That which feels fervent
I just binge-read Ling Ma's Severance, an uncanny, eery book to be reading in the middle of our current pandemic. So many little details that mimic the current reality -- and certainly so much that is far from where we are currently. But the similarities pin-prick the skin, raise goosebumps. And then the devolution of the book's reality leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. And questioning everything.
It's day 77 of life in semi-quarantine in this pandemic reality -- some days, it feels like we're living in a wild different world. Others feel so normal, full of meetings and routine, work that needs to be done, laundry that needs to be folded. Sometimes I forget the world is crumbling in so many of its layers. Sometimes I just focus on backyard birds and baking bread. And sometimes I see an empty bus rolling past, or a restaurant shuttered with boards and spray-painted with some stay-strong message, and I feel a knot in my throat, stifle a feeling that the world is swaying beneath my feet.
--
I just wrote a lengthy-ish email to Norayr for the first time in months, perhaps a year, as I listen to the soundcloud mix he sent last month. A single link, no context. The fact that he still sends me things, even if I don't respond, means something to me. But as I learned, it likely has to do with a universal duty then anything very personal.
Before writing, I (virtually) leafed back through some past correspondence, lengthy, jumpy, musing, and remembered the addiction I had to our dialogues. Which were sometimes monologues because we didn't always correspond to have a dialogue. There was something about Norayr's conviction, his fervent beliefs, his almost frenetic sense of needing to follow and propagate his values of decentralization, of Armenianness and the Armenian language, of code, of building a different culture for Armenia, of sacrifice in the name of the collective... that was addictive. Even when I didn't see eye to eye, even when I pushed back, devil's advocated, asked questions... I was drawn to that passion, as myopic as it sometime felt in moments I wished for a more personal sense of connection and friendship, rather than some duty-bound compulsion to email me for the sake of the greater good, the greater cause.
It was contagious in a way -- motivating. Feeling someone's passion and dedication. Even for something you don't necessarily agree with or understand. I think that's what I miss about having that friendship / connection, beyond the specificity of it, was the general way it pushed me to wonder about my own convictions, to want to pursue something with voracity. The way it made me write, think, ponder. I was addicted to writing those emails to Norayr because it was a way of reflection and writing for myself. Even if he came back and dismissed what I'd written, disagreed with a musing, the thing that persisted was the compulsion to write.
It's perhaps the thing I miss the most in my life right now. Having someone that pushes me to think, reflect, converse, engage, dig deeper, commit to a cause. Life with Mike is a land of fantasy, procrastination, and creating worlds that are designed by a passion for play and control of that which is not real. We have our daily life of habits and connections, we laugh and poke fun and dig up dandelions and cook meals and go on bike rides and buy things online. But we don't lead a life that feels motivated forward, that is striving for something, that has a unified mission statement or vision. We don't have very many conversations that dig into passions, debate issues, explore possibilities. One of us is passionate about something and the other warmly or distractedly listens, in the best of moments encourages, and then we mostly go back to our own lives, orbiting in the same solar system, but seemingly around different fuzzy planets.
We don't share a passion or drive in most things. And I find myself avoiding thinking about future questions, future directions, big life questions, because it doesn't feel like we have the motivation or alignment to actually reach those things and embark on them together. Mike wants a house. I'd like to be a mom and quickly feel the clock ticking on that front. And each morning I bring him coffee and kiss him on the cheek and then embark on my life of habits and inclinations, not moving any closer to a larger goal beyond improving my birding -- something I am passionate about, something that keeps me grounded and has no doubt improved my quality of life during this pandemic, but something which is not necessarily propelling me forward towards a larger life goal.
The pandemic is an interesting time to be assessing one's life and wondering about its larger purpose. As we find our daily routines interrupted and have to learn to create new ones, as we spend more and more time with fewer and fewer people, as the future continues to feel unsure and insecure, it is easy for me to do a few things: 1) Dive into daily routines to create structure and avoid thinking of the larger mess and one's place in it; and/or 2) Spiral out into questioning the purpose of one's life and whatever future is ahead, wondering how much I should ride this strange wave in my current reality, and how much I'm just watching potential float by in the current and not reaching for it because I feel trapped on my small little raft. If I give up my current raft, where will that leave me? Is this my only chance?
It's obvious I feel trapped by my own choices and circumstances. Some moments I feel resigned. Some moments I feel loved and loving. Some moments I feel excited by possibilities. But many moments I find myself asking how I ended up in a stereotype of a relationship I never thought I'd find myself in.
I value optimism, thoughtfulness, connection, a thread of spirituality, mindfulness, movement, creativity, common purpose, in-sync energy, drive, motivation, humor, earnestness, passion, shared curiosity, health, learning, listening, enjoyment, sensuality, possibility, collaboration.
I've never found all of those things in a single person, in a single relationship. And many of things ARE present in my current relationship. But it feels laughable that my current situation is perhaps farther from what I pictured, what I intended, then most of my past relationships. And yet, here we are coming up on the end of year 3. And neither of us has left, even though I know we've both imagined it many times.
Being human is a confusing affair.
I miss having my brain challenged to explore "the most wide intellectual vistas that I have ever known" (in the words of Laura Dunn / Rosa Red), I miss the exhilaration of pondering together, or pondering apart but knowing there was someone there that was going to make you think even harder, make you want to think harder. When Mike and I get into heated debates, I feel guarded, protective. Like I need to brace myself for the anger and conviction that bubbles up, that doesn't feel safe to banter with. I feel proactively like I hold back, or want to hold back. It doesn't feel fun. It feels unsettling.
Norayr was a friend that served as a surrogate for the kind of intellectual volley and confiding I craved during a relatively lonely time in my life (even if he never signed up to be and ultimately I crossed some unfortunate boundaries and asked more of him than he ever wanted to provide).
His passion captivated and confused me, but it also motivated me. I miss that motivation. It's something I think I seek out on my own in many ways now, but I miss having a person to volley with.
It makes me wonder about my tendency to be drawn to that which I don't understand.
My most passionate, yearning, difficult, and deepest love still feels like it was in high school, in a relationship with the enigmatic Sophia who I never felt like I could ever fully know. Who kept so many secrets from me, and with whom I always felt, in many ways, like I was on shaky ground. Ultimately, I cherish a relationship during which I perhaps had the least self confidence of any relationship because of the secrecy and uncertainty. But my god, there was never a lack of things to wonder, to explore, to do together... and apart. And that attraction burned until the end and beyond.
I keep coming back to Esther Perel's theory around the familiar vs the unknown and how that dichotomy and it's delicate balance has defined so many of my struggles in relationships.
As I circle back to the initial compulsion to write this post -- the pandemic, the re-evaluation of life as normal, the revisiting of past connections and compulsions -- I keep bumping up against this idea that this strange time of shifting patterns, crumbling infrastructure, broken patterns, and new ways of thinking is both the worst and best time to re-evaluate everything in ones life. To revisit values, redefine a life mission statement, figure out where I actually want to go, what I want to move towards. While simultaneously craving that which is safe, routine, comforting, normalized, reliably expected (even if not desired).
Perhaps I'll end on that musing. And put in writing the desire to bring out my camera and document some of this shifting world that we're living in. Look at it instead of looking away. Try and answer the questions rather than pinging off of them. And at the very least, write my way through some thoughts rather than leaving them to bump around in my head noisily.
It's day 77 of life in semi-quarantine in this pandemic reality -- some days, it feels like we're living in a wild different world. Others feel so normal, full of meetings and routine, work that needs to be done, laundry that needs to be folded. Sometimes I forget the world is crumbling in so many of its layers. Sometimes I just focus on backyard birds and baking bread. And sometimes I see an empty bus rolling past, or a restaurant shuttered with boards and spray-painted with some stay-strong message, and I feel a knot in my throat, stifle a feeling that the world is swaying beneath my feet.
--
I just wrote a lengthy-ish email to Norayr for the first time in months, perhaps a year, as I listen to the soundcloud mix he sent last month. A single link, no context. The fact that he still sends me things, even if I don't respond, means something to me. But as I learned, it likely has to do with a universal duty then anything very personal.
Before writing, I (virtually) leafed back through some past correspondence, lengthy, jumpy, musing, and remembered the addiction I had to our dialogues. Which were sometimes monologues because we didn't always correspond to have a dialogue. There was something about Norayr's conviction, his fervent beliefs, his almost frenetic sense of needing to follow and propagate his values of decentralization, of Armenianness and the Armenian language, of code, of building a different culture for Armenia, of sacrifice in the name of the collective... that was addictive. Even when I didn't see eye to eye, even when I pushed back, devil's advocated, asked questions... I was drawn to that passion, as myopic as it sometime felt in moments I wished for a more personal sense of connection and friendship, rather than some duty-bound compulsion to email me for the sake of the greater good, the greater cause.
It was contagious in a way -- motivating. Feeling someone's passion and dedication. Even for something you don't necessarily agree with or understand. I think that's what I miss about having that friendship / connection, beyond the specificity of it, was the general way it pushed me to wonder about my own convictions, to want to pursue something with voracity. The way it made me write, think, ponder. I was addicted to writing those emails to Norayr because it was a way of reflection and writing for myself. Even if he came back and dismissed what I'd written, disagreed with a musing, the thing that persisted was the compulsion to write.
It's perhaps the thing I miss the most in my life right now. Having someone that pushes me to think, reflect, converse, engage, dig deeper, commit to a cause. Life with Mike is a land of fantasy, procrastination, and creating worlds that are designed by a passion for play and control of that which is not real. We have our daily life of habits and connections, we laugh and poke fun and dig up dandelions and cook meals and go on bike rides and buy things online. But we don't lead a life that feels motivated forward, that is striving for something, that has a unified mission statement or vision. We don't have very many conversations that dig into passions, debate issues, explore possibilities. One of us is passionate about something and the other warmly or distractedly listens, in the best of moments encourages, and then we mostly go back to our own lives, orbiting in the same solar system, but seemingly around different fuzzy planets.
We don't share a passion or drive in most things. And I find myself avoiding thinking about future questions, future directions, big life questions, because it doesn't feel like we have the motivation or alignment to actually reach those things and embark on them together. Mike wants a house. I'd like to be a mom and quickly feel the clock ticking on that front. And each morning I bring him coffee and kiss him on the cheek and then embark on my life of habits and inclinations, not moving any closer to a larger goal beyond improving my birding -- something I am passionate about, something that keeps me grounded and has no doubt improved my quality of life during this pandemic, but something which is not necessarily propelling me forward towards a larger life goal.
The pandemic is an interesting time to be assessing one's life and wondering about its larger purpose. As we find our daily routines interrupted and have to learn to create new ones, as we spend more and more time with fewer and fewer people, as the future continues to feel unsure and insecure, it is easy for me to do a few things: 1) Dive into daily routines to create structure and avoid thinking of the larger mess and one's place in it; and/or 2) Spiral out into questioning the purpose of one's life and whatever future is ahead, wondering how much I should ride this strange wave in my current reality, and how much I'm just watching potential float by in the current and not reaching for it because I feel trapped on my small little raft. If I give up my current raft, where will that leave me? Is this my only chance?
It's obvious I feel trapped by my own choices and circumstances. Some moments I feel resigned. Some moments I feel loved and loving. Some moments I feel excited by possibilities. But many moments I find myself asking how I ended up in a stereotype of a relationship I never thought I'd find myself in.
I value optimism, thoughtfulness, connection, a thread of spirituality, mindfulness, movement, creativity, common purpose, in-sync energy, drive, motivation, humor, earnestness, passion, shared curiosity, health, learning, listening, enjoyment, sensuality, possibility, collaboration.
I've never found all of those things in a single person, in a single relationship. And many of things ARE present in my current relationship. But it feels laughable that my current situation is perhaps farther from what I pictured, what I intended, then most of my past relationships. And yet, here we are coming up on the end of year 3. And neither of us has left, even though I know we've both imagined it many times.
Being human is a confusing affair.
I miss having my brain challenged to explore "the most wide intellectual vistas that I have ever known" (in the words of Laura Dunn / Rosa Red), I miss the exhilaration of pondering together, or pondering apart but knowing there was someone there that was going to make you think even harder, make you want to think harder. When Mike and I get into heated debates, I feel guarded, protective. Like I need to brace myself for the anger and conviction that bubbles up, that doesn't feel safe to banter with. I feel proactively like I hold back, or want to hold back. It doesn't feel fun. It feels unsettling.
Norayr was a friend that served as a surrogate for the kind of intellectual volley and confiding I craved during a relatively lonely time in my life (even if he never signed up to be and ultimately I crossed some unfortunate boundaries and asked more of him than he ever wanted to provide).
His passion captivated and confused me, but it also motivated me. I miss that motivation. It's something I think I seek out on my own in many ways now, but I miss having a person to volley with.
It makes me wonder about my tendency to be drawn to that which I don't understand.
My most passionate, yearning, difficult, and deepest love still feels like it was in high school, in a relationship with the enigmatic Sophia who I never felt like I could ever fully know. Who kept so many secrets from me, and with whom I always felt, in many ways, like I was on shaky ground. Ultimately, I cherish a relationship during which I perhaps had the least self confidence of any relationship because of the secrecy and uncertainty. But my god, there was never a lack of things to wonder, to explore, to do together... and apart. And that attraction burned until the end and beyond.
I keep coming back to Esther Perel's theory around the familiar vs the unknown and how that dichotomy and it's delicate balance has defined so many of my struggles in relationships.
Our therapeutic culture “solves” the conflict between the drabness of the familiar and the excitement of the unknown by advising clients to renounce their yearnings in favor of more rational and “adult” sexual agendas. Therapists typically encourage clients to really get to know their partners. But I often tell my clients that knowing isn’t everything. Eroticism can draw its powerful pleasure from fascination with the hidden, the mysterious, the suggestive. Revealing less is not a norm of couple therapy. Many of the couples who come to therapy imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. In large part, I see my job as trying to highlight for them how little they’ve seen, urging them to recover their curiosity and catch a glimpse behind the walls that encircle the other. [quoted]
As I circle back to the initial compulsion to write this post -- the pandemic, the re-evaluation of life as normal, the revisiting of past connections and compulsions -- I keep bumping up against this idea that this strange time of shifting patterns, crumbling infrastructure, broken patterns, and new ways of thinking is both the worst and best time to re-evaluate everything in ones life. To revisit values, redefine a life mission statement, figure out where I actually want to go, what I want to move towards. While simultaneously craving that which is safe, routine, comforting, normalized, reliably expected (even if not desired).
Perhaps I'll end on that musing. And put in writing the desire to bring out my camera and document some of this shifting world that we're living in. Look at it instead of looking away. Try and answer the questions rather than pinging off of them. And at the very least, write my way through some thoughts rather than leaving them to bump around in my head noisily.
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