underwater
People often catch me with a vacant look in my eyes. I stare out into space, as if stunned by an immense atomic bomb dropped in the distance, shattering buildings and turning the world into a black ashy splotch. They instead see a cream-colored wall, or perhaps a blank-canvas-blue sky. I suppose I look pretty deranged in those moments. They say, "Jaron, you good? You look kind of sad." I snap out of it of course, ceasing the blank stare. I respond with an embarrassed laugh, "Yeah, I'm good."
This has been going on for a few years at this point. People catching me staring into space and asking if I'm sad. Like most people, I'd like to think I'm doing fine. I don't feel any different.
But I give a simplified response — after all, no one wants you to explain your entire life story at lunch. So the truth is, in the last two or so years I have devolved into a thin sheet of paper, held down by a paperweight of unknown origin. With each train I took to get from university to home, I grew a little thinner, a little more delicate as I sat traveling from station to station until I finally laid to rest. A malignant vacancy emerged from its slumber during my extended sojourn at the house I grew up in; a piece that started as a tiny form and then grew over time with the slow end of another friendship and with other inevitable choices being made not by my own hand, but by the unchallenged decision making of time.
From the two-year vacation at home, I picked up an odd affliction — an implacable fog that floats in front of me most days. A permanent third-party perspective. I often catch myself viewing my life as an observer of a Truman film: detachedly observing everyday interactions as I sit in a coffee shop, watching myself talk and message, the extras around me drinking their coffee or chatting with their friends. If personally prompted, I become the director giving my automatic, predictable answer to ensure that the movie set isn't disrupted.
On occasion something breaks the fourth wall. A few days ago some teenager was berating me for wearing a Stanford t-shirt because I didn’t attend the school. It took me a second to register that I was actually being insulted, and that this scenario was out-of-the-ordinary compared to the interactions I expected from strangers. I was irritated by his offhand comments, but strangely I was also pleased to have something different occur, something that yanked me out of the fog, that tore down the set.
I'm confused by what traps me in a personal film, so I turn to words as my default reaction to make sense of anything I don't understand. Because of this lots of the stuff I've been consuming revolve around monotony and the desolate sameness of your routine motions and how that starts to seep into your being. Stoner by John Williams has taken the capricious medal of my favorite book:
"It was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them."
With most books that I grow to love the most, it's like I'm reading about myself, rather than a character. Compared to novels which have a protagonist with latent extraordinary qualities as they overcome countless trials and villains, William Stoner is an steadfast man who cycles through the doldrums of his arduous existence, slowly whittled down, enduring the reverberations of his mistakes and lack of notable prosperity in his work and relationships. The stark reality of his portrayal is a refreshing sight for me in a landscape dotted by people desperate for uniqueness.
I know describing all of this in detail sounds gravely depressing: drifting from point to point in a haze, watching myself as a third-party, consuming content to make sense of the thin patchwork of woven academic, corporate, suburban monotony that blankets each moment. But in practice it's not all that dreary. Distilling anything into words makes it become much more intense than it truly feels.
I'm doing my best to drag myself out of the rut. From another perspective I feel the days and months behind me have been my most wholehearted, proactive effort to navigate the never-ending swamp extending into the horizon. I'm the kind of guy who is caught in the back-and-forth between wanting to do this and wanting to do that and in the end not doing much of any of it — so I'm working on fixing that by being as deliberate and intentional as I can with my time. From Murakami once again:
"[I’m] planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure if I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time."
As a side note, I've been writing less because I've been thinking less. This whole time I’ve been trying to measure the world with a cold, machinelike rigor, which is an impossible task when everything really isn't that serious. I’ve outgrown my need to put life in delineated boxes or to intensely brood over it all, to sift and grind for some introspective and optimized denouement. I’ve accepted that some things just… are.
"It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course."
If you ever look over at me and find I have a vacant expression, it's because I'm underwater. My eyes glaze over and I’m far from shore, deep below the applause of the waves. I’m out having a walk on the bottom of the sea, chasing shards of moonlight cascading from the surface. I'll get back to you soon.