Oh boy, it's the big one!!!
Oh boy, it's the big one!!!
we've all read a newsletter by someone who maybe should've just talked to his therapist instead
It’s funny to be tackling this week’s TWIRL after last week, when I was grappling with the indifference I felt towards my creative pursuits. There’s that quote I read in a very big book [watched on TikTok] where Ethan Hawke is talking about how art feels like a luxury until it is a necessity. Just fun and games until a family member dies, or you fall in love, and suddenly need to understand if anyone out there has ever felt like this before. To understand that this feeling is not delusional, but common, and that the world turns anyway. The knowledge that someone has captured sweeping, unrelenting torture or extravagant passion and placed it onto a canvas or into a recording tells you that even this galactic scale of feeling you’ve been exposed to is still happening on planet Earth.
I read in a novel [watched on TikTok] that Pharrell claims the universe is a library, and when you sit down to practice a craft, you check an idea out. You need to keep checking out new ideas. They say you keep up a creative practice so that when inspiration does strike, you have the vessel to more fully realize the ambition.
Enter: heartbreak. In the last few days I’ve written over 40 pages in various journals, in contrast to the months it’s taken me to get even halfway through the script to my pilot, or weeks that I’ve written a newsletter about basically nothing. Drawing is a hobby of mine that for quite a while has felt just out of reach, but the night of the operation, I was suddenly compelled to illustrate the shape of her eyes, the correct thickness of her lips, and felt stalled by my inability to correctly describe the curve of her cheek. I panic at the notion that someone else will fall in love with these same features, but be able to access one more dimension than is available to me now. In this moment, I wish I had more practice with my pen.
I monitor the symptoms of this heartbreak like I’ve contracted a virus, and coincidentally, I did. I came down with a bad cold in the last few days. Daily I take note of how it feels to walk, or speak, and to which ailment is the cause of my regression. Every cough feels like I’m hacking up sweet memories. My friend in his first year of med school, who I run all of my maladies by, despite his claims to “lack the vast majority of skills and knowledge necessary to give advice as a doctor,” says that sadness can activate the body’s response to illness. Which I think is a pretty fucked up bug in the code, but does make me feel valid in staying in bed next to a pile of tissues and ordering delivery three days in a row.
I routinely describe some of my least favorite emotions as “ugly feelings,” inspired by the book by Sianne Ngai, which I tried to read before getting stuck at the foreword and realizing that I was too dumb to make any progress. Don’t know what she thinks about ugly feelings, but it’s how I characterize the minor, grating emotions of envy, anxiety, superiority, bitterness. Heartbreak has always been one of my biggest fears, and the anticipation of experiencing it sometimes creates a lot of these ugly feelings for me. So I’m struck by the observation of huge, beautiful expressions of grief that this experience of heartbreak has lent itself to. I know that sounds masochistic, but there’s a revelation in the experience of wailing and sobbing, the feeling that your organs have been pulled through your mouth and are being squeezed in front of you: and yet, you are left standing on two legs. It’s not an ugly feeling. Unfortunately, the Greeks snapped when they described tragedy as catharsis.
Like the virus, the healing gets a little easier every day, unfortunately. Unlike a virus, a large part of me wants to stay ill. I don’t want to shift from being a living, breathing body to finding company amongst the ghosts of her past. I have to touch my own chest, and clutch my legs to remember that I, too, am flesh and blood. I mourn the death of the future I thought we would have, but also have immense hope for the infinite possibilities (sometimes, including that same future.) Reincarnation doesn't just happen when your heart stops beating, it seems we are constantly being born into new lives.
I love her in the same way as the animals that mate for life. That’s silly to say, which is why I’m only saying it to you guys. I’ve never felt that way at the end of a relationship. The downsides of ending a relationship before the love has gone away is basically everything you can imagine. Torture, etc. But the positive is, potentially, having an unharmed source of love and joy to tap into. When I think about what it is to be happy for another person, or to experience glee, I think about her. When I think about what it is to be welcomed, to be passionate, open minded, to be warm, to be enchanting, to make someone smile, to make someone laugh, to make someone CACKLE: I have the way in. I know, undeniably, what love looks like. Its eyes, lips, and cheek. I imagine her frozen in air, skipping down the hallway of her apartment, with her hands and legs outspread, curved, almost touching. I imagine her as the essence of joy, which is important to me, as someone who needs to be able to access joy, but so often is unable to. I have the way in now.
It’s been good to try and see friends. These moments bring me joy, along with other beautiful feelings. On Monday, I watched the Bachelor with my crew. The main guy, whose name I do not remember, got covid. The girls lamented about having to do their dates with him over video chat and I yelled at the television set: you’re just not doing it right!!!!!! You need to do a big kiss at the end!!!!! then I was crying again, and again as I type this.
Tuesday I went to a rehearsal for a short film, which was an amazing experience of reconnecting with my true passions, and a bleak realization that I no longer have my person, who I want to tell every detail about my life to. And I don’t want to search for who that person could be, because I know who it is.
In both these instances, it was the effort of others that brought me the only joy I could feel in the last few days: given to me by the entertainment giant ABC, or sanctioned by the American Film Institute, but really by all my friends involved in experiencing this odd new life with me. So now, Wednesday, I throw my effort towards all of you, in return, hoping you will be my people. And, of course, to one person in the audience, who maybe reads, but maybe doesn’t, but at the very least has given me the permission to write about this. She has given me much else as well.
