A month after my 30th birthday, I found myself perilously employed at a job I resent, functionally broke, estranged from family, inconsolably lonely with an anguished heart, and hospitalized for two weeks from complications during retinal detachment surgery – which had no apparent cause in the first place other than to add to the cascading calamity.
Rock, meet Bottom.
I have managed to channel a fairly stoic outlook to all this: that as a bad as things can be, this is but a brief interruption of a hopefully kaleidoscopic life; that as much as I may fear for the sight of my right eye, I have another to spare; that despite the decline in one sense, I am relatively sound in body; that while finances are tight, I nevertheless still have the luxury of a roof over my head; that while I am provisionally thwarted in my career, I still have a conservatively average intellect to fall back on, and the zig always returns after the zag; that though my internal landscape is in ruins, I had nevertheless maintained a modicum of self-control so as to not irreparably destroy relationships; that emotionally ravaged I may be, pain is the bedrock of compassion and sorrow the texture of gentleness, and I will become all the kinder for it. The serene space between despair and ecstasy draws ever closer.
Looking back, comparing now with where I was ten years ago, I’d say it’s all progress.
This attitude, insofar as I’m able to adopt it, post hoc, nevertheless fails to lull the funeral drums beating in my mind each night, and it does not hold back my heart from plunging into the endless, and it does not alleviate the constant harrowing sensation of freefall. This has been a breakdown a year in the making. The vessel has been sundered too many times. Break it, grind it to dust, and still, I’ll forge myself anew. But the vitality it once held will take a long time to restore.
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that my initial reaction to all this was perhaps overwrought. The psychological anguish was accentuated by the conditions of my stay: my body unraveled at the end of a long and arduous year that had already left me depleted. I was whisked off to the operating table at a dizzying pace without my fully comprehending what was happening. The surgery was two and a half hour long, and due to my alcoholism-induced tolerance to anesthesia, I had maintained full motion in my eyeball, which I had to keep transfixed at the light all the while feeling each needle prick as the surgeon sewed a silicon band around my eyeball before poking holes in it. I was then confined to bed rest with both eyes bandaged due to an inexplicable bleeding problem, and that was before the glaucoma headaches set in: as if someone had punched into my eye socket, scraped around and squeezed. It was a sleepless, restless, devastating 330 hours.
Recovery took place in a public ward shared with three other bodies, each making their unique sounds – the sort of sounds that bodies sometimes make to signal its fast-approaching expiration date and to remind me that I am the youngest person in on this floor. A rolling cough that sustained for ten minutes and ended with a moist wheezing as if the very life forces were being expunged. Soft but rhythmic moaning that kept apace with every exhale persisted through the night. The rustling of plastic bags and clothes, the clamoring of metal pans and shoes and screeching of chairs dragged across the floor. The commotion of visitors yammering in strange dialects. And in the distance, indistinguishable yells of agitated loved ones. Oh what wretched sounds we make, the paragons of animals.
They take away your name here, and then your flowers. I am Bed 05, my neighbors Bed 04, Bed 06, and the supplemental Bed Plus 2. You are put into a unisex striped gown that came in just the one size: excessive. Each day began with the janitor barging into the room unceremoniously at 5 AM to mop the floors and spread the putrid scent of disinfectant. Rounds begin at 8 AM. The prisoners must make their way to the examination room and queue for examination by the resident doctors, who would gather among themselves to discuss the curious case of Bed 05 and his mysterious bleeding, but never quite address him directly. When they did speak to you, the doctors assumed an impatient tone that one may reserve for a petulant child. Lunch, should you chose to eat here, was served at 11 AM and dinner at 4 PM. Bland dishes that smelled like warm metal.
Breakdowns have a way of sneaking up on you. For months, maybe years, its tendrils surreptitiously reached into your life and entwined into the neglected corners of your world. But you’re far too good at keeping pace, and far too busy at measuring up to the world to pay close attention to the cracks that have appeared here and there – in that inexplicable outburst at the person you loved, in those fleeting moments of doubts that shaded your triumphs. And suddenly you unravel. It would be fortuitous if your rapture took the form of uncharacteristic outbursts and momentary lapses in behavior, but sometimes you end up where I was, in a hospital bed, completely baffled as to what had happened and how you got there.
I had unraveled, and in that first week succumbed to self-pity and resentment towards the aching injustice of the world. Possessed for a brief moment by unbridled egoism, my suffering, for a week, become the suffering of the world… and the smallest wrongs committed against me was to be a calamity. Throughout that whole time, I had the vague idea of what stirred behind my outburst. Those still nights besieged by the sounds of ailing bodies with nothing but darkness keeping my company, I cried – like how many years ago I would cry to sleep, having hoarded every sharp object in my house under my pillow lest my parents murdered each other in my sleep – and for the very same reason, for the desperate desire of a warm, consoling embrace of someone who loved me even at my worst, and for the sorrow of its absence. I don’t believe in a failure of efforts, but at that moment I did succumb to the terrifying realization that my life was an abject failure because, at my absolute, dejected low, I had suffered alone.
During those worst hours, I thought of Man’s Search for Meaning. Actually, I thought about a lot of things. All the works of philosophy I had ever read surged to my brain in some meditative response to combat a crisis, and I found resonance in all of them. But it was the words of Victor Frankl that ultimately served as a railing onto which I gripped tight, slipping dangerously close to nihilism.
Slipped it did, as my brain cataloged all its woes and made an inventory of all the ways I’m broken, the temptation to never hope again was tantalizing. I had unraveled, and my life too – that I’d leave this place and resume a life of meaningless grind, eventually accepting at a quiet middle age that all my youthful dreams of yore were the fantasies of children and my life amounted to middle management selling shit people didn’t need, and nothing more. That, again and again, my heart would be agonized by people who do not love me back, until finally, calloused and brittle, it settles for a life of mundane domestic bickering, and commit the mortal sins of bringing forth more unhappy animals to this earth. That my grandpa will die in a few years time still holding on to hope, on his deathbed, that I might have someday amounted to something, That I’d failed those who have ever hoped for me as profoundly as I have failed him. And my eye, momentarily recovered, will go blind, and in some years I will be back on this bed a crumbling old beast. Or perhaps I’d spare myself all of that, and just end things once I leave here so as to spare a lifetime mourning a life unlived.
Those are the thoughts that come to you in isolation, and in darkness. Thoughts of meaninglessness and despair.
But my mistake had been treating meaning as something that had to be constructed, something that was conditional, had to be sought – when it was actually endowed. It is what we choose to make of things. There is beauty in sorrow too. Life’s magnificence lies in its fault lines.
A week into a toxic mind fog, I’m out. What follows now will be an attempt to consolidate all the stray thoughts of mine as I lay curled up in bed, semi-delirious but feeling quite good about myself.
But first, I am suddenly thinking of one of my favorite paintings of all time. After the storm, moonlight.
#00117F 