“April is the cruellest month.”
Trauma has a peculiar effect on me. Prompted by dates, places, smells, passages of text, or fragments of music, my body – the muscles, bones, cells, nerves, neurons and all, harmonize to re-enact an affective experience of that ordeal. The mind attempts to forget, but some primordial agent still holds on to thumping hearts and flushing skin and I am left disjointed, disoriented, and dispirited for days, unable to separate perception from memory, rumination from reflection.
Which is why the weeks around April 20th are particularly enervating. Even if my mind opts to supress it, the body remembers that on this day eleven years ago I had tried to shuffle off this mortal coil, and though my flesh lived on, my spirited had died that day, and I have spent the subsequence eleven years in search of a reason for being.
Had I been a more appetizing banana, perhaps I’d have found abandon in hedonism. As it stands, the lives of ye pink fleshed humans is something I could never understand, nor do I pass muster with EC Standard No. 2257/94, being too stout, too thin, and too wrinkled for consumption.
Had I possessed more enterprise, perhaps I’d have found oblivion in avarice. But I am too cautious, to stuck up in my prosaic aspirations to hustle. The Street to the Square Miles is paved with a zealous will and a rapacious intent, neither of which I am capable. I don’t have the forte to reduce lives to a spreadsheet.
In so far as a meaningful life sought, I suppose finding the way to nowhere can be a triumph of sorts. There are as many ways to live as there are lives to be lived, I simply found the most assured way to do it poorly.
Simply put, if the true north is finding one’s own definition of contentment, then I’ve headed as south as south can be.
I have spent the last fifteen years living up to an arbitrary and improbable set of terms, pieced together from bits of fiction, embellished biographies of inspirational folks, and deep-seated maladaptive coping mechanisms. In that scene I reside in an abode of agenerous dimensions, adorned in a vaguely clinical style, hold a title that conveys a degree of prestige, I’m surrounded by a posse straight of sitcoms, and have found some outlet for romance. Only recently have I pulled my head out of this hazy fantasy.
In the spirit of affording a little forgiveness to myself on this dreary bitter day, I should acknowledge that this is not entirely my own fault. I did not grow up under any semblance of normalcy, my teenager years were caged in a joyless and loveless household under two parents that despised each other to the soul and bemoaned the obligation to support their progeny. I strained at every moment to separate the few friendly faces from the terror of my life and in so doing alienated them all. I never went on dates, never organized a birthday party, never held a sleepover, never partook in group hangouts, never had a soul to call on those sleepless nights cradling a pillow stuffed with knives.
There may be an expiration date to blaming one’s childhood, but there’s no deadline for healing.
Cherophobia, the fear of joy. That’s the condition that often plagues us survivors. We had known fear and anxiety and nothing else.
That’s not to say that what I wanted were intrinsically worthless. But life needs to have a point to them. Solid things begin with purpose, even straw things. And most of what I had committed to amass stems from insecurities, and from a fear of happiness and of its pursuit, lest what is sought proves unattainable and what is acquired is inevitably lost.
I wanted wealth, but only to satiate the boy who had nothing, whose parents brawled with blood and teeth and fangs to pilfer fortunes from each other. If I had enough, the boy had thought, they’d clash no more. And so I searched for it blindly, ambivalently, fruitlessly.
I wanted love, though I had scarcely an inkling of how it should look or feel, just a vague idea that there should be something to fill this dusky pit at the centre of my everything. But that’s not where love lies, is it? From that pit emerges only a jealous, greedy, possessive, and desperate thing, and it births nothing but loneliness.
I wanted companionship, but only to soothe the gnawing scratching shuffling disquiet of isolation. I needed another’s utterance to give my name a meaning, a gaze to be set upon my outline to take shape, a grip upon my hand to feel warmth, an echo of my voice to be heard. Without the validation of others, I feared I’d be nothing at all.
And I found none of those things.
Not quite.
I found none of the things that I wanted. But I had accumulated somethings. I have already assumed a form most natural, grew into the life I am meant to live, met the people who saw me as I am. I still exhale, therefore I have meaning.
Our own definition of contentment is always there. It is the first thought of the morning, the neglected small acts that give us joy, the unseen labour we perform, the unspoken codes we uphold, because our silent selves decree it so.
Live for those things.
It’s really not an earthshattering epiphany.
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