Catching Up

My life has changed so much since April of 2015. I decided it would be good to write out a brief narrative of those changes so that I can reference themes or events in future posts. So here goes:

I remember myself in April of 2015 riding high on the wings of a brand new hope after long feeling paralyzed. The low point had been the month previous. One morning on my drive to school in early March, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I felt too stunned to drive. But stunned by what? A powerful nothing pulled at me––what Solomon Andrew might call "the absence that is a presence"––what Emily Dickinson might call "an element of Blank." I sat there, my hands gripped on the wheel the whole time, my eyes staring forward without seeing, breathing slowly and deliberately against the weight pressing in at my chest. It took me well over an hour before I could continue on my way to school.

In retrospect, I call this the weight of empty vision. Our hopes and dreams of the future enlighten us. I don't mean in some vague, mystical sense––I mean that it's actually easier to walk when you (think you) know where you're going (and whether or not you end up in that place)––that lacking a clear vision of what you want from the future can become an absence that presents as heaviness and pulls you down.

Weeks later, just before April dawned, I received news that I'd been admitted to the University of Chicago for an MA program. Suddenly, my future brightened, and the fog inside cleared a bit. I aspired to use my year there to build the portfolio of research I would need to enter a PhD program in Chinese history and eventually become a professor of history.

But what can I say of what actually happened? From my vantage four years later, I don't think I ever really knew that I wanted to be a historian. I knew that learning about the human past inspired me, that I wanted to write, that I enjoyed conversation, but I didn't know what archival research entailed. I didn't know what questions would motivate my scholarship. I didn't understand academic politics. All I knew was that some institution far away had decided to fund my way out of Utah and into a new world.

And what a rich, enticing world it was! Filled with more people like me than I'd ever encountered––people who wanted to stay up all night talking about the riddles of human society and history, who wanted to explore the mysteries of the mind, who understood the root rage and anger that inspired me to critique the culture I came from. But my rage was often too much for me to sleep, and I learned to self-medicate my way to slumber.

After a blur of books, papers, seminars, music, and parties, it was suddenly August of 2016, and I was graduating successfully but had no idea what to do next. I wanted to pursue a PhD, but I couldn't even afford the application fees. In September, I decided to stay in Chicago and move in with friends, find a way to support myself, and try to make it eventually into a PhD program. But I had to borrow money from a friend just pay rent.

That was a dark winter. I struggled to undo the knots of self-medication that tied me to my bed, but I found myself accompanied once more by the Blank. Terrified, I tutored and freelanced and barely, barely squeezed by. I lost a friend to cancer. Another close friend moved away. But throughout it all, I had one close companion: a roommate who I could speak to in the language of my thoughts, who supported my faltering heart, who believed in me. If the story of my life in the last four years contains a hero, it's her. 

In the darkness of that winter, I found a passage from Nietzsche on self-discovery that informed my struggle: 

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. 

What was the character of the soul that hung suspended above me? Who could I yet become? I contemplated my purpose in life over and over again that winter, and the further back I reached into my memory, the more firmly I believed that the law of my nature had always been to write. I began trying to draft novels in third grade. I've journaled consistently most of my life. I've written poems for as long as I've been able to write at all. So I began trying to jump-start my writing practice, but it felt like trying to start that old mower my family kept in our barn––like I was stuck yanking the pull cord of an engine unwilling to spin.

Slowly, though, everything else in my life improved. I started teaching for a few months in early 2017 and had a discretionary income again. Then a few months later, I was hired by a marketing research company and started making a real salary. I could finally go to the doctor, update my glasses prescription, buy new clothes. But it didn't last very long.

One morning in July of 2017, I woke up to discover the muscles of my hips bound so tight it felt like I was wearing a corset beneath my skin. I'd had chronic back pain since the age of eighteen, but I'd always been able to walk through it. That morning, I was completely stuck. I could barely move, let alone stand to walk. Luckily, though, I was still living with my hero. She rushed home to care for me.

After a week of being in bed, I could walk for a few days. Then it hit again, and I spent another week barely able to stand before my muscles softened enough to limp around. The doctor thought it was just a muscle spasm at first, but then my torso contorted, and both of my legs started firing with sciatica. Then my doctor thought it was ankylosing spondylitis, but I was presenting so many strange symptoms that my physical therapist was flummoxed. For two months, my insurance denied an MRI, and I was trapped hobbling through strikes of pain.

Slowly, my condition deteriorated until one day I could barely lift my legs, and another roommate brought me to the ER. An emergency MRI revealed that my two lowest discs had both herniated in two directions. Discs usually herniate in one direction, and the bidirectional herniation had caused all sorts of atypical symptoms, like the weird contortion of my torso and bilateral sciatica.

An emergency surgery was scheduled for the next day. I spent a total of 18 days in the hospital that month: first for surgery and recovery, and then for a second surgery to clear out an infection that developed in my spine and threatened my life. In the end, I had to have a PIC IV inserted into my arm so that for the next two months, I could inject powerful antibiotics into my blood each morning.

By January of 2018, I was back to working and leading a normal life. The experience of surgery and recovery inspired a new focus on health and fitness, and I started working with a personal trainer. My physical condition steadily improved, and my mental health improved along with it.

In September of 2018, I decided I wanted to make more gay friends. So I downloaded Grindr again, but I was explicit in my profile that I was just looking for friends. A guy named Zahid started talking to me. He'd just moved to Chicago from San Francisco, and he was looking to make friends, too. We met up one day and ended up spending the entire day together. And then we spent the next day together––and the next, and the next, and the next. Although we'd just been looking for friends, it was immediately apparent we'd discovered in each other something much more than that.

The whole experience was so delightful and surprising to me. I'd never dated before, and I'd resigned myself to just being single forever. Zahid woke me up from a broken record of internalized self-doubt and taught me the enlivening joy of simply loving and being loved. I ended up taking him home to visit my family for Christmas. They welcomed him with open arms, and he made special efforts to connect with them, too. It was better than I'd ever dreamed it could be. It left me feeling the happiest and wholest I think I've ever felt.

This year, my relationship with Zahid has continued to blossom. We recently moved in together in a lovely apartment in downtown Chicago. We live here with his dog, Toby, in a space filled with art and plants. He works as a software engineer, and I'm working as a design researcher. I'm enjoying my job, growing in my career, and my life feels the most settled it's ever been.

As my life has stabilized, I feel new energy and motivation to apply myself to reading and writing again. And that's why I'm restarting this blog.

There we go––all caught up :)