On balance

This habit of overemphasizing “all things being equal.” That one thing must balance out the other. This push to fit form to content. In this perfectionist impulse I knew I was barking up the wrong tree. I figured they’d hear my cries elsewhere.

You can refuse to knock on your own door. You can get up to the impressive work of not thinking about yourself all the time. You can be helpful and generous and you can listen and be good. And then there is a rupture inside of you. Perhaps it has always been there, and grown in the dark. The only way to address it is to go around talking about yourself. Not exclusively, but more than you ever have.

Maybe this is uncomfortable or maybe it feels too good, to stand so squarely on the “I.”

But so much of what I thought I was saying about other people was about me. I didn’t know what I was saying. The unconscious reigned. I wanted to know everything but I had prevented it. I read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick write about her friend Michael Lynch. I read Ali Smith write about a girl named George and a Renaissance fresco painter. I hired an analyst and stumbled through a series of romantic clichés.

Is this not every other person’s story? And so you tell your own through what you recognize in them. The hesitance, the denial, the savior fantasies, the vague and hopeless grasping, the fear of the future and idealization of the past.

People, when they are giving you wise advice, talk a lot about letting go. This sounds absurd at first. That you shouldn’t push for everything you say you want. That you shouldn’t make sure it all works out. But then what becomes apparent, the more you push and rearrange and organize is that it is all pointless. Whoever is in there will fight their way out your whole life, and if you try to bury them they will kill you. So the letting go is the only thing that can happen outside of self-destruction. Surrender. Disintegration. I read about this in Sexuality Beyond Consent and Is the Rectum a Grave? It is in relation to sex—that so-called powerlessness is not an unfavorable position—but also it is in relation to everything. That failure is a site of regeneration.

The clown flops, the lover falls, the seduced is undone. You are not one thing. You are both, or all, or neither, or anything, whatever. This is what the good philosophy was getting at. You keep reading—this time, for more and not less confusion.