The World As It Is, Part I

I’ve written, or tried writing, a number of essays before this one. I even finished some of them. But they don’t feel right, not yet. They feel less like perspectives worth sharing and more like older versions of myself airing years-old grievances across the page. The world passed some of them by, I’ve reconciled myself to them, but they insisted on taking my time and voicing themselves anyway. And now, voiced in private—after insisting on the labor of editing their words into production-ready prose—they are satisfied, and leave the decision to me whether to press Publish.

For now, I’ll pass. But, I need to publish something because another part of me, my ego, insists on keeping a weekly schedule, just as another part of me, my body, insists on a regular gym schedule. They get obnoxious and make trouble if I don’t.

And that something is this: despite the immense relief of finally writing again after years of intractable dumbness, I still hesitate with what I say. I’m less careful with my words than I used to be (that’s progress) but I’m far more cautious with the subjects. I know much better now what I know and what I don’t know, a wisdom well-earned, but unfortunately all I want to talk about is all the interesting things I know dangerously little about.

Some of that wisdom: a dull knife is more dangerous to its wielder than a sharp one. And after years away from writing for an audience, my knife is worn.

One keeps their knife sharp through regular discourse, else you find yourself as I am, spitting sentiments years old that just refuse to let go. I want to grab you by the collar and scream I Told You So, I want to publish all my receipts, I want to ask Claude to go through all the group chats and all the old arguments and show them all how all the robots agree with me (no you can’t see the prompts). It’s not that I want to be told I’m right—I know that they know that I know—it’s that I want them to think now, today, that huh, maybe because he was on to something then, he’s on to something now. I don’t want validation of my past, I want permission to be myself going forward.

And that’s where the dull knife slips, and where I get cut: I still want permission, even though no one demands I ask for it, even though no one feels so authorized to give it.

I used to be good, really good, at explaining myself. I got that way because it was how I first learned to protect myself when I was being authentically me in front of others. But soon I replaced myself with the explained version, the safe version, and I no longer knew if the parts of me I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) explain were still a part of me at all. And so they hid themselves, but unbeknownst to me kept talking amongst themselves, and now torture me by forcing me to write retrospectives about how I was right about Bernie and the lockdowns and the campus protestors, actually, that I will never publish.

I spent half a decade in rebellion against the world I found myself in, refusing to simply accept (as I once did, as I always had before) what I felt and thought and heard and saw, refusing to accept the World As It Is, insisting instead that everyone just work towards the World As It Should Be, and wouldn’t that be great if everyone would just open their hearts and eyes.

But everyone will not just, of course everyone will not just, no one has ever just, because that’s not the World As It Is.

A funny thing, though—you, in particular, can choose to just. You can choose to just do whatever it is you want to just do. That’s the one person you have some amount of control over. Or, maybe more accurately, you are the one person for whom you can remove all the obstacles between the You That You Are and the You You Ought To Be.

But the irony in that funny thing is this: to do that, first, you must accept the You That You Are. You must surrender to whatever that is, wrong or right, dumb or discursive, dull or sharp. I had to cut myself once or thrice to find that wisdom, and I still forget it from time to time (though I know now that there are parts of me that will loudly remind me if I ignore them for too long).

Once you experience it, that surrender and acceptance, it’s the most natural thing in the world. You realize that so much of your suffering, maybe all of it, is in the resistance. And, you can just not. You can choose to just not. And so you make that choice, and for a while, you literally can’t remember what it was like to be otherwise, until gradually, imperceptibly, you find that you’re back in rebellion and you’ve conveniently forgotten how to surrender. You have to remember how to remember how to choose to find your way back.

My father died a few months ago, after ten years with Alzheimer’s. He was not a writer. He left his lessons to me only in memories. One of those lessons is that, though we hurt, though we regret, though we grieve, and though we die, we need not suffer while we do it. He didn’t suffer as he died over ten years, not visibly anyway. At worst, he was uncomfortable, he was in pain sometimes, and he got bored a lot, but he had peace. And through that peace, he didn’t suffer.

I did not understand that lesson until shortly before he passed, when I first felt that surrender and acceptance. I imagine that was his natural state, that he felt that way almost all the time. He made sense to me then, in a way he hadn’t before.

My mom told me, when I asked, that they never really talked about the end, that he never brought it up. I was so confused. If it were me, that’s all I would talk about. But I understand it now. It was just another day, another happy day.

I wish he wrote that down, I wish he wrote a lot of things down, so he could share that wisdom with the grandkids he will never meet.

He left me many lessons, but only in memories, and the most important lesson was one he didn’t mean to teach, that memories are fragile.

So I have to keep writing, on a schedule, so that even if I forget, I have a way to remember.