How it All Began

The mornings all go the same way these days — I wake up to what sounds like an alarm clock but it beeps only inside of my chest. Something is telling me I didn’t do what I was supposed to do the day or the week before but as far as I know, the tasks are complete; veggies are in the fridge, the bathroom is clean, the bills have been paid, the gas tank is full. I turn over and breathe in, but the alarm is still going.

Once I get out of bed and brush my teeth and take a look in the mirror — I forget what longing sprung me out of bed.

Or, it’s not that I forget, but it fades back into its indelible corner, drawn out by the sound of a regular day, until the next time a blanket of silence covers me.

This morning, the alarm went off again. I have been feeling uninspired lately — trying hard to write because it feels like it needs to get out but then nothing comes out and I keep looking for the perk up: that jolt that comes with a fresh idea, a synapse linked, the thrill of uncovering some expansive new truth, and sometimes they — the perk ups — hide inside different garments, or the affections they make when mixed together.

This is the blessing, but also the curse of having demands outside of yourself; there is always something more urgent to respond to.

Last month we had both Easter and Passover. When I use to celebrate Passover, I would think about Exodus as the story of pursuing freedom from who you thought you were or who you thought you had to be or even who you wanted to become and settling into yourself of who you actually are.

Sometimes I can’t wrap my head around how epic Biblical stories can be. And who knows if they’re true, there’s a huge chance they’re not but I am convinced that the books that make up the Old Testament serve as the sort of legend from which all other stories are born — at least not the ones that we tell ourselves.

The stories writer Joan Didion famously said that we speak in order to live.

How different are these stories from the stories our cultures tell us about how to live our lives, about what we deem right and what we deem wrong and what we deem true and what we deem not. About what we think we should want and what we actually want, and about who we are, and when the day ends and we slip into bed and begin to drift off and we are with ourselves and all is quiet­— the mask comes off.

I think I internalized the idea of stories making our world from growing up as a kid of immigrants that living a true life is about sacrifice, that whatever’s more true is also much harder and therefore more painful, so these sacrifices — this life — is really about suffering.

Which doesn’t sound right when I say it but let me explain how I got here: I think I have conflated discomfort with suffering. I do believe that discomfort’s progressive — that heeding the sound of one’s own alarm clock may well put us in positions that test and challenge the depth of what we think we know, often expanding our own senses of confidence or meaning. I also think that discomfort is sometimes painful. And that pain takes us into our true authenticity.

Suffering meanwhile is different from that, and it’s actually not useful.

Suffering is the act of trying to push away the pain. It’s not actually feeling the pain. And this pushing away is actually the thing that can you make you feel like you’ve been rendered inert. Like you can’t move like there’s nowhere to go. It’s the feeling when the alarm clock rings that you have to, or that you must turn it off. To make it shut up at any cost.

That’s the reason the alarm clock seems so daunting — it’s actually trying to free you. What if instead of pushing away, you asked what it wanted to tell you.

Now that’s what I call liberating.