There have been many times in my life when I thought certain things did not make sense in my life at various moments. These repeated contradictions of finding my body in a certain space of disjunction at disparate moments invoked a paralysis of sorts, to the extent that I could not move myself like a red checker on a checker board from one square to another. Instead, I felt trapped by looming black kings and queens ready to jump me with a quick move of a hand. Many times it was my location, like my first year of college, where I would wake up every day and feel something eating away at the walls of my intestines telling me that Richmond, Virginia was not where I belonged. And then there was the second year of college where I had transfered to Holy Cross in Worcester, MA from the University of Richmond and found myself up at 5am sitting in a soggy boat in Lowell ordering much bigger and stronger women than myself to R O W this way or that. I remember getting up and putting on black Adidas nylon pants and saying out loud, "Tara, what the hell are you doing this for?" It fixed itself, as life does, when the time was right.
The same thing happened later, when I was living in DC after Ecuador, and I would get up at 7am every day and run. I was very regimented. I would run every morning because that time, that running alone on the streets of Arlington was the time I felt most myself. Later, as I would trapse with bags and baggage from my house (that once had rats) over gravelly driveways to the metro I would again wonder, "Tara, what are you doing?" I'd have blisters on my feet and know that I had 8 hours ahead of me in a cube in a rather corporate office of a relatively prominent conservation NGO. At the office, instead of doing my work, I'd spend hours on my computer researching graduate programs in literature, thinking how I wanted out. That feeling of wanting out of something is one of the worst because while you are in it, you feel like the next step is miles away. You feel like a week is a year. You feel like every walk to and from the metro is five miles even though it's about 3/4 of one. Again, time fixed this and I extricated myself from my cube.
Even the first two years of my masters at Berkeley, especially the first year, I woke up every morning on College Avenue and wondered how it was that I was where I was? I had wanted so badly to be there, but when I got out here, nothing seemed to go exactly according to plan. I felt like I felt my first year of highschool all over again, a tiny fish in a massive ocean, lost in the shuffle of paperwork, egos the size of California, and books bigger than my shelves. Time felt like it weighed 90 pounds every morning. Each day was a week. I hated it. I took many more turns. I found myself back here, again, when the time was right.
Finally, last year, things started making sense to me academically. I liked what I was reading. I thought on rare occasions that some of my comments were actually decent in classes. I felt like I was writing paragraphs of papers that were good, even though the entirety of the paper had many "problems." But then, once again, things started multiplying and the sense of self I had outside the classroom seemed to start stirring, in the sense that I wanted to be in different company, I wanted to be asking different questions of life, I wanted to be more than I was when I was lying in bed (not) falling asleep at night. This search for self has manifested itself in many ways over the last year. It is not something, I don't think, that ever reaches an end. Sartre says this most effectively in his writings on Existentialism, again going back to those questions, "Is it?" Yes it is. Yes she is. But the much more difficult question, "What is it?" is constantly looming in front of us escaping our hands in the way that a dream that you have escapes narration once you open your lids. You see colors, visual metaphors, like she said, but you cannot actually retell it to yourself.
We cannot retell ourselves ever with all honesty to ourselves. We cannot even explain why we make certain decisions we make. Why we have a conversation that could be meaningless but lodges itself in our memory in a way that five thousand others didn't. We cannot explain why someone walking up stairs in our direction or standing by a bench makes us think, while another person a foot a way goes unnoticed, or why we are put in places, next door or states away or on patios, that introduce us to people that suddenly, out of nowhere really, make our lives mean in a new way.
My self is still ahead of me, but it is becoming more clear. I like being me in this very time.
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