A Story About Being In The Middle
When we tell the stories of our lives, we always want to tell them from the end point.
We want the plot lines neatly packaged and the morals softened, easy to digest.
‘Look what I learned from this thing that happened.’
‘I used to be a mess and now I’m well.’
No one ever tells their stories from the middle because the middle is confusing and disorienting. You’re not yet sure what the character’s motives are. It isn’t clear quite where any sub plot’s going to go.
About a year and a half ago, I stopped writing.
At least, I stopped writing anything real.
It was the November of 2017 and my parent died and then a person I’d been in love with for a very, very long time left my life and then I kind of just stopped feeling things. That’s the best way that I can describe it.
I braced myself for a tidal wave of grief or confusion or anger, but all I felt was vaguely existential. I traveled a bunch and meditated a lot and experimented with some reality-bending agents to try to reunite with the self that I remembered. I carved out room inside myself for an ending: a place where the moral of my story would go.
Except the moral kept on not showing up.
Each question that I tried to answer was a door leading to ten other doors.
Death had hollowed out a space in my psyche that did not exist before. My dad had died physically healthy. My ex had kept a secret for three years. Nothing seemed quite as safe as it used to be, and nothing seemed to matter much either. Any linearity of thought that I once had rearranged itself into a giant question mark and draped itself ominously over everything.
My mind hung in a state of suspense. So did my life.
I didn’t have an apartment. Or a home base. Or a full-time job. I had neither the protection nor the judgement of my father. I had neither the tether nor the tenderness of love. I owed nothing to anyone.
I was free, and the freedom theorized responsibility. The responsibility to learn something from it.
The problem is, the lessons weren’t arriving.
The more I studied spirituality, the more nihilistic I became. The more I blew off responsibilities, the more opportunities rolled in. The more I pushed my limits, the more my limits failed to push back.
I traveled quickly and experimented widely and worried very little about my direction. I waited for the consequences that people always told me would come from living without caution and the consequences failed to show up. At times I thought that hitting rock bottom would serve as the conclusion I was seeking.
I waited for redemption. But redemption wasn’t seeking me out. The Universe, it seemed, was indifferent to me. This was an alarming revelation.
In the year and a half that I spent wandering, I doubled my income. Came out of the closet. Touched down on every inhabited continent and crossed paths with some of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.
I also got robbed, said some excruciating goodbyes, developed a problematic relationship with partying and experienced endless frustrations with myself; with the persistent ambiguity of existence.
Everything I learned became a door, leading to ten other doors.
And I am starting to suspect that this is nowhere near the end of the story.
None of the losing and finding (and losing and finding and losing…) has landed me back in a place where I can sit down and write coherently about what I have learned. I still don’t know where I will end up, or with whom. I don’t know how to turn some of my bad habits around. I don’t know if the Universe is benignly indifferent to our presence or if there’s someone up there watching us with trained eyes, pulling every string with careful precision.
I don’t know these things because this is still the middle of the story.
This is the part where the questions don’t have answers and the loose ends aren’t tied up. I still have a lot of work to do on myself. I still have a lot of questions left to ask.
But I am writing out this story from the middle because nobody else ever does.
Because people write the middle when they’ve already reached the satisfying end; when all the past becomes tinged with the color of future understanding. We forget the way it feels before we get there, before we find ourselves enlightened with the punch line. How the roads fork endlessly, senselessly. How we only hope we’re walking the right way.
A year ago, deep in the Andean mountains, I swallow Ayahuasca and march confidently up to heaven’s door. I knock loudly enough to cause a ruckus.
Nobody answers. I keep knocking.
Once I have made a proper scene, God’s secretary buzzes through the intercom, sounding frazzled. ‘What can I help you with,’ he asks me.
‘Hello,’ I tell him, ‘I am here to have a word with God.’
He sighs, exasperated. ‘Please hold.’ The phone clicks without giving me a wait time.
Just in case you’re wondering, the sound of heaven holding the line is the voice of the last person you loved, laughing and saying your name with boundless warmth.
I hold for God.
Long after the sun rises, after the medicine drains from my system, after I pack my bags and board my plane back home, I think disjointedly about the conversation that heaven would not have.
I have a laundry list of questions left to answer. I have suggestions and some strongly-worded thoughts. The Universe remains stubbornly indifferent, but I do not.
There is either a God or there is not one. All of this either means something, or it doesn’t. We will someday have the answers to our questions, or we will die without knowing any better. All of these are equally likely. All of them are equally empty.
We search, and we question and we try, because what other option do we have. We take the question marks, draped over everything, and rearrange them into a roof. We live beneath them. We build spaces to welcome in the answers that we may never have.
We do this because we are human. Because to be alive is to exist in the middle of a story. One we cannot know the ending to yet.
It has been ten months and seventeen days since God first refused to answer my phone call. But should he ever pick up, I will be waiting.
I have built a home from unanswered questions.
And I am still here, holding the line.
