Pain, losing myself, and finding who I am all over again
It’s a moment I am not proud of. I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize myself.
My face looked heavy, and my smile nonexistent. My peace was far from present.
Somewhere along the way, between starting a new job, meeting new people, and establishing myself in a new city, I lost myself. I stopped feeling comfortable being who I was. I started wearing a mask to hide my emotions from myself and others.
It felt easier to cry alone than admit life was complex and lonely; uncertain and turbulent. I stopped doing the things I loved, like filling these spaces with thoughts and ideas — some half-baked and some overthought.
I was running from myself like Tigst Assefa ran to beat the women’s marathon world record. It felt easier. It felt better. But then, with sleep still in my eyes, my mouth crusted with a night’s worth of drool, and my hair unkempt, I looked in the mirror and broke. I didn’t like the man I was growing into — one that lacked love and appreciation for others. And I hated the person I had been. The mask was a band-aid on a wound that needed stitches.
I lost myself.
Pain is powerful. It is also manipulative. Somehow, it will convince its victim that its presence in life is warranted. Once convinced, it stays — like a bad roommate who is always late on the rent and always comes up a dollar short.
Pain possesses a foreboding quality. When it grabs hold, it makes every action in life feel more fearful. It rationalizes thoughts that isolate and create an outward shell, leaving the inner mind to suffer alone.
It makes me think of a line by Norman Mailer from The Naked and The Dead (My favorite 20th-century writer, for what it’s worth) that says, “It was as if he had a coating of insulation about all his feelings, and the insulation could be shed for only a moment or two before his pain drew it about him again.”
Pain pushes those who show love away. It convinces its possessor that they are undeserving. And its influence allows isolation to always look more enticing, vitriol and anger to be the default, jealousy to be the remedy, and self-obsession to become the consequence.
What I felt when I looked in that mirror, unrecognizable to myself, was pain. What came next was the weight of buying into pain’s web of lies.
Weeping was inevitable.
That morning, I splashed water face. I grabbed the towel that hung next to me and padded my eyes. I brushed my teeth, went to the gym, wrote, and went to work.
That’s what I was supposed to do. It’s what I had to do.
On the drive home — darkness surrounding my car as I crossed the imposing Ravenel Bridge — I lowered the volume on the radio and thought.
“What caused this pain?”
“How did I end up here?”
“Why did I stop doing the things I enjoyed?”
Sometime between mid-July and late August, I started to believe pain’s lies. I told myself I was too busy to relish in my creative writing. I convinced myself I was too busy to walk outside and feel the sun on my skin or take a moment to call that friend I was thinking of not too long ago.
To disguise pain, I used productivity.
To disguise a lack of self-worth, I used work obsession.
To disguise loneliness, I used the company of strangers, which always left me feeling far lonelier than before their arrival.
As Mary Shelley wrote, “I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers.”
I elected to drive home in silence after that realization.
The next morning, I was walking on the treadmill when a video popped up in my recommended: “Productivity is ripping you apart.”
In the video, the creator analyzes American work culture, explaining how corporations stopped seeking maximum productivity from their system and instead started seeking it out of people.
The video-maker’s hypothesis was the root of our pain, the genesis of our confusion, and dismay — my dismay — was defining myself by my productivity.
Items are checked off the to-do list, but life isn’t lived or felt.
Humanity rushes from one item to the next with no will or care for what currently is — and what could be.
The sunrise is missed because we are too tired from the day before. Sunsets are ignored because we have a deadline to meet. Rinse and repeat.
At least, that’s my story. I stopped determining life for myself. I started looking at the to-do list and predetermining if today was a bad or good day.
I let other’s ideas of me govern my humanness. Acceptance became the precursor to every smile. Meanwhile, my unrecognized soul withered from a lack of nourishment.
I stopped reading as much. I stopped writing as much. And I let the outward unhappiness of others fuel the unhappiness within myself.
The saying goes, misery loves company. I let it drag me down. It was easy to complain. It was easy to be bitter. It was easy to turn into everything I didn’t like because the alternative felt far too arduous.
All the while, I ignored the countless ways life blessed me. I lost sight of the life I lived now existing as one I once prayed for.
Not anymore.
As I powered down the treadmill and turned off my iPad, sweat dripping off my brow, I took a deep breath.
It was a cleansing one.
The breathing in was everything I felt: Pain, loneliness, selfishness, vindictiveness, self-loathing, self-hatred, and self-doubt, among others.
Exhaling was the act of letting go. It was as if a 300-pound dumbbell was lifted off my neck. Life felt authentic again. I felt present again. For the first time in two months, my life felt like my own again, as if I was in the driver’s seat of a familiar car and knew how the vehicle handled.
As the lights flickered off on the treadmill, I grabbed my bag. I walked into the warm sunshine, with birds chirping, bugs buzzing, a lawn mower cutting grass, and people talking.
“This feels good,” I thought to myself. “Yeah, this feels good enough.”
Life isn’t defined by productivity — nor should it ever be.
To measure a good life is to examine the why and how of the lived experience.
It is saying hi to strangers. It’s helping someone out because you can. It’s starting the art project you’ve put off. And it’s trying your hand at something new.
What makes for a meaningful life is often what we do in between our spurts of productivity: the long lunches, the complex discussions, the evening walks, and peaceful mornings.
So discovering the version of yourself you lost sometimes means remembering that whether you’re in Charleston, London, Kampala, or Tokyo, we all watch the same sunsets, count the same stars, seek the same joy, and long for a purpose.
And maybe that purpose isn’t always as “productive” as the world tries to sell it to be.
“When people say to me, ‘how do you get through life?’ it’s the same thing,” Jimmy Valvano said in his now famous 1993 ESPYS speech. “To me, there are three things we all should do every day. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three, you should have your emotions moved to tears. Think about it. If you laugh, you think, you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. If you do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”
What am I reading?
My October issue of Harpers Magazine came in.
The main story in the issue is regarding the lack of Democratic Party candidates that the establishment takes seriously. It is actually quite the critique of the long-known anti-democratic system the Democratic Party utilizes to pick its nominee.
It was a riveting read.
Here is my favorite line: “The continuing influence of [Pat] Buchanan’s message, now deployed by Trump, has paralyzed politics in America, given the Democratic priority of preventing another Trump presidency — and the reluctance of the left to fight back with its own insurgents. Hence, in the 2023 general election, there will likely be little or no discussion of the existential crisis confronting American society: racism, chronic diseases, militarization, war, and the threat thereof. this depressing situation at least highlights the fundamental problem of a system in which power is centralized in the presidency, so that all politics are ultimately subsumed into a binary contest. Once again, we’ll have the great democratic privilege of voting for the lesser evil. In that race, no one gets to write in.”
You can read the full story here.
Some work I am proud of
1.) ‘I will truly fight for American workers and jobs’; Tim Scott on the UAW strike
CHARLESTON COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — The historic United Auto Workers strike has become the latest battleground for candidates vying for the presidency in the United States.
More on. the story here.
2.) Recount results: Tedder certified as winner in District 42 Democratic primary runoff
CHARLESTON COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — The tightly contested results of Tuesday’s South Carolina State Senate District 42 Democratic primary runoff went to provisional ballot count and recount Thursday morning.
More on the story here.
