The following essay is a compilation of personal journal entries from 2015, when I was at my lowest point. The words are striking to me now, a very intense and urgent reminder of just how deeply I believed my world was coming to an end. I am in recovery, no worries. But I feel it's time to put this out there. Living memory. And yes...I literally journal like this.
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Guillermo del Toro once tweeted, “We come into this world just to shout/scream/laugh – declare who we are before fading…and hope it echoes in someone’s soul.”
So of course that’s what it is. He echoes in my soul.
Obviously that wasn’t his intention, he came without intentions, but we can’t predict or control the effect we will have on other people. We don’t know most times who’s hurting or vulnerable or codependent, and we can’t stop them from one day seeing us as if for the first time and believing in their broken heart that we can save them.
I’m not sure if we have true souls, but I think there is definitely a part of us that transcends the ordinariness and banality of the strictly material. Maybe if, fantastically speaking, someone went in and excavated my soul, and if they placed their ear to the wall, they would hear the echoes of this experience – the highest and lowest feelings, the dreams, the tattered hope, and all of it would be called by his name.
Am I doomed to his echo? I think I am doomed to putting a face to desires that are never satisfied, to hanging on to the smallest fragments of what it must be like to be human, and cared for. Sometimes I feel very, very deeply that attachment is blindingly simple, that love waits just beyond another day or two of staying here; sometimes I could swear I feel it right next to me but separated by a plane of existence, able to look but never touch. Is this a manifestation of a yearning so long and so unresolved that it is self-aware, that it needs to understand why it would exist only to scatter in the darkness like ancient starlight? That’s one way to put it, I guess.
It’s enough to make me feel like a mistake. I mean, we’re all mistakes, we shouldn’t even be here, but working with what we’ve got we attuned ourselves to the possibilities of love, and within that framework I’m the mistake of mistakes. And I feel like a fool. Far enough removed from it now, unmoored and drifting further every day from my little island prison, I see more objectively what an idiot I was to believe in such things. I went through all the machinations of infatuation – happy, confident, expectant, the world all bright and new, etc. etc. Maybe that makes sense for other people but not for me. Real, solid, foundational happiness – not contentment, not joy, not peace, but happiness – will not have been a part of my experience in this place. I’m a shadow passing through the world; no one can see me.
It’s actually a bit frightening the way that, even apart from how others can determine our own identity, our mind dictates our experience of reality. When our eyes are on the prize we are blind to anything that doesn’t support the grand idea, and we are hostile to truths that would dismantle it. Is it so important that we hold to it? No, the chemicals in our brain merely dictate the necessity. We are slave to the interchange, the increase and the lack, and only if equilibrium is restored do we see as clearly as one can see, laboring as we do inside the equivalent of an illusion.
Last week I realized how linked my creativity is to my desires, and my obsessions; how he shows up in so many of my internal wanderings and creations, almost spontaneously, as though the stuff of which my inner life is made is intricately infused with those things of him that I loved most. I wondered if all artists experience this. Maybe all artists, once they reach a certain point, find their body of work is just a retelling of their single most important pain, and as such, I’m afraid everything I create until the day I die will wear his face.
