Which was also hard for them.
When I returned from this most recent time in Paris, I remarked to anyone who asked that I was all travel'd out. That I wanted to remain within America's borders for a bit, and were I to indulge the wanderlust, it would be to learn and better understand my country's contours. Its ridges and valleys. Ride down its roads, ideally with the top down, or, to stray further into utopian vision, I'm on a motorcycle, and I'm the only living thing as far as the eye can see with only two legs.
Looking back over my shoulder, I can't pin down the precise moment or even the day when it happened, but at some point the imperative returned to add stamps to my passport. And I say 'imperative' because it's, at this point, more than fidgetiness.
I started this entry in California, and am finishing it in New Haven. Even after a shower and a midday nap, I still wear the second skin of travel-grit on my flesh and in my teeth.
On one level, it's a simple desire to escape. Greener pastures, perhaps, but simply a change of air, the kind that a protagonist's life crisis propels into need. Let me go to London and get my life right. Or something like that. Whether or not such a sojourn is open-ended in nature is an as-yet unanswered question. Renewed vigor in my engagement with the world outside of my country boils in this stew as well. I've strengthened my resolve to recommence my Arabic lessons. Habibeti is, at this moment, preparing a list of works in response to my query for recommendations on works concerning Islamic theology, particularly those works with a particular linguistic bent. Houda Benyamina's French-Qatari Camera d'Or, César Award-nominated banelieue drama Divines is currently streaming on Netflix. International strains of far right populism sweeping across western democracies and the global fight against the rising tide suddenly assumes outsized importance in my mind. It doesn't help that my reading for the past few months has primarily concerned the Opium Wars and has had for its backdrop India and China in the 1830s. The urge to become a news reporter and investigative journalist stirs within me. Pulitzer Season changes the air. Send me to a place where neither the Queen's English nor that spoken by her wayward American nephew is the primary language. On some roof, pidgins gather. In Karachi, ambulance drivers, for one pound a day, gather the dead and rescue the wounded from burning buildings, terrorist attacks, gun battles. Tell me more.
I knew, when I'd landed in JFK after that last flight from Charles de Gaulle airport, after a year of protest and love affairs and a terrorist attack, that my contentment with America and her boundaries would be temporary. When I moved back to New Haven and said contentment flared into a full-blown case of joy, imagined futures proliferated. Many of them saw me embedded into Connecticut's concrete. My roots entwined with the water pipes underground. Stability was the goal, I'd told myself. I'd aged out of weekend-long benders in Paris and getting myself stranded at the Serbia-Kosovo border and speeding recklessly through Cairo's streets. My back couldn't take much more Palestine, or at least, could not have endured a stretch longer than those 10 weeks under Occupation. Another year in Paris, though? I'm sure that could be negotiated. But the problem with all of these things is that they have end dates, and while knowledge of that precise time is a stable fact in and of itself, it means the future has a terminus. And there is only uncertainty after that.
With the CT futures, there were enough lodestones to make the fantasies concrete in my mind. Family was near, though that is never guaranteed as we children age and move our separate ways and Mom eventually tires of the New England cold (though I doubt she will ever retire). The friends I share with Bill are largely based here, though, that is also a very transient population, and, if I learned nothing else from this last time in Paris, it's that Bill's friends are ubiquitous. Whenever I find myself pining for New England's topography, only visions of incandescent trees lining interstates fill my head, and there's enough of a breeze to make putting on a jacket prudent, and there are apples to be picked. I was born during that time of year. New England in the summer, in the spring, never appealed to me. Winters were beautiful, because I was lucky enough, for most of my life, to have rarely been inconvenienced by the snow. Precipitation worsened some walks, but that was about it. And that's not the only time of year the world at night gets that quiet. The job I have now, oddly enough, has pulled me in opposite directions simultaneously. It is precisely the stable income I need to settle. But it offers flexibility that could potentially translate into the geographic. It is possible I may be able to do this job in Montana. In Massachusetts. In California.
But if the escapist imperative that powers this reinvigorated wanderlust had for its principal preoccupation convenience, I'd likely have already committed to moving to California. Where a relatively concrete future waits for me.
I'm returned to October of 2008 when my ideas of what constituted escape were much more simple. It feels now, as it did then: less like unfurling wings and more like sliding out from between the walls of a vice. On both ends are people dear to me prompting introspection--uncomfortable, taxing introspection--and rather than sit and puzzle through the interior entanglement that makes me a mystery to myself on my own time, I'm forced to do it all while going about the business of living. The screen door keeps flying open, and as I try to reel in insights, precious things leap and bound out into the desert. This is why I can't keep pets.
Weeks back, I had the chance to see, in New York, a very dear Vietnamese-American friend whose acquaintance I'd first made in Paris. She'd come to a Black Lives Matter manifestation I and a few expats had planned at Place du Trocadéro, but I hadn't known this until she'd told me about it after a talk Ta-Nehisi Coates had given at the American Library of Paris. This friend had swiftly become one of the greatest, most heartening elements of my time in Paris, one major reason the sojourn was as charmed as it was. One evening comes to mind where I and several of her friends stay up late in a friend's apartment chatting animatedly in French about epigenetics and video games and Descartes, and the air was thick--pregnant--with love and fun and just being. I felt weightless.
This friend had embarked, afterwards, on a mighty task to chronicle her family's history in the refugee camps and after. The project, for which she'd won a Fulbright, had begun as a simple family history, but it had swiftly broadened into a much larger quest, involving officials from the State Department, mistaken identities, an old photo of a missionary baptizing her father, devastating political dialogue in the present, war, and so much more. As she told me about what she'd been up to since we'd last spoke, perhaps a year prior as she was just beginning, I was already dream-casting the screenplay adaptation of this tale.
Conversation soon wandered into issues of allyship and just how much sympathy one American should have for the Trump supporter who stands to lose their health insurance and perhaps even their lives because of their vote. Should we feel bad for cackling mercilessly at the folk so willing to white supremacy themselves into extinction? We talked about Aleksander Hemon and the Bosnian War and how the 2016 presidential election may have made me and many others worse people, quicker to violence, physical and otherwise. It was such expansive conversation, flitting easily between French and English, like a nimble child hopping from stone to river-polished stone to cross from one bank to the next and back.
For a number of years, I'd nurtured the desire to embark upon a similar project with my mother's scopic life story. From having lived through the civil war and military dictatorships in Nigeria to witnessing first-hand the rise of the Moral Majority at Liberty University in Virginia....
Talking with her, I felt blissfully international again. A citizen of the world. It's how listening to M.I.A. makes me feel. Watching her "Rewear It" video, blasting Matangi. I feel like I'm wearing a camo jacket and I have three passports and friends in five continents and I've set foot on every bit of contested territory on Planet Earth. In those visions, there's no vice.
In those visions, I trust myself. Or, at least, I can trust I'm doing right.
It seems ironic that what I really yearn to elude is the ground currently shaking beneath my feet. Professional dissatisfaction, spiritual stultification, the realization that I've been standing in the same place for so many years. And you can change the state of residence. You can change the occupation. You can change the partnership. But the old adage stands: you bring yourself to every relationship. And the epiphany that the vice is currently squeezing out into a pool at my feet is that perhaps the restlessness never goes away. The perfect job doesn't exist not because I haven't created it, but because that quality of an activity or profession is asymptotic. There will always be dissatisfaction. I'm not using enough of my self or my talents. I'm not being paid enough. There's no room for growth. My colleagues are racist. Etc etc etc.
I think part of why I've written so furiously all my life (and particularly in film school) was not just to avoid certain futures (financial destitution, wearing a suit and tie every day, never having the time and money to see other countries) but a method of writing myself into stability. Interior and exterior. It's the most reliable outlet for the roiling inside of me, and I'm now beginning to be paid for it, which is nice. It also promises a platform that could perhaps one day engender exterior stability.
In recent conversation, it was told to me that I put so much value on an externally-attained sense of stability, but that said sense will remain elusive until I can engender the same internally. Not until I give in to the swaying and gain my sea legs will the waters stop churning so viciously.
Such involves giving up things I've held onto for my entire adult life. Belief in one's skill at myth-making being one of them. Belief in the myths being another.
I thought I'd experienced quarter-life crises before, but such mammoth humblings can't happen that often, can they?
Change is the only constant, I once wrote to myself. I'd been thinking, at the time, of the difference between operating out of a posture of fear and operating out of a posture of faith. Where previously, I'd had faith in a core conception of myself, the answer has now turned into a question, the concrete into mist. Faith in what? That the universe is constructed out of love for me, sure, but to what end? What tides have I been fighting all this time?
I'd written the following in 2014:
"Much of my future is unknown. And much of myself is unknowable. One learns to explain to one's self with increasing articulation one's own impulses, but then one believes that one has stumbled upon the answer and, without one's noticing, the fog has descended. Fear has been my response for much of this year. A personal narrative, a myth, is ruptured, and the first oxygen mask I reach for when I'm sucked out of my failing spacecraft into the inky void is the one that pumps fear."
So much easier to tell myself to live in mystery and trust that a peace is being crafted for me that I don't have to craft for myself, than it is to live that truth.
Looking back over my shoulder, I can't pin down the precise moment or even the day when it happened, but at some point the imperative returned to add stamps to my passport. And I say 'imperative' because it's, at this point, more than fidgetiness.
I started this entry in California, and am finishing it in New Haven. Even after a shower and a midday nap, I still wear the second skin of travel-grit on my flesh and in my teeth.
On one level, it's a simple desire to escape. Greener pastures, perhaps, but simply a change of air, the kind that a protagonist's life crisis propels into need. Let me go to London and get my life right. Or something like that. Whether or not such a sojourn is open-ended in nature is an as-yet unanswered question. Renewed vigor in my engagement with the world outside of my country boils in this stew as well. I've strengthened my resolve to recommence my Arabic lessons. Habibeti is, at this moment, preparing a list of works in response to my query for recommendations on works concerning Islamic theology, particularly those works with a particular linguistic bent. Houda Benyamina's French-Qatari Camera d'Or, César Award-nominated banelieue drama Divines is currently streaming on Netflix. International strains of far right populism sweeping across western democracies and the global fight against the rising tide suddenly assumes outsized importance in my mind. It doesn't help that my reading for the past few months has primarily concerned the Opium Wars and has had for its backdrop India and China in the 1830s. The urge to become a news reporter and investigative journalist stirs within me. Pulitzer Season changes the air. Send me to a place where neither the Queen's English nor that spoken by her wayward American nephew is the primary language. On some roof, pidgins gather. In Karachi, ambulance drivers, for one pound a day, gather the dead and rescue the wounded from burning buildings, terrorist attacks, gun battles. Tell me more.
I knew, when I'd landed in JFK after that last flight from Charles de Gaulle airport, after a year of protest and love affairs and a terrorist attack, that my contentment with America and her boundaries would be temporary. When I moved back to New Haven and said contentment flared into a full-blown case of joy, imagined futures proliferated. Many of them saw me embedded into Connecticut's concrete. My roots entwined with the water pipes underground. Stability was the goal, I'd told myself. I'd aged out of weekend-long benders in Paris and getting myself stranded at the Serbia-Kosovo border and speeding recklessly through Cairo's streets. My back couldn't take much more Palestine, or at least, could not have endured a stretch longer than those 10 weeks under Occupation. Another year in Paris, though? I'm sure that could be negotiated. But the problem with all of these things is that they have end dates, and while knowledge of that precise time is a stable fact in and of itself, it means the future has a terminus. And there is only uncertainty after that.
With the CT futures, there were enough lodestones to make the fantasies concrete in my mind. Family was near, though that is never guaranteed as we children age and move our separate ways and Mom eventually tires of the New England cold (though I doubt she will ever retire). The friends I share with Bill are largely based here, though, that is also a very transient population, and, if I learned nothing else from this last time in Paris, it's that Bill's friends are ubiquitous. Whenever I find myself pining for New England's topography, only visions of incandescent trees lining interstates fill my head, and there's enough of a breeze to make putting on a jacket prudent, and there are apples to be picked. I was born during that time of year. New England in the summer, in the spring, never appealed to me. Winters were beautiful, because I was lucky enough, for most of my life, to have rarely been inconvenienced by the snow. Precipitation worsened some walks, but that was about it. And that's not the only time of year the world at night gets that quiet. The job I have now, oddly enough, has pulled me in opposite directions simultaneously. It is precisely the stable income I need to settle. But it offers flexibility that could potentially translate into the geographic. It is possible I may be able to do this job in Montana. In Massachusetts. In California.
But if the escapist imperative that powers this reinvigorated wanderlust had for its principal preoccupation convenience, I'd likely have already committed to moving to California. Where a relatively concrete future waits for me.
I'm returned to October of 2008 when my ideas of what constituted escape were much more simple. It feels now, as it did then: less like unfurling wings and more like sliding out from between the walls of a vice. On both ends are people dear to me prompting introspection--uncomfortable, taxing introspection--and rather than sit and puzzle through the interior entanglement that makes me a mystery to myself on my own time, I'm forced to do it all while going about the business of living. The screen door keeps flying open, and as I try to reel in insights, precious things leap and bound out into the desert. This is why I can't keep pets.
Weeks back, I had the chance to see, in New York, a very dear Vietnamese-American friend whose acquaintance I'd first made in Paris. She'd come to a Black Lives Matter manifestation I and a few expats had planned at Place du Trocadéro, but I hadn't known this until she'd told me about it after a talk Ta-Nehisi Coates had given at the American Library of Paris. This friend had swiftly become one of the greatest, most heartening elements of my time in Paris, one major reason the sojourn was as charmed as it was. One evening comes to mind where I and several of her friends stay up late in a friend's apartment chatting animatedly in French about epigenetics and video games and Descartes, and the air was thick--pregnant--with love and fun and just being. I felt weightless.
This friend had embarked, afterwards, on a mighty task to chronicle her family's history in the refugee camps and after. The project, for which she'd won a Fulbright, had begun as a simple family history, but it had swiftly broadened into a much larger quest, involving officials from the State Department, mistaken identities, an old photo of a missionary baptizing her father, devastating political dialogue in the present, war, and so much more. As she told me about what she'd been up to since we'd last spoke, perhaps a year prior as she was just beginning, I was already dream-casting the screenplay adaptation of this tale.
Conversation soon wandered into issues of allyship and just how much sympathy one American should have for the Trump supporter who stands to lose their health insurance and perhaps even their lives because of their vote. Should we feel bad for cackling mercilessly at the folk so willing to white supremacy themselves into extinction? We talked about Aleksander Hemon and the Bosnian War and how the 2016 presidential election may have made me and many others worse people, quicker to violence, physical and otherwise. It was such expansive conversation, flitting easily between French and English, like a nimble child hopping from stone to river-polished stone to cross from one bank to the next and back.
For a number of years, I'd nurtured the desire to embark upon a similar project with my mother's scopic life story. From having lived through the civil war and military dictatorships in Nigeria to witnessing first-hand the rise of the Moral Majority at Liberty University in Virginia....
Talking with her, I felt blissfully international again. A citizen of the world. It's how listening to M.I.A. makes me feel. Watching her "Rewear It" video, blasting Matangi. I feel like I'm wearing a camo jacket and I have three passports and friends in five continents and I've set foot on every bit of contested territory on Planet Earth. In those visions, there's no vice.
In those visions, I trust myself. Or, at least, I can trust I'm doing right.
It seems ironic that what I really yearn to elude is the ground currently shaking beneath my feet. Professional dissatisfaction, spiritual stultification, the realization that I've been standing in the same place for so many years. And you can change the state of residence. You can change the occupation. You can change the partnership. But the old adage stands: you bring yourself to every relationship. And the epiphany that the vice is currently squeezing out into a pool at my feet is that perhaps the restlessness never goes away. The perfect job doesn't exist not because I haven't created it, but because that quality of an activity or profession is asymptotic. There will always be dissatisfaction. I'm not using enough of my self or my talents. I'm not being paid enough. There's no room for growth. My colleagues are racist. Etc etc etc.
I think part of why I've written so furiously all my life (and particularly in film school) was not just to avoid certain futures (financial destitution, wearing a suit and tie every day, never having the time and money to see other countries) but a method of writing myself into stability. Interior and exterior. It's the most reliable outlet for the roiling inside of me, and I'm now beginning to be paid for it, which is nice. It also promises a platform that could perhaps one day engender exterior stability.
In recent conversation, it was told to me that I put so much value on an externally-attained sense of stability, but that said sense will remain elusive until I can engender the same internally. Not until I give in to the swaying and gain my sea legs will the waters stop churning so viciously.
Such involves giving up things I've held onto for my entire adult life. Belief in one's skill at myth-making being one of them. Belief in the myths being another.
I thought I'd experienced quarter-life crises before, but such mammoth humblings can't happen that often, can they?
Change is the only constant, I once wrote to myself. I'd been thinking, at the time, of the difference between operating out of a posture of fear and operating out of a posture of faith. Where previously, I'd had faith in a core conception of myself, the answer has now turned into a question, the concrete into mist. Faith in what? That the universe is constructed out of love for me, sure, but to what end? What tides have I been fighting all this time?
I'd written the following in 2014:
"Much of my future is unknown. And much of myself is unknowable. One learns to explain to one's self with increasing articulation one's own impulses, but then one believes that one has stumbled upon the answer and, without one's noticing, the fog has descended. Fear has been my response for much of this year. A personal narrative, a myth, is ruptured, and the first oxygen mask I reach for when I'm sucked out of my failing spacecraft into the inky void is the one that pumps fear."
So much easier to tell myself to live in mystery and trust that a peace is being crafted for me that I don't have to craft for myself, than it is to live that truth.