

Technology has always removed friction.

The loom changes the relationship between skill and cloth.

The camera changes the relationship between seeing and representation.

Recorded music changes the relationship between performance and listening.

Spotify changes scarcity, sequence and discovery.

Google Maps changes getting lost.

Instagram changes social connectivity.

None of these transformations can be reduced to simply good or bad. Removing unnecessary friction is one of civilization’s great achievements.

I am grateful that I do not have to milk my own cow and grind my own wheat every morning to eat toast with butter.

But sometimes the obstacle and the process cannot be cleanly separated.

Generative AI makes that distinction critically difficult.

A poem exists on my blog, but did I wrestle with language and the profoundness of my experience?

An image represents an aesthetic, but did I learn to see?

An essay exists, but did I think through my relationship with the words?

A love letter exists, but did I erase and rewrite enough lines inexhaustibly to come up with words that still can’t capture my feelings?

The interesting question is not whether AI can produce great art.

I believe it can.

The stranger question, and the more poignant one, is:

What happens to us when excellence in the result no longer implies transformation in its maker?

For most of human history, certain artifacts served as somewhat-imperfect-but-still-reliable evidence of processes that had occurred inside people.

The pianist’s performance implied years of practice.

The carpenter’s scarred table implied knowledge residing in hands.

The essay implied that someone had spent time thinking.

The letter implied that someone had searched for words.

Generative systems loosen this relationship.

They offer an newfound possibility: the artifact of transformation without the transformation.

This concerns me more extensively than the raw accumulation of computational prowess.

And I know this because it happened while writing this essay.

I asked a machine to write part of it.

I gave it ideas I had been circling, fragments about Kundera, and kitsch, brainrot, millennial gray, and a woman I once loved, and asked it to show me what the section might become.

The machine produced something beautiful.

It moved me. It sounded like me.

And almost immediately, I felt something closer to disgust.

Not because the words were bad.

Because they were good.

Really good.

The words felt right.

But I had not earned them.

I had not wandered there myself.

And what exactly did I believe I would be stealing if I copied them?

The sentence? Or the process of becoming the person capable of writing them?

The Machine That Wrote This Sentence

There is, of course, an irony in writing any of this with the help of a machine, on a machine, to be broadcast to all the other machines on which it will be read.

I can ask it to find the word I cannot find.

I can give it a half baked thoughts and ask it to finish baking it.

I can ask it to connect Nietzsche and Kundera, kitsch and architecture, an obscure YouTube video about gray houses and an Instagram photograph and the quantified self.

I can even ask it to make the argument sound more like me.

The sentence appears. Everyone else can see it.

But did I think it?

And yet even this distinction is suspiciously convenient.

There is a particular egoic pleasure in recognizing kitsch.

Once you learn to see it, the world becomes morbidly easy to diagnose.

The millennial gray apartment or the industrial coffee shop. The LinkedIn confessional masquerading as growth. The meditation retreat and the old money shoes. The traveler waiting in line to photograph the same icon from the same angle as everyone else. The West Village girl who would never go above 14th Street. The tech worker reformed as an artisan. The struggling image of performative poverty. The billionaire trying desperately to look like he inherited his cashmere. The influencer filming herself crying. The man optimizing his jawline, sleep score, morning routine, testosterone, and VO₂ max in the hope that enough perfected variables might eventually add up to a person, or even more terrifyingly, acceptance.

Once you have the vocabulary, kitsch is everywhere.

And there is something intoxicating about being the person who notices.

How wonderful that I am not like them.

There it is.

The second tear.

How wonderful that I am sophisticated enough to recognize the artificiality of everyone else’s life.

Perhaps anti-kitsch is simply kitsch for people who know what kitsch is.

The handmade ceramic mug can become kitsch. So can the gourmand who fusses over natural wine, the obscure neighborhood that is really the heartbeat of the city, the rare Neutral Milk Hotel LP, the Leuchtturm notebook with the dot grid, the jhana meditation practice, the insistence on buying only heirloom tomatoes, or the refusal to download ChatGPT.

There is no aesthetic that cannot eventually become an aesthetic of authenticity, no rebellion that cannot become sufficiently legible to be packaged and sold.

Even friction can become a fetish. A performative caricature of intent.

The person taking the subway when an Uber would save them an hour. The person writing by hand when an email is needed. The traveler refusing Google Maps in pursuit of some supposedly purer encounter with foreignness, wanderlust, and self reliance. The person listening to vinyl not because they love records, but because they love being the kind of person who is seen listening to vinyl.

There is no shopping list for escaping kitsch.

You cannot purchase your way out of it.

You cannot aestheticize your way out of it.

You cannot optimize your way out of it.

And, apparently, you cannot write an essay about it without risking another version of the same performance.

Because somewhere in writing this essay, another uncomfortable possibility occurred to me.

I began with a woman.

Five years ago, my then girlfriend gave me her copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We were still in that early period of a relationship when another person seems inexhaustible. Every story opens another room where you stay awake too late asking questions because it feels miraculous that an entire other consciousness has somehow opened itself to you.

I devoured the book. I was, in another sense, devouring her too.

I wanted to know everything. The childhood stories. The contradictions. The private theories. The things she hated for reasons she couldn’t quite explain but made me relish in the schadenfreude of her externally directed ire. The strange little preferences that seemed arbitrary until some story made them inevitable. I wanted to understand how a person becomes this particular person and no other.

For a while, I thought I did.

The relationship ended. Years passed.

And somewhere in those years, the person I knew became a person I remember.

Memory is a ruthless editor.

It cuts the waiting. The repetition. The arguments whose premises I can no longer reconstruct. Or an afternoon when neither of us was particularly interesting or appealing. The moments of selfishness. The things I said that I wish I had or hadn’t. The things she said or did that hurt me.

It keeps stranger things.

The private language. The inside jokes. The smell of her hair. The particular way gravity shifted when we were in the room together. The feeling of sitting beside each other without needing the moment to become anything more than itself.

The boredom. The resentment. The sex. The tenderness. The irritation. The laughter. The cruelty you discover yourself capable of. The darkness of two souls meeting. The generosity you didn’t know you possessed.

The terrible inconvenience of loving someone.

And then memory takes thousands of moments, exuberant and banal and caustic and ordinary, and compresses them into a sentence:

It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

What is that if not a kind of kitsch?

I have spent this essay accusing modernity of taking complicated things, stripping away their contradictions, and returning them to us as beautiful, legible representations.

And here I am doing precisely that to someone I loved.

I can look at fragments of the life she lives now and tell myself a story about what she became. A neighborhood. A career. The people around her. The signs and symbols of a world we once talked about differently.

If I am feeling wounded, I can call it compromise.

If I am feeling superior, I can call it hypocrisy.

If I am feeling gracious, I can call it growth.

If I am feeling sentimental, I can call it adulthood.

If I am missing her, I can turn it into tragedy.

Each story tells me something.

None of them tells me what it is like to be her.

That is the inconvenient truth.

I don’t know her anymore.

Or perhaps more precisely, I know someone who no longer exists.

I know the woman who handed me a book five years ago. I know fragments of the person she became afterward. Between them lies an entire private life I did not witness.

She changed.

I changed.

Of course we did.

Perhaps the more kitschy fantasy would be insisting that either of us owed permanent fidelity to the people we happened to be when we loved each other.

There is another cruelty in nostalgia. It freezes people at the moment they mattered most to us and quietly resents them for continuing to live.

The real person keeps moving.

She will have acquired tastes I’ll never know. Changed her mind about things she once believed with conviction. Will love people I’ll have never met. Created rituals I cannot recognize. She wakes up on ordinary Tuesdays and thinks thoughts in which I do not exist.

She becomes unknowable again.

And perhaps this is why kitsch cannot simply be defeated by choosing the authentic thing.

Memory itself is representation.

Language is representation.

An essay is representation.

To tell a story at all is to select, compress, arrange, craft, and perform.

Context must compress.

And any life remembered is necessarily lossy.

We could not carry the full resolution of reality even if we wanted to. It would be unbearable.

So perhaps the danger is not representation itself, it is forgetting that something infinitely less legible once existed underneath it.

The kitsch isn’t the simplification. It’s the forgetting that you simplified.

An archetype instead of a person.

A lesson instead of a relationship.

A set of stories instead of a life.

And when I strip away everything I have subsequently made that relationship mean, I am left with something embarrassingly simple.

I miss her.

There is no philosophy in that sentence capable of making it cleaner.

No theory of recurrence changes the fact that it happened only once. No amount of remembering gives either of us another attempt. No machine can regenerate the precise consciousnesses we were then and ask them to choose differently.

Einmal ist keinmal.

Once is never.

Kundera may have been right about the terrible lightness of a life without rehearsal.

And yet I cannot convince myself that once was nothing.

The relationship happened once.

That particular world happened once.

Those versions of us happened once.

And then they disappeared.

She continued into a life beyond my knowing. I continued into mine.

Still, something was altered.

Perhaps weight does not come from recurrence after all.

Perhaps weight enters a life wherever something is allowed to leave a mark.

The chipped bowl becomes yours because you kept it after the argument slipped it from your hand.

The empty bottle that looks like trash to someone else contains a night they cannot see.

A city becomes home because you stayed through the harsh winter, when nobody was jealous of your days there.

A craft becomes yours because your hands refused to listen to you a thousand times.

Another person becomes part of you because loving them changed what you were free to be.

Maybe this is what I misunderstood when I first read Kundera.

We cannot make our lives recur eternally. We cannot know beforehand which choices will justify themselves. We cannot rehearse loving someone before deciding whether the consequences are worth it.

We can only choose what we are willing to let constrain us.

Inconvenience us.

Disappoint us.

Change us.

What weight we are willing to carry when no one gives a shit.

What we are willing to love without first knowing what it will become, or what we will become.

Five years ago, she handed me a book about the unbearable lightness of a life that happens only once.

Five years later, I think I understand something I didn’t then.

It was unbearably light.

It was unbearably heavy.

It happened once.

And yet, it only needed to happen once.

I came here to see people who struggled
who knew nothing but the burnt ends of a cigarette and the beat of rhythm. 
I can hear for the fragrance of earth, the smell of the sky on a rainy day, 
the errant whisper of a newly blossomed leaf and the beckoning of a light a hundred meters too far gone. 

I came here to feel the intensity, 
the power of weight, oppression, release, the erotic touch,
a crescendo on a violin and then the fall of nothing more than a beating whisper. 

I came here to lie on the wet grass and to stare at a sky overcast, the rhythmic pulsating of a heart too strong to care and to weak to know the future. 

I came here for now, an unknown, a beginning, and end, and everything, everything that lies to the left. 

I came here to live lifetimes.

// // written while lying on wet grass at 11:29pm, frankfurter allee, berlin

The last piece I wrote here was three years ago to the day, on my 27th birthday, as I stood on the cusp of a new transition and tried to grapple with what, at that time, felt like a cacophonous symphony of losses, excitements, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

I got more than I bargained for.

There is a funny thing about hindsight, viewed through the smudge-free lenses of wisdom—lenses milled through realized experience and polished by sheer overcoming. Lenses that unblur lessons that feel both profound and obvious.

To judge the past with the knowledge of the present would be impossible without the past first creating the very circumstances that forged that knowledge.

And yet, we judge. Perhaps from hope, as if, somehow, the wisdom of the present could reach back and reframe what has already been written. As if the past itself were not the necessary path to the present.

I’ve questioned my decisions often, my past—what was in my control, and what I thought was in my control.

I don’t think it’s been helpful.

I’ve learned instead to see my choices, the world I shaped, and the person I’ve become as always having been the right ones.

Not because they were objectively right, but because they were right answers for the worldview I held at the time. The story I chose to live, where my actions declared my reality.

To me, the integrity of my self-trust is paramount, and so if I believe in the integrity of my internal tools, then the only thing requiring refinement is my worldview—not by default, my ability to navigate it.

It’s easier written than done, but I’ve come to realize that life, at its core, is an exercise in learning to play again.

Since I last wrote here, I’ve been through more ups and downs—really, helical loops—circling through patterns and lessons. I’ve experienced the highs of some of life’s greatest joys and the inevitable descent of sorrow that follows.

Each new chapter of life blossoming with new opportunities, relationships, and experiences, colliding with my refining sense of self, my inner demons, and the unpredictable impact of others’ choices on me.

And each chapter, cyclically, frustratingly, often abruptly, ended. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes by circumstance. And then, as that desolate page turned, the next chapter began.

I’ve cycled through new highs, abrupt endings, and the quiet dissolving of past selves. And yet, the more I observe these shifting patterns, the more I return to a Sanskrit word I grew up with: Maya.

A quick search will tell you it means “illusion”—specifically, the illusion of the phenomenal world.

I’ve learned to take its spiritual inklings in stride. The mythology and eastern philosophy I was raised with shape a more fluid meaning, a semantic cloud that resists the isolating choice of a single translation. Language often fails when it tries to distill an idea from one cultural consciousness into another, falling instead into a lexical gap as the translation strips away the nuance of its lived experience and cultural grounding.

So instead, I think of Maya as a play—a grand stage upon which we perform daily, shifting masks and personas to fit the stories we choose to live. We engage with the people who orbit our immediate world either personally or virtually, unaware of the countless others whose stories unfold beyond our line of sight.

It’s like the plays that we love to watch—in films, in books, or in the quiet schadenfreude of watching someone else navigate the rollercoaster of life. We immerse ourselves, emotionally invested in narratives we know are fiction, just as we invest in our own life. We believe, with temporary delusional confidence, that the robot truly fell in love, that the protagonist really did reconcile their grief, that tragedy had to unfold just so, dictated by fate rather than chaos. We know it’s not real. And yet, we play along, manipulating that world in our imagination.

It’s like the way a child leaps off a swing just to feel the split second of flight before hitting the dirt. The way a game of pretend becomes life-or-death for an afternoon, only to be forgotten by dinner. Play feels serious in the moment but weightless in the long run. The ability to hold both dialectics in hand at once allows neither seriousness nor weightlessness to take hold of us.

Maya is the play that fades when we close the curtains of our eyes each night, surrendering to a night of dreams—no different from our waking life, just less bound by coherence. We laugh at the absurdity of falling out of the sky on our seventeenth attempt to fly, yet wake to live another act. An act filled with sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, beginning again, in our next beat—a new story or an old classic, with a repeat cast or an ensemble of new faces.

It’s a word used to describe the ludicrousness of it all, of the stories we choose to believe and thus live, the people we cling to as anchors, and the selves we construct, knowing they are always in flux, dissolving and reforming.

It is the default script of reactivity, where life unfolds on autopilot, dictated by our silo of habit, obsession, and neurosis, leaving us unaware that the game is playable.

There is no fixed script. The stability we crave is just an illusion—a desire to escape responsibility, to live without the burden of freedom, the burden of weightlessness, without the suffering that choice entails. It is the comfort formed from decades spent reacting—watching reruns of the same episode, lulling us into stagnation, stripping away the very poignancy that gives life its thrill.

And yet there exists a boldness to life, where life isn’t a state, but a forceful determined engagement. To become a confluence of life and existence, two rivers meeting in endless motion, swirling, shifting, shaping the self anew, liberated from the responsibility of a contrived and predetermined role.

We admire those who radiate this energy – who are undeniably alive.

We may have even been them once.

In a state of being, full of vitality.

If Maya is the grand illusion, then childhood is the default time we engage with it fully, unburdened by the need to make sense of it.

Play, from our childhood, is a full-bodied experience—intense and immediate, yet fleeting.

It’s the way a child runs, then falls, then laughs at the fall before getting up to try again, unbothered by the failure, finding exhilaration in the motion itself.

It’s how a game invented in the span of a few seconds—an empire built of sticks, shadows, and whimsically shifting rules—becomes the most important thing in the world, only to be abandoned without regard when something else becomes important.

It’s the unfiltered testing of reality. What happens if I jump from here? What if I pretend to be a lion? How far can I run? How do you react to my ridiculous idea?

Every action is a question, a hypothesis, an experiment. Every failure is folded into the next attempt. The stakes feel high, but the consequences are light.

In play, emotions run hot—laughter, frustration, triumph, heartbreak—but nothing lingers. Tears dry fast, and bruises are forgotten and healed. A feud over an imaginary meal is mended in seconds when a new adventure calls. There is no burden of permanence, no need to make sense of it all.

It is life in motion, unencumbered by self-judgment or the fear of looking foolish.

To play is to live lightly, but completely.

Life then is not the opposite of death, it’s the continual engagement despite the lure of comfort.

To live is to destroy one’s identity repeatedly—letting go of past traumas, realizations, regrets, and victories alike—in favor of what is necessary to be present.

To live is to learn, to dismantle faulty constructs, and rebuild them to hold the new.

To live is to play—with ourselves, with our relationships, with our conception of existence. To test the boundaries of the material and immaterial, of people, of ourselves, to cultivate the ability to see things as they are.

To continually play is to tell the greatest story our life can offer.

A story that, in its telling, becomes the meaning of life.

I sit here now, three years later, on the cusp of a new decade of life, one that everyone seems to have an opinion on. Your 30s, as I’ve been told, is when you leave the chaos of your 20s behind, find a renewed sense of self and identity, solidify the people that matter to your core, stabilize your relationships, start experiencing the highs of your career, beckon the start of a new family, and build solidarity with community.

It’s often a loss of people, watching former friends and lovers move on, watching the slow decay of family and older loved ones, and confronting in the mirror our own frailness and temporality.

It’s all a stark declaration, one that I imagine comes from a milkshake of hope, expectations, reassignment, progress, self knowledge, and a honest confrontation with reality.

For me, these things are neither something to chase, nor understand, nor something I even expect to grasp.

I have an inkling that life doesn’t set, clarity doesn’t emerge, and that I don’t get to be subsumed by the stability of my own comforting realizations.

I hope instead, to develop more awareness of my world and the immaterial in my mind, to continue to exercise my agency in the world, to curate and tend to the beauty I find daily. I hope to have more time with the people I cherish, and to cherish the world I get to occupy for this season of my life.

And in all of that, to continue playing—building, testing, learning, failing, and trying—on that edge between life and death.

To be caught up in living so fully that the need for answers dissolves into the simple act of play.

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the misty veil reveals a wry dwindling
of whenever, whoever, and then
a memoriam, not dark, instead
a lightness of being untarnished
not provoked nor still

an uncertain uncertainty
of mixed allure
revealing neither for you nor me
the risk that lies ahead

behind what could have been
what is, and what could be
a story untold

in that permanent mist
unyielding and serenely damp
is where a new comfort lies

one where there isn’t a you
or me, or even us
but an unchartered beginning
through a bridge of dreams

an adventure waiting to be lived
for the courage to be wielded
and the fog to be lifted
by the simple perilous act
of running through it
wildly and freely

// written on my sofa at 2:48am, nyc

Life exists.

Not as a grand gesture to the universe, or an ineffable and necessary part of all.

Instead it beckons, for the realization of being itself.

Not to them, to us, to anyone.

But a call nonetheless to experience, not a direction, nor a place, nor a person

But a time.

A stopgap between the was and the will be.

A small buffer, sure, but a buffer that contains a totality —

of you, of me, of our place and our being.

It isn’t grand. It’s not meant to be – anything, really.

Instead it’s an allowance for our time, our infinitesimal yet nonzero grace —

to experience all the states of being that play.

It isn’t wholly pleasant either, or terrible.

It isn’t meant to be, well, anything really.

Anything more than a being.

An existence.

forever is not a place,
nor a date, nor a time
forever then could be
as they say, a state of mind
a feeling, disjoint from space
even away from time.
and maybe in that forever
where you and I collide
a center removed from itself
no sun, no moon
no day, no night
where a moment
can be forever.
in those places we linger
eternally enveloped
wearing in that blanket
a haven of presence
where forever is found.

I’m sitting again.

This time surrounded by the small mounds of things that make up my collective possessions.

I notice myself in a transitory state, one where my home has started to no longer feel like home, and the next place, not yet home.

The new home still ripe with the exciting unknown that leaves me grasping for hopeful thoughts of recreating a familiar state, but not quite sure of the steps it’ll take to get there.

I’m about to move again, maybe for the 12th (or 15th or 17th) time. It’s a familiar experience for me, one that, comically at this point, feels more natural than staying in one place. But this move feels different – it’s not just the symbolic act of moving myself and my belongings from one location to another.

No. This one – this one coincides with a decided willingness to walk into this next season of my life, not really even sure what to expect at all.

It’s daunting, exciting, and sorrowful all at once.

The first time I chose to move, it was a radical choice – for me – to leave all of the familiar, the world I lived in and loved, and venture to a new city, with some rolling suitcases and the excitement of so many unknowns.

It was, entirely, also, a naive move. One where the consequences of my choices, the loss of people, of familiar routines, of foods I loved, and memories I wanted to have, felt insignificant when compared with the wonder of the future.

I didn’t know then that those losses stay with you.

The loss of the paths you could have gone, but now never can, replaced instead with where you are now, for better or for worse, though likely both.

And these positives and negatives don't outweigh each other. Instead they both exist together, emblemized by your present.

No one told me about the listless drunk nights passively wondering what things might of looked like, if one seemingly arbitrary decision had been replaced with another.

The other major time I moved, it was a choice to run away from the world that scared me. A world battered by a newfound disease, that made everything, even my own body, feel unknown. It wasn’t a deliberate choice to run towards something I knew I wanted, but rather a yearning to run away from a storm towards a perceived calm. A calm in which, hopefully, I could find the stillness to heal.

I’ve even gone back to the previous homes. Homes that are always a garland of deja vus. A revel in the past, that are, just like the oddly familiar, odd.

Something still feels hopeful, like the ebbs and flows of life aren’t meant to take everything from you. My memories, my ability to revisit the amorphous structures of my past, the adopted families I never really left behind, all there.

Familiar.

So maybe then, familiarity is the atonement for loss.

I want to hold onto to each item, listening the stories of each memory, and sometimes even, the lack-there-of that each one initiates.

It isn’t even the thing itself that I care about. Nor the memories even.

Each thing, to me, represents an anchor to a consistency. To a stability I can’t automatically have when I arrive at my next destination. Each item I take with me provides me with the ability to reach out and grab something in my next unknown, and know that I’ll be grasping something familiar.

A phantom negotiation with the world for some semblance of stability.

So then what should I take?

I want to be judicious about what I choose to bring into this next season of my life. The default sentimental panic (and expensive) urge to pack it all and mule it over to my new life is there. But I am, also, acutely familiar with the cost of taking this easy way out.

Each item serves as an anchor to my previous life, and those points keep me connected, yes, but with that also, give me a way to keep me from truly experiencing the new found life that I seek. The distraction that extra weight brings to my life, inhibits me from experiencing the weightless and open potential of the newly encountered unknown.

The real reason I move.

“Should I take my bear can?” I question myself. I hold it, recounting the memories of it serving me a half dozen times in the various forests of the PNW. “Maybe I’ll find a use for it in the concrete jungle of New York”, I humor myself, already knowing I won’t.

What about the studio lights I acquired, hoping to kickstart a new pathway into portrait photography? Or the books I was once so eager to read. How about the chair that I sat on through countless video calls, or the art that I stared out for hours, looking for something to wonder about?

It’s funny how we encounter the best and worst parts of ourselves in the things we choose to inhabit our environment.

How some things evoke a hope for life, a dedication to a value, or enable the performance of a joy that few other things can compare to. And how other things represent failed starts, forgotten dreams – the cruft of a life left from an unanticipated wake of change.

I came across the idea of liminality a few years ago, almost casually, while cooking lunch and listening to a podcast in the new home I had just moved to.

Liminality as a quality can be expressed both in the physical, as a place, and in the immaterial, as a time.

We are surrounded by liminal events, and often we choose to celebrate them – funerals, weddings, graduations, New Years, new jobs, new moves. They are times that mark a transition from one state of being to another. In our society, so many of our ceremonies and rituals result from these events, characterized in all the proclamations that go hand in hand with those transformations.

And then liminal spaces – the places that feel most like home to me. Airports, hotels, bridges, bars. All providing temporary refuge from one major place to another. Places were the rules of society feel different, where you will have dinner for breakfast or a drink at 4pm with international strangers in some new city, or where you will meander across a divide in an activity that is, in itself a pleasure.

I ponder attachment. Why it hurts to leave and change, even though, as the flippant phrase declares, "change is the only constant".

I find myself walking the razors edge, with a rope of my left pulling me towards attachment, towards all that I’m leaving behind, and rope to my right pulling me towards detachment, an existential need to let it all go.

And so I walk, slipping, falling, as each tug from the ropes sways my balance.

The goal really isn’t to not fall, but rather to continue to walk the edge without fearing the slip.

So I’ll spend the week, tending to my routines with the pendulous baggage of finality. I’ll see the friends that I won’t be living in the same place with again. I’ll visit the places I’ve loved, the mini sanctuaries of familiar foods, views, and comforts. I’ll pack my bags, and repack them, a little lighter. I’ll wonder what delights and sorrows I will encounter ahead. I’ll think about all the places I’ll want to see when I come back.

And then the swarm of movement, and all the busyness that comes with it, will take over.

And I’ll find myself in some other home soon, taking in again whatever I am, whatever I have, and whatever I’ll soon become.

Life, at a fundamental basis, is a choice of feelings.

Not that we get to necessarily choose how we feel, but that we choose based upon what we hope we can.

We find new partners for the excitement of acceptance, the casual vulnerability, and the blanket delight of pure physical sensations.  

We chase the overwhelming enchantment found in the exploration of a new place, and the following discovery of the unknown, both within and without.

We relish in the terrifying controlled adrenaline thrill of an adventure – one that allows us to see death, but not touch it.

We listen to that song that acts as an invocation of something deeper, a collective mourning of a past that once was, or one that could have been.

All the various, wondrous, calamitous feelings of life, encapsulated in something profound and deeply human.

It's the baseline currency of life really.

I've been marinating in what it's like to lose – to find myself alone again.

To find myself feeling all of those emotions – anxiety, distress, grief, sadness, nostalgia, confusion, hope – in all their totalities, and to still feel – in whatever meaning it can now take on – whole.

I've been there before. I've never actively wanted to be there.

Life has an almost tragic way of offering these sensations, that you least want to feel, when you least want to feel them.

I'm there now.

It's even been a while.

And so, I've been reflecting a lot on loss.

The loss is not so much me grieving what was, but rather, what could have been.

What has happened, however splendid, beautiful, heartbreaking, maddening, and everything in between, is just that – a memory. I never lose that, even if my perceptions of those memories is distorted in the present.

But what I do lose is the world that I crafted. The one that was created from those memories, and the one that I thought I was living in.

But it wasn't reality, and that realization is the very definition of suffering.

I feel a grief germinating from the dissolution of the world and the dreams that I created while having that thing, that person, that place, in my life, that now, rudely, must be rewritten to accommodate the new reality.

It is, existentially, the greatest pain to reckon with.  

Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

– Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Often these moments of loss recalculate the route of life we take.

Disruptions that force me to question my choices, constraints, beliefs, and values.

I want a life that doesn't feel like merely surviving. But sometimes, that is enough.

Because surviving means to also accept the gamut of life's experiences, and to not deny the pain, the sadness, and the feelings I can so easily run away from, because they too are essential to living.

Because surviving means to delicately curate the attachments I have in my life. To intentionally allow for each suffering, and to have the courage to let go when the cost is too high.

I sit here, writing, feeling, breathing. It's hard. It's painful, and perversely it's also beautiful.

To be alive is to take the risk to be.

I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

― Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I've been thinking about what it means to exist past a loss.

To lose, and to live with that loss.

To release the stress, the elasticity, and to put my energy elsewhere.

Not in an exercise of self delusion – to forget what once was – but instead to live in what is.

It feels like an obvious travesty, to abandon all that you can relish now, in favor of hankering for what is no longer there. But we do it – I do it, anyways.

The tide of loss takes, smooths over, ripples, and somehow leaves both less and more behind.

But then maybe a flexion of freedom is to let go. To remember that all that is, ourselves included, is a suggestion on the universe.

Our etch, however short, however long, deep or shallow, is impermanent – and that itself liberates us to leave our old barren world and run into the next one that we can belong to.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

― Joseph Campbell

I've learned recently that loss isn’t just about the rush of sadness or the mourning.

It’s also, sometimes unfairly, a beacon. Something unforgettable in my mind and spirit.

A beacon to remember how lucky I am to even have had something I cared so much about losing.

A reminder that I’ll always lose, and I can’t know when I’ll lose.

It's an everlasting signal: a cue to live bigger, love harder, and cherish every beautiful fleeting moment that presence offers.

Everything else is a distraction.

i wonder. no. i wait, for the
melody of clarity to play
an effulgent warmth of white, blues, colors.
shifting, moving, carrying, bearing
a vessel of their own dissolution
a mountain range of them, in fact
waiting for their earthly significance
overseeing, peering through.
the gaps – if any
waiting just a little longer,
for the descent that follows

// written on alaska airlines 2157, from sfo to pdx

the ocean sings her boisterous song
first a murmur — a trial of sound
then the squelching symphony
of overlapping water
leading into the sonorous crescendo
of a terrestrial collision
before once again, perpetually chorusing
to that gentle hum, to begin anew

// written on the shore of sunset beach, oregon coast

I love the idea of the road.

The rough terrain and the never before seen vistas. The cultures, the art, the foods, the music, and the people.

The world unexplored, in all of its anticipatory delights and sensations.

There is an excitement of leaving the familiar behind – just for a short time – exchanging the warm comfort of the known with the provocative embrace of the new.

I've been fortunate enough to have seen so much in my life. Different times, different places, different wonders. The gamut of poverty and wealth, nature and the created, the exciting and the terrifying.

It's been a generational privilege, to feel the new, from my grandfather traveling the world in the 1950's for political missions, to my parents migrating across the world to America decades later, to myself finding new homes and communities as I progress through my life.

I've wondered, a lot, why we take so much interest in visiting new places. Why we choose to leave.

Sometimes it's forced upon us, sometimes it's pilgrimage to reflect and expound ourselves. Sometimes it's just an excuse to escape the core dissatisfaction of our unexplored selves.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

― Lord Byron

There is an inherent sacrifice to exploration. It's a curiosity with a cost. To see new things, to experience the other and the outside, requires an adaption of self.

To truly experience another culture, some part of your view of the world must be retired to make new for an alternate perspective. It's not an easy choice, to relinquish the comforts of the known, the patterns and routines, the people in our lives, and the lives we define in the context of what we currently are, all in the hopeful exchange of some potential reality.

But there is also an inherent satisfaction with that exploration. It's a curiosity with life, to embrace possibility, and more importantly to find out one's own nature when removed from one's expected environmental context and stimuli.  

It exposes a side of ourselves. The discomfort of the unfamiliar tests our underlying principles.

What do I care about right now?

We learn how we adapt, how we grow in circumstances foreign to our core self. That excitement is an allure. The questions of self discovery, beseeching us under the guise of a novel delight.

In many ways, it's an exercise in what it means to be free.

If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself.

― Joseph Campbell

I'm fascinated by the reasons to migrate. To purposely find oneself amongst the unknown.

Maybe it's a person, an opportunity, the exciting bustle of a complex city, the calm of nature, a yearning to find a community, or even just a change from the expected and now boring norm of our current lives.

I find myself in my fifth city. I've moved many times in my life, taking a sometimes obscene delight in relinquishing my past self for the anticipatory novelty of the next. I've lived in 15 different homes in that process – each move, posing an opportunity to reexamine my values, my things, my choices, and my world.

Every new life has been a reconciliation of self. The chaos and disruption, the loneliness, the curiosity and excitement, all centered around me and my mind, sometimes pervasive, and sometimes unacknowledged.

I wonder how much of this is all in pursuit of a deeper reckoning with world, or perhaps even, myself?

I've pondered how much I've used the novelty, the busyness of the logistical move, to escape my unexamined mind.

How I've run from permanence, not because it actually exists, but because some of my choices are harder than others to undo, or even to learn from. How the decision to stay, terrifies my yearning to replace what I am, with what I can be.

Maybe it's an escapism. To run from my deeper self in pursuit of shallower changes.

How easy it is to replace my own true inner work with the newly created work of the different.

And yet I find myself in my current home.

It's not a definite stability that I seek, it's the ability to be surrounded by the people, things, and ideas that I love.

It's the ability to pack what I already have, myself and all the accoutrements of the familiar, and to feel complete, not because of the world I've learned to know, but instead, of the self I've grown to love.

in that mirror lies the reflection
that keeps track of me
a singularity now, the past, a future
nestled into this reality
this moment – a capture of me
away from all that I've been
as i am now, my fluidity
the honesty is stark
my transitory self
no matter the benchmark
i think – I see myself?

// written in my bathroom, alberta arts, portland, oregon

444 days ago I died.

April 1st, 2020

It wasn't the finality of life kind of death – instead it's the kind of death that you remember. A permanent etch in your memories that has an indelible before and after.

It may sound like a lurching transition from one life into a completely different one. But in the moment, it isn't obviously or memorably different. It's instead one, that only in retrospect, changed everything.

At that point 9181 days of my life had passed. 96% of my life to date.

Since then 444 days have passed. The other 4% of my life.

I look in the mirror daily. Sometimes I cringe. Sometimes I exalt.

Why do I want my body to look a certain way? Why do I find what I am, materially, to sometimes be remarkable, and other times, downright embarrassing?

There is a lot of talk about body image, body positivity, body acceptance, like talking about it will really change how we internally feel. Maybe.

Honestly it really hasn't for me.

Maybe you're on Instagram or TikTok, watching people flaunt their chiseled bodies, their flattering new style, their beastly workout routine, their healthy diet. All of the perfectly timed, tailored, and filtered performances.

Is it all a cry for attention? Maybe. But we listen to it. We watch it. We relish in other people's images of their life.

We know it's all a sort of farce. We desperately wish it wasn't. We know something must be missing – there always is – but what if this time, they were actually perfect? Wouldn't that be something?

It's a blind hope really, disguised as attention.

What else do we have to compare ourselves against? In the absence of self driven ideals, culture fills in those gaps.

We watch the people with the money, the time, the knowledge, and sometimes the favorable genetics, with a sweltering envy. It's not that they aren't admirable people, or that they aren't driven by the same cultural objectives that we've all implicitly agreed upon. It's just that they are them - they have the attention and admiration for now– and we are us, on the sidelines, craving.

If I am not them, how will I be noticed, respected, valued?

How will I be loved?

It's all a reinforced cultural norm– regardless of gender or ethnicity – a culture that while predominantly Victorian in origin, is now the lingua franca culture of the Internet we all live in.

We struggle to share ourselves as we are. We filter, we restrict, we construct carefully crafted images of self.

We loathe negativity. We read other's negativity in our voice. We reinforce external perceptions, without giving ourselves the chance to truly perceive ourselves.

We give a passing grace for other's flaws, but to ourselves, the internal incessant haranguing seems like a necessary part of existence.  

I grew up in an environment that did not favor movement. It favored the results, but never the performance. I thought I should look a certain way, but how I got there wasn't important.

One of the most popular greetings in most Indian households is, "Wow beta (son) you've lost so much weight". It's a strange greeting, perhaps a nod to the predominance of high blood pressure in the community.

I grew up never really understanding the relationship between my body and my self. But I knew others seem to care, for some unknown reason.

It wasn't that I was unathletic. But I wasn't fit either. I partook in various forms of movement from martial arts to hiking to biking and swimming. I found the occasional joy in them, but I never really cared much for them.

But still I judged myself constantly. I found myself judging others. I felt good if I was the fittest person in the room, I felt self conscious if I was not. I created a self deprecating hierarchy in my head.

I equated the discipline, the self-knowledge, the socioeconomic advantages of being fit, with self respect.

I feared that if I didn't, I wouldn't be respected. I wouldn't be loved. That I would always be playing catchup to that elusive ideal, that others, not me, possessed.

As an adult I tried so many different things. I played tennis. I practiced yoga. I swam. I biked. I hiked. I lifted. I learned how to move.

I tried extreme sports, I tried personal challenges.

Sometimes I liked it. Often I was pretty good at it. But none of it was really sustainable. Change one thing, and it was a reset. Nothing ever stuck.

I valued the movement, sure, but I lied to myself about how much I did. I perpetually found other things that felt more worth my time and energy.

I gained weight, I lost weight. It was all a rollercoaster of confusion.

Why did I care so much to begin with?

Really what I craved was permanence.

I craved a state, that once achieved would remain steady. I would be fit, I would have a body that myself and others respected, and for the rest of time, it would be one less thing to concern myself with. I would be loved for how I always looked, and I could relish in that. I could live a life approved by others.

You probably see why this wouldn't work.

We don't live in a stasis. Stasis is the opposite of vitality.

Stasis is death.

I spent most of the week of March 9th, 2020 in a state of active fatigue.

I was riding the high of a post promotion, post travel life from the weeks before. The world seemed uncertain then, with some new virus going around, but it didn't feel like something I couldn't handle. I'd been through some shit before, this couldn't be all that different.

I woke up March 13th, feeling like death would be better than waking up.

It was a physical terror. It was an existential terror. To be a pioneering victim of the century's first pandemic.

I lay in bed for weeks, without the energy to stand, to eat, to shit, to put my attention to anything else but sleep.

My muscles hurt, my chest hurt, breathing hurt. I was so totally exhausted.

I felt, for the first time in my life, my body falling apart in front of my own eyes. I knew that however things turned out, I wouldn't be the same.

In the moments that I couldn't sleep, I pondered.

I questioned my life up to that point. I remembered the days, just weeks before, of boundless energy.

I remembered going for a run, in my home in New York, as a homage to the first beautiful day we had that winter.

I reflected on the walks, the runs, the sweaty work outs, the physically exciting moments where myself and my body got to experience being. The totality of immersion into action.

I remembered fearing, reading articles about people recovering, permanently debilitated. The multiple doctors I talked to offered me the choice assurances of "well we all really hope you don't die, just make sure you can breathe alright".

In my privilege of being able bodied, with no major health conditions, with access to a seemingly endless amount of calories, I'd never contemplated an alternate reality. One were I couldn't just do the things I wanted to do.

I reflected on the mentality that I had developed towards moving. It was a chore. It was work. It was something that given a choice, would rank after everything else on my list. I thought of it really as a means to satisfy my insecurities – not as something always pleasurable in of itself. I would strive to be healthy, not because I wanted to, but it was what culture told me was the right thing to do.

It realized it all was temporary. My life. My people. My abilities. Maybe I'd have them for as long as I lived. Maybe I'd lose them now. The coin was still in the air.

I resolved, that if I could get through this crisis, still able, I would yearn for, I would relish and cherish every day I got to move. I would move, not because I had to, or because it would get me to where I wanted to be:

I would move because I could.

On April 1st, 2020 I started moving again. It started with walk. Then a hike. A pose. A run. A swim. My body in all is potential, sometimes struggling, sometimes transcendent, but oh so capable of moving.

It's been 444 days of movement.

People often talk about how love is the meaning of life.

It only ever registered in the romantic sense for me, even though as a bold statement it seemed that it would have potential layers in its meaning.

I think the meanings are lost because English falls short. We use a single word to channel a plethora of feelings.

We can experience love in so many ways. Our friends make us feel love. A beautiful song makes us feel love. A kind complement can make us feel love. We can feel love in the things that we do. The places we see. The people we become.

I've wondered how much I've reached for expectations in moments of love. Where I've substituted presence with desire. Where I've left the love wayside as a means to preserve the sensation itself, abandoning the moment – the pleasure itself – for an empty yearning of permanence.

Love in a way, is the abandoning of those expectations, not because they are horrid or malicious, but because they are a distraction.

I fell in love with moving.

The play. The beautiful world I got to see. The sheer enjoyment of watching my body flounder. The exhilaration of the self push. The hormonal reward for being alive in all of its senses.

I wish I knew in my previous live what I know now:

Move.

Because you are alive. Because it's magical. Because you can.

dropping into the vastness
a dive, a glide, a beginning
an intimate breathe, chasing immersion
a contortion, a follow, another breath
the dance, to the melody of the splattering divine
back beading, the percussion of rain
a love that isn't a trickle, instead –
the enveloping embrace of totality

// written on the shore of the columbia, janzten beach, portland, oregon

Words color our world. They guide our thoughts, make us feel, connect, and understand. They are our joined reality, allowing us to reshape the past, understand our present, and yearn for the future. Words transmit beyond ourself, our places, and our time.

I came across a beautiful word recently:

Parvaaz / परवाज़ / پروااز

It's an Urdu word that, as every language does, has a literal meaning – to rise.

I looked up another meaning (according to this quora response, but I'm a descriptive linguist so I'll go with it), its deeper poetic one:

the rising of a bird during its first flight.

That flutter in your heart before the kiss. The audible thudding before a performance. The rush before an adventure commences.

Parvaaz.

The sensation that lies in that space between the unknown turning into the known.

The flattening of all potential realities into the one you will now live in. Your life, in all of its thrilling moments.

It's scary. Existentially terrifying. You risk death, or worse, the death of your world, of the ideas and beliefs that have led up to this splitting point in time.

In a good life I think, you feel it a lot.

I've struggled in those moments. To stay present, to acknowledge the terror, the excitement, the possibility, and to still persevere with the moment.

In my best memories I've come through. In my regrets, I didn't.

"It's confidence that got you through those moments", I think to myself now with all the graces of hindsight.

I know what confidence feels like, but it hasn't always been accessible. I've felt the paralyzing anxiety rush through my body before, seizing my very breath, my thoughts, my moment, me.

"Anxiety", I decide, "is then the opposite of what I want".

Every motivator worth their likes will tell you "confidence is a fake it till you make it" kind of ordeal.

That hasn't really worked for me. What does "faking it" even mean?

A few months ago, a close friend of mine invited to go skiing with him. It was a pastime I never really had the socioeconomic ability to really partake in it before, but this time I did.

As I spent the humbling first days, bumbling my ways through beginner slopes, crashing, falling, and learning, I relished in the mechanical improvement. Like most physical action, you can feel yourself getting better. It is a visible progress. It's inordinately satisfying to recall being utter shit at something that comes effortlessly to you in the present.

The improvements happen gradually across multiple dimensions of growth.

You go faster, take more calculated risks, try a more challenging terrain, fall less, shit your pants less. You get better.

In learning theory, they call this the zone of proximal development.

It's that area just outside the familiar, where you nudge against what you know into the area of what you don't know, one prod at a time.

We all do this intuitively, we talk to children at their vocabulary level but introduce a few words we know are likely unfamiliar to them to help them improve. We explain things to a friend, dropping words that they likely don't know, but in context of the explanation, now understand. We take risks, pushing right outside our comfort level.

It's a delicate balance. Venture too far out this zone, and you risk everything negative: confusion, shame, injury, or death.

But in this zone you experience the fundamental human satisfaction of growth.

I felt myself getting better. I found the beginner slopes easy. I felt confident. The terrain was familiar – effortless even.

I relished in telling that to my friend. He congratulated me on the progress, and I felt good. I was confidently in my comfort zone. It wasn't scary, it wasn't unknown.

He told me to try harder, "this isn't the confidence that you want, you don't want confidence in the terrain, you want confidence in yourself".

"Try this one", he pointed to intense looking pathway on the ski resort's map, with a concerningly innocuous name.

My heart pounded. I felt that fear. The anticipatory worry that I wasn't yet ready for what life was offering me.

I was confident in where I was, wasn't that enough?

Without processing the feeling, I took the lift to that run.

As I stood at the top of that terrifyingly inviting slope, I reflected on those words in sheer panic.

I wasn't confident in myself, my abilities. I liked where I was before, it was familiar, known, comforting. I had mapped out my terrain, but change the terrain on me, and I was back to existential anxiety.

To get better, to be confident, is a regular charting to your ideals, through the winds of your fears, insecurities, and discomforts. It's not a one time affair, it's an intentional practice of orienteering from where you are at and making progress towards where you want to be. Stay blissfully where you are at, and you risk the conditions changing on you while you are not prepared.

Confidence isn't a state to relish ones existence in, it's a comfort appreciated through the consistent provocation of the self.

I dropped down the slope.

It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. I loved it. I felt alive. I wanted more.

Growth often seem like it's linear. Like its improvement should charted on a line, each assessment an upgrade upon the previous state, point by point.  

But growth doesn't always look like improvement or optimisation.

It's not always getting better.

In 2020, I felt myself struggle to make progress towards my goals. Everyday's effort was spent in just keeping myself from drowning.

A forgotten growth in the world we live in that chases ultimate efficiency is resilience.

Weathering the complex storms of life. The calamities, the suffering, the inevitable loss. To survive, to metamorphise, to adapt in place.

This progress is invisible. It's also essential.

You grow downwards, like a tree, to maintain your strength, not to seek the light.

It's a wonder then why I run, why I cower away from this. It feels good doesn't it?

The intoxication of growth.

But the risk is there.

I risk myself, my world, my reality. I risk suffering.

I risk trying, failing, and facing my own imperfection. I risk making mistakes. I risk going backwards. I risk perpetually not reaching the idealized state that I will always be short of being.

When am I ready? I won't know. I can't. There is no signal, no sign from above, there is no optimal level of preparedness that I can strive to reach for.

There is only the moment and my confidence in myself to get through it.

But I can relish in that feeling. The silliness of failure. The pleasure of success. The rising that occurs only after risking falling.

Parvaaz.

look at the tree outside
how its mass of leaves glisten in the sunlight
how it withstands, blooms, grows
how it sheds, loses, and heals
bearing through the trivialities of days
with patience, focus, and commitment

look how the tree reaches to the sky,
a hope – a yearning for light
look how it reaches, deep below,
grounding itself for strength
searching the elixir of life itself

look at the tree outside
growing through its damages, its scars
becoming its vulnerabilities
as the world continues around it

watch the tree as it sways in the wind
a rustling dance to its strength and flexibility
look how it grows and grows
never sure if the next gust will topple it
or whether it’ll withstand a century with calm majesty

notice the tree outside
how it sheds its skin, its bark
revealing a raw facade
before again turning that fragility
into a resilient armor

look how the leaves come and go
forever changing, forever turning
the flowers bloom at their time
the sun shines at its –
the will of the seasons
a time, a place, a person, a reason
just look at the tree outside

// written on the back table in donnie vegas, portland, oregon

Autumn is a season of transition.

The transitory colors of leaves strewn about the glistening streets.

Reds, oranges, yellows.

An elaborate season. My favorite.

It’s a season of transformation, not towards vitality, but towards a long silence.

A rest.

The word that reverberates in my mind is metamorphosis. It’s a loaded word. With memories of early childhood, learning about caterpillars unwitting metamorphosing into butterflies.

Wrapping itself up in a vessel of its own dissolvement.

No expectations – an act of instinct. To let go. To surrender. To transform.

To the childlike mind it is hilarious to imagine the contrast. A slow, missable creature becoming an erratic and bold butterfly. Something to chase.

On this cool autumn day, I hear the migrating birds, the falling leaves – the overcast skies and the petrichor perfuming the air.

I too, must let go.

Surrender what I am, to allow for the potential of what I can be.

Surrender is the precursor to renew, to life, to vitality.

The end of before. The beginning of the rest.

(clang)
the machine runs
ceaseless, incessant–
like a stream beyond winter.
always carrying, moving, going.
to where? unknown, but there.

(clang)
i can’t take a break,
there is no time.
time, my concept, absent from me.
rest? i’ll sleep when i’m dead.

(clang)
the pointless meetings
perfectly attended.
the deadlines
dreadfully met.

(clang)
the intoxicating grind.
i can miss today–
for my beloved
tomorrow awaits

(clang)
the conveyor belt must run.
the machine cannot stop.
productivity. production. product.
who am I selling to again?

(clang)
stress is progress.
i must build loudly.
my presence never forgotten.
forever a rebel against–
the quiet doing of nature.

(clang

)

You have a life. I have one too.

You live it, you accept that things happen.

You disallow other things. You choose one thing over another. Sometimes it's a choice, a gut feeling. Sometimes an excruciating discovery of priorities.

Why is something coveted, and something else, an entitlement?

Internal turbulence

"Values."

A word so casually tossed around, like it means something. Like it isn't something we pipe dreamed into existence.

"Find your values, let them guide you, don't let others get in the way of them."

I read it, I feel better. It's the answer to existentialism. Mental masturbation.

But do I trust myself to do that? To know? To value?

I'm frustrated, I recall. I don't even know what I want anymore.

I hear a voice, my conscience. What does it say? Are those my values?

"Go. Don't go there, don't do that. You shouldn't have said that. You should have said that. You should have stood up for yourself. Do the thing. Stop wasting your time. You're wasting your life. Say something. Reach out to them. What do you really have to lose? Just say no. Do that instead. Stop."

Despondent reorientation, ridden with guilt, bereft of satisfaction.

"I should–"

That's not what I want.

Actions betray my ideals

My family, my friends, my health, my internal calm, my flow, love, music, freedom, curiosity – all my supposed values.

And yet:

I want to be free. But I cower from my dreams.

I want to feel alive. I run away from discomfort.

I want love. I ignore it.

The phone rings. I let it.

I try to learn it. I'm not enough this time.

I sit still. I can't.

My active values, opaque to me, executing my life. Me, a marionette of my own existence.

I find the shortcuts. The lies. The dopamine chimera.

Sugar over movement. Action over intention. Scrolling over play. Desire over love.

My deeper, hidden self, is manifested at night, in the darkness of solace.

I can't sleep.

Lies to myself

Actions are the manifestations of the inner self.

The discord of trauma, false beliefs, coping mechanisms, cultural pressures, all murk the internal world. They cause us to construct ideas of who we are, who others are, and what the world is, that is not in agreement with reality.

The Buddhists say that "life itself is suffering". Not a visceral suffering, like a stab or a wound. Instead it's a suffering garnered from the reconciliation of the version of the world we have in our minds with the version that exists in reality.

I thought I was addressing the important aspects of my life, my values. I was lying to myself. My actions betrayed my false ideals.

I thought emotional disconnection was resilience, to withdraw rather than to resolve. This was a lie. My body kept the score.

I thought the life I was living – by my own accounts a comfortable and privileged life that I had worked hard to attain – was gratifying to me. It wasn't. That too was a lie.

I found ways to distract myself from this horror of responsibility. Of the agency that in my life, my decisions are all ones that I must not only orienteer but fully accept the resulting tradeoffs.

Emotional state changes offer alluring distractions from these choices. Obsession with work. Alcohol, weed, caffeine, sugar, sex, relentless action. Anything to distract from the internal hollow despair.

But those distractions prolong the emptiness, they mask it for the briefest of moments. Reality, eventually, always must be contended with. Life itself is suffering.

"What's your addiction? Is it money? Is it girls? Is it weed?
I've been afflicted by not one, not two, but all three."

– Kanye West, (Addiction, Late Registration)

Values demarcate the boundaries of choice. But having them doesn't change the choice of action. Action is a constant personal decision. A honest persistent analysis of one's true intentions.

I can change my values, or change my actions. I don't get another option.

What I ignore persists. The demons get stronger, the consequences of a decision more unbearable. Empty wallowing is alluring, but it's the trap of despair, a desperate attempt to give up the only faculty I really have, agency.

I have to face myself.

Distance from ∞

We judge. A lot. On anything, on anyone.

It's a mirror really. A reflection of our own ideals, our choices, our lies, our insecurities, reflected on the shiny canvas of another's actions.

We don't really truly understand most people's intentions. Their values.

They probably don't either. We mirror. They hurt.

We continually harangue them. We berate, we rip apart relationships. We impose our view of the world. Does it work? No. We do it anyways.

We judge ourselves. Everyday.

We compare our abyss with theirs. They've seen more, been more, done more, felt more. They are closer to the ideal, farther from the abyss, a disguised despair and fear that we ourselves aren't capable of filling the void.

Every ideal. Our judge.

What we want to be, but are always short of becoming.

The distance from infinity is always infinity. Unobtainable.

Waking up

I obsess with the distance. How far I am from where I want to be. How long I have to go.

Months seem like an eternity. I should have been there by now.

Any progress is unbearably slow. Will I ever finish? Will I ever get there?

I constantly worry about where I need to be, rather than where I am – the next step I can actually take. It's the ultimate distraction, a retreat into my own head.

I don't want to notice where I am. I don't want gratitude for my work so far, for the gifts others have given me. That presence requires me to accept that I am where I am, and I am who I am, forever imperfect, forever striving, forever degrees removed from the ideals I haven't even properly set for myself.

It's the waking up from a dream.

The weary despondency that even an imperfect life, with its flaws, mistakes, and learnings, is still a beautiful one, and the only one I can live.

"Beauty is the harvest of presence."

– David Whyte (Beauty, Consolations)

Baby steps

I watch. I notice. I reorient. I wince. The unknown.

The abyss beckons.

"Hello."

I can't wait anymore. No more lies. No more distractions.

I want to be alive. I chose to be alive.

I take the first step. I'm not "there". "There" is a mirage anyways, a siren hoping to distract my presence. It's worked before. Maybe not this time.

Every weighted step, a reorientation of myself. A self that is always changing, but maybe now, I can choose to bear witness to the change.

"But it's just a step", I think.

"It's the only one that matters."