There are moments in life my husband calls “ping-pong moments.” These are the moments when your thoughts start chaotically bouncing off of every surface in your brain, like a ping-pong ball after a particularly energetic smack. These are the moments when dots start to connect and disparate ideas suddenly seem part of the same larger conversation.
I am having one such moment lately. Energy in the air; chaotic intersections; whirring lines of thought. I’m processing things I thought I forgot. I’m watching them come flying back into the room and bouncing off every surface.
Come sit in the mess with me for a moment? I brought music:
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
— Michel Foucault
I have often longed to feel this way, that “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly who I am.” Maybe it’s enough to think — like Descartes said.
“I think, therefore I am.” There’s no “know” in that.
But the core of my anxiety gnaws at the unknown, especially the unknowns inside myself. My anxiety gnaws on the “therefore.” From thinking to am-ing. From thinking to being.
Perhaps this is why I find reading Mary Oliver’s poetry so soothing. Her poetry is, in simplest summation, about being okay with the mysteries of yourself.
“You do not have to be good,” she writes in “Wild Geese.” “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Whatever that means, I love it. It’s a kind of goal of mine; a distant, true thing that I feel I’m always grasping for: to be okay with not knowing what I am. To let some unfettered part of me love unbridled, as big as I can.
Intellectually, I know that I do not and can never know exactly what I am, or precisely who I am, with any permanence. Like Alice, I know that every time I wake up, I’m a different person. I’m a little bit someone else, someone I’ve never met before.
Intellectually, I know it is true that I probably wouldn’t write anything if I knew what I was trying to say before I started writing. Like Didion, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.”
Intellectually — up inside my brain — I know it’s true that Whitman was right. We all contain multitudes; we are as strange to ourselves as we are to each other.
There are parts of us, some light some shadow, that are always unknown. There are parts of us that linger along the periphery. There are parts of our identities we feel, and are, only briefly, if ever. Sometimes we meet parts of ourselves we have never met before because someone else, somehow, makes it safe for them to come out of hiding.
Intellectually: I think.
In other ways: I am.
“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
Re-reading has always offered me a kind of soothing exercise into the recognition that I am different today than I was yesterday; that, held up against something stable, I am not.
Last year, I tried to re-read Anna Karenina with a group of incredibly smart women I met on bookstagram. I felt little torrents of shame when my DMs would light up on the weekends, as we were meant to have finished the next few chapters. For some reason, the precision of which remains strange to me now, I couldn’t get back into it — even though it was one of my favorite novels I read in college and I’ve re-read it at least twice since.
When I read it, back then, I was different. I was in a difficult and strange relationship. I had moved out of my favorite apartment with girls I’d loved living with into an older unit with random girls who had creepy boyfriends who insisted on hanging pictures of Jesus all over the living room. (One of my roommates bought a 5-foot frame for her huuuuuuge framed photo of two toddlers holding hands — a little girl in a wedding dress and a little boy in a tux — posing in front of the Salt Lake City Mormon temple in the middle of our shared living room. It was nightmarish to me; she called it art.)
When I got home from class each night, I would tuck back in my little bedroom with the twin bed and the twinkle lights and the piles of books on the floor, and read Anna — and all the books like hers, Madame Bovary and Antigone and The Yellow Wall-Paper. I was loving my life-after-Mormonism. I was younger; I was smaller in so many ways; I was alone a lot. Critically, I was not tuned into how sad the novel, or Anna’s story, really is.
As I tried to re-read it early last year, I felt myself plunged into the past. I had vivid memories of where I was during certain chapters: a rented room on the Oregon coast when Anna meets her lover for the first time; in a chilly hallway of Utah Valley University in my favorite corduroy overalls when Levin rambles on about farming and agricultural practices for way too many pages.
While re-reading, I was confronting the facts of my difference. I was face-to-face with past versions of me. Versions I have, to be very honest with you, often preferred to my current ones.
As I sat down to read with renewed vigor one weekend last February, I wrote this:
The thing about beloved books is that, when you come back to them years later and wonder “how did I miss that before?” Or, “I remember it being another way last time,” what you’re doing is announcing the unbelievable fact that, against all the odds, you really have changed.
Maybe it’s on such a micro-level that you didn’t even know you had changed until you went somewhere, into some story, where you’ve been before and, knowing the words did not, in fact, rearrange themselves in your absence, you realize something in you has certainly rearranged since your last meeting.
And then, just like your old self, against all the odds, you find yourself still holding out hope that maybe the heartbreaking thing won’t happen this time. Maybe you’re remembering wrong; maybe it’s not so bad. You and your past self team up and decide you must be powerful enough to will a better ending for this person—this fiction, this beautiful imagined creature—because you love her like you love yourself. Maybe: you loved her before you knew how to love yourself. And so you hope for her. And you wish, despite its remarkable beauty in the exact way that it is, that this story could all go some other way.
And then, as the story unfolds, and it’s different in a million ways but also so very much the same, you wonder if you can bottle that hopeful feeling. And then you realize: what is a book but that feeling, bottled? What is a story but that leaving and returning, that reminder that the words never change but that we do. We really, really do. What could be more hopeful than that?
Whatever version of me wrote that, I kinda love her for it. She reminds me that the hopeful parts of me aren’t the knowing parts. Maybe you can’t have hope and knowing at the same time; one rather denotes a lack of the other.
About a week before I had my gall bladder surgery, I started feeling existential. The doctor’s office had called to ask about my Living Will, “just in case anything happens.” I turned white as a sheet and choked back a knot of anxiety in my throat.
A few hours later, I messaged a friend and plainly asked if he believed in heaven. His lovely non-answer pointed at the lack of evidence of heaven’s existence; I told him I hope there’s some “after” place where I’ll get to be conscious, because I like being conscious, but that I didn’t know it would be there. He agreed. “All we can do is hope.”
I realized, as we wrote back and forth, and my ping-pong connections whirred through my brain, that all of this stuff we were talking about was bringing up a specific old memory; was connected to why the concept of “bearing my testimony” was always so painful to me, growing up Mormon. One Sunday a month, our typical one-hour sacrament meeting transformed into what was essentially an open-mic night at 10 o’clock in the morning, in a Cultural Hall with turquoise carpet that smelled like Febreze. Anyone, so moved, could walk up to the microphone on the podium and “bear their testimony.”
Most people in my ward1 bore the same one — a rote series of declarative statements so devoid of meaning that it stunned me, even as a tiny girl, any time someone got up to recite it:
“I’d like to bear my testimony. I know the Church is True. I know Jesus Christ is my Savior and I know that he died for my sins. I know I am a daughter (or son) of a Heavenly Father who loves me, and I love him. I know Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God. I know [Whoever Was Prophet At That Time] is a Prophet of God. I know these things to be True. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen2.”
With my arms reverently folded and my dress neatly pressed and my hair in a curly ponytail, I’d hear a tiny little voice — not the “still small voice” of the Holy Ghost in the trinity, but my own buried consciousness — quietly press: “You don’t actually know any of that. You are hoping for it. That’s not the same thing.”
This voice was not tinged with the intellectualism, or conscious knowledge I’ve come to rely on as an adult. It was my little body’s truth — the somatic truth of gut feelings, the presence of uncertainty and hope as visceral and meaningful sensations. It was a rare preference for the unknown; a peace in the fact of my uncertainty.
Testimonies and Anna Karenina; Alice and Foucault. These ping-pong connections, fluttering around my brain like those winged keys in Harry Potter, little needles in an impossible haystack of experience. These are breadcrumb trails to and from so many versions of me; the detritus of things unknowable but felt. Impressions and feelings and voices and ways of being I held for fleeting moments and have since remembered or forgotten.
All of this — a reminder that we really do change. All of this — evidence of the presence of anxiety and confusion and uncertainty, which are really all the same thing, when you think about it. They’re all hope. And maybe hope is the whole point. Otherwise, Foucault is right: it’s not a very fun game, being alive.
“The game is worthwhile,” he says, “insofar as we don’t know where it will end.” It’s the not knowing that’s the being. If it’s true that “I think, therefore I am.” Maybe hope is the “am.” Maybe “I” starts with hope; maybe it starts with, “I don’t know exactly what I am,” and the starting is enough.
This Wednesday, the next Wharton chapter guide drops. Need to get caught up? Go here.
‘Til next time, happy reading 📚
It’s still deeply weird to me that our church groups were called “wards,” using the same terminology used by 19th-century sanitariums or mental asylums to mark distinctions between patient types. “The sick ward,” “the psych ward.” Etc.
I thought the word “amen,” was the word “almond” until I was like 10 years old. I pictured a pastel pink Jordan almond every time someone bore their testimony or said a prayer. Isn’t that the cutest thing you’ve ever heard?
Beautiful reflections. It has been so interesting to re-read House of Mirth with my copy from undergrad. I can see so clearly from the comments and underlined sections that it was read by someone a little lost, navigating a break up, and not comprehending how some of the language cuts deep into experiences had and to come. I can feel my dorm room, but also the panic to read quickly before finals and the stress of my harder classes that semester. It’s amazing how it feels like reading a totally new book, but mostly because I’m ready for it now.