Where were you in 1989?
Doubt is confidence divided by pressure. Just like any formula, the less confidence you have the less pressure it takes to split it into little pieces. It doesn’t mean that a little amount pressure, whether internal or external, will not have a palpable effect on the most confident of people. Actually, because it’s division, all it takes is a small number to reduce to a mere fraction of who you really are.
Doubt is at the core of everything. It’s neither good nor bad-it has no “Moral” value, though we always attach one. It’s what lets you know you’re approaching adulthood. It’s the reason why for the first week of spring break I regressed into watching old cartoons and suppressed a strange desire to color pictures. As children once we think we understand something, we feel sure of it. We understand that our parents are supposed to protect us. We’re also certain that they’re trying to punish us for the littlest mistakes. We feel sure that death is wrong, and that crying means something has fallen apart. We believe in our heroes with undying affection, and we condemn our enemies with decisive hate. It’s simple, and doubt only begins to creep in as our brains tell our bodies to metamorphose. We begin to start doubting whether we are children any longer and to question what childhood and adulthood even mean anyway.
Once it seeps into your bones, stretching them out, it never goes away. But doubt is the reason many of us are here. It was doubt that let me born-doubt that my mother should indeed get an abortion, doubt that premarital sex was an abomination, doubt that anyone but her own child would ever truly love her, yet ironically, here we are years later unable to truly speak to each other not because of love, but because we doubt whether we can understand each other beyond a basic level.
Doubt only emerges after you’ve gained enough confidence to do something.
“I’ve had an epiphany,” I wanted to say to my boss, but she wouldn’t understand the irony. She had just asked me if my migraine was better because I had missed the previous day of work. I had just finished explaining to her that it crept up in the middle of the night as most things tended to do lately.
“I’ve made a decision, and I might as well tell you now,” I said. “I’m not coming back next year.” It was a slight moment of glee, and for the briefest of seconds, we both admitted how much we hated each other. I hated her because perky makes poor management; she hated me because I had little patience for cordialities.
I don’t remember what she said to me next. I just remember her leaving, saying, “Of course, we’ll miss you, but I’m happy for you.” Then my memory moves forward to D., the only person I trust in that place, and the relief I felt once I told her. She wasn’t surprised.
“Was J. happy?” she asked. I thought about J. and the perky way in which she said Of course, we’ll miss you…
“Yes,” I said. “She sounded happy.”
“I knew she would be. She hates you because you’re a troublemaker.” It was a compliment, and I understood it.
By then, it was my first day of freedom. I wasn’t going to be teaching next year. Doubt hadn’t turned it into a pyrrhic victory quite yet.
“A Ph.D.?-That’s wonderful-Where?-Have you been accepted?-Taking classes, oh!-Which schools will be going to?-Are you staying here?”
I answered everything with confidence. The plan was in the works already. I had emailed my professor from WashU. She had already recommended I look at four programs: Stanford, Duke, Columbia, and UPenn. At nearly the weight I was in high school now, I felt my old confidence slipping back on like a forgotten dress.
“Is there anything I can do to persuade you to stay?” my boss’s boss asked.
“Not at all. It’s time.”
My ideal school was Cornell. Maybe it still is. It has everything I want-the potential for both critical and creative. In the end, I always want everything, and I hate to settle. As we finished up The Odyssey in freshman English, I thought of the distant and lonely Ithaca, NY. I wondered what the school and its town were like. I had done research for the last three weeks on a bunch of different schools. I annotated pertinent sites, highlighted professors of interest, and acquired an application for auditing courses at WashU.
I still felt sure. Then sleep started to escape me, and the nightmares began to creep. Doubt is an adult’s boogeyman, waiting silently for you at the end of the day in the quiet of night. I didn’t have nightmares about going to school. Those were good dreams. It was nightmares about teaching. They assaulted me for nights until last night.
Last night, my dreams changed tone. Before I went to sleep, I thought about all my doubts-doubts about god, childhood, memories, people. I lack trust in everything right now. As I fell asleep, a dreamlike thought crept in that led to dreams about ships and The Odyssey. What was I doing in 1989 was one of my last thoughts before falling asleep. It is my 20th year of some sort of odyssey. I was six years old then. Noriega had taken control of the country. H.W. Bush sent troops in December of that year for Operation: Just Cause. I remember brush fires, pans banging in protest, disease rampant, and people dying in the news, but my memories are still jumbled. I told the strange person asking about 1989 in my dream that I didn’t know. There wasn’t anything.
“Ask your family. Ask others. 1989 is important.”
I had another dream. Edward James Olmos played the part of a worn Latino Odysseus. I wanted on his ship (a real one, made of wood, with sails, floating on a water, rocking back and forth in a comforting motion), but I confessed I got carsick easily. He looked at me, and then looked around at his crew and the people on the bay. He said, “Make three friends, and I’ll let you on my ship for the summer.” He pointed it out arbitrary faces. I recognized old high school friends among the strangers in the bay, and some of my students as well. I figured that would be cheating.
“I’ll make three friends. I’ll be on this ship,” I said.
The Odyssey opens up with Telemachus in search of his father. Athena pleads with the gods to let Odysseus return home. Zeus complains about mortals: they’re fickle, petty, and never listen to the gods. They don’t follow the holy signs and warnings.
I’m following a sign because doubt has me. I know at some point it’s had you. I’m following an advice. The one that asks me to ask everyone I know what he or she was doing in 1989. So if you have time, tell me, what happened in 1989? No history lessons, just what mattered to you that you remember in 1989. If it’s not something supernatural, then my subconscious is asking me to find answers in my past and to learn from it.
Who were you in 1989? What do you remember from that year?