Somehow, I need to deal with my sadness.
Do we all?
It’s like it sits just under the surface, ready to spring up. Is every adult like this? I think it must be more common than anyone talks about. It’s not even that the world is getting harder, between climate change and nationalism and war; it’s the narrowing vice of what it takes to just be alive. There’s no time, there’s no money, we’re all expected to be a part of a template that someone else has established for their own benefit. It’s maybe easier if you’re rich, because more money roughly translates to more time and more freedom, at least in America, but even the rich get trapped into their own cycles of spending and acquiescence in order to maintain their lifestyles. Even rich kids compare their lives to people who have it better. They’ve got to keep earning, somehow.
I had a conversation with a good friend recently. I told her that I felt like I was living in a branch in the timestream, and I was waiting for the world to snap back to the main timeline.
“Ben,” she patiently told me, “this is the main timeline.”
I mean, fuck.
I’m older than I think I am. That’s a common problem too, I think: finding yourself stuck in that late twenties / early thirties mindset where you’re still exploring and nothing is really set in stone yet. I’m forty-five. My next major milestone birthday is fifty. I’m fifteen years away from being sixty years old. Is it always going to feel like this? When, exactly, will I have my shit together?
I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother and everything that led up to it. It’s been thirteen years since I moved to America to be closer to her, because she needed supplementary oxygen and it wasn’t clear how long she would live for. For so much of that time, I was worried about her. The two fridge-sized oxygen concentrators running in parallel so she would have enough to breathe, the clear tubes snaking around the house as she moved; the day she had her double lung transplant, when the ICU nurses eventually had to kick me out of her room; her first steps, set perfectly to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show; the joy of being free; the slow sadness of the drugs taking it all away from her. The nightmare trauma of palliative care and my guilt for not having done more. Wishing I’d said more to her in those final hours. Wishing I’d talked more with her overall. Feeling, despite everything I know, that I must have disappointed her, she must be mad at me, because she’s never shown up in a dream for me since.
My life hasn’t been real. It’s all a hyper-surreal collection of scenes that I’ve been disassociated from to varying degrees. After her loss, I fell into a trough of feeling like nothing at all mattered, like I was disconnected from the cause and effect of reality. It was all a dream.
It was not a dream. This is the main timeline.
One of the things about being a third culture kid — or maybe this isn’t about being a third culture kid at all, maybe it’s just about me, or maybe everyone feels this — is that however you may superficially appear to be a part of an archetype, you’re not a part of it. For all those years with a British accent, going to an English school, I was missing the cultural touchpoints and feeling of belonging. Some people are anchored in place, nationhood, nationality, their hometowns. The only feeling of belonging that really made sense to me was family: the only people who had that same background, that mix of cultural touchpoints and recognition. Losing family is about the profound hole that’s left when someone you love is suddenly gone, a real hurt, but it’s also about losing a tether: losing belonging itself.
I have always felt like I don’t really matter to anyone, except to my family. I could disappear tomorrow and, shrug. When I was younger, I convinced myself that there was some kind of magic incantation that other people knew and I didn’t; if I could just learn the password, I’d be a part of what everyone else was a part of. Until then, I wasn’t good enough. I needed to prove myself.
When I didn’t date in high school, it was because I wasn’t good enough. (All those beautiful people who did — I admired them so much. To my teenage eyes, to hook up with someone meant that they acceptedyou. What an unattainable thing for someone who didn’t feel like he belonged.) (And: Christ, why was my body so big. I hated my physicality. I wanted so badly for someone to tell me I was okay. This is still true.) Every job I didn’t get, I wasn’t good enough. When my startups didn’t hit the highs I was hoping for, I wasn’t good enough. Every mistake, I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t measure up.
I don’t measure up. I’m not good enough. Even in my chosen profession, I’ve never been in the cool developer circle, I’ve never quite made it into the in crowd. I am still scared of my body, of catching myself in the mirror. I’m still looking for the password.
This backchannel in my head is exhausting. It’s another reason to think: eh, I don’t matter, nothing I do is really that important.
The thing about being convinced that you’re in some kind of dream-world fork of reality is that you don’t face these things. The temptation is to slide and slide — nothing really matters, remember? — and pretend that one day you’ll go back to how it was before any of it started. But you have to; there is no going back; if this is a fork, it’s been worked on so long that there’s no way you could possibly rebase to the main branch. This is life.
Which brings me to: I have a son.
He’s beautiful and smart; his smile cuts through everything else. He sings the alphabet song in the back seat of the car and randomly walks up to me and says “hug” before wrapping me in an embrace. I wish my mother could have met him, is the toxic thought, but he is infused with everything that was good about her. To him, I want to be the belonging she represented to me. The belonging that my dad still represents for me. (Largely unacknowledged: I am terrified of losing him, too.)
That means I have to deal with this sadness, this untethered unreality. This has to be the main branch, because no other branch has him in it. What I do matters to him, a lot, and it will for the rest of his life.
Therapy? Yes, of course. Parts Work and reflection and perspective. I have a trauma therapist and Erin and I have a couples therapist and these things work.
But they don’t cut to the sadness. The sadness is there, always. And I have to deal with it, don’t I, because eventually it will infuse itself into my son. I don’t want him to carry it. I want him to be free of its tendrils. I want him to not feel how I feel.
I’ve been focused on the loss of belonging, and the idea of returning to a less complicated timeline. I think, though, the way to deal with the sadness is simpler, although also harder.
Ultimately, finally, I’ve got to make peace with myself.
That’s the job.
I’ll be honest: I don’t have the first clue how to do it.
And I don’t know how universal this is. Is this something that’s unique to me? Something that a lot of people quietly deal with? Is this sadness sitting just underneath everybody’s skin, or is it just an infection under mine? If it is lurking everywhere, shallowly digging its way into everyone, what can we do about it? How can we tell each other that we belong, that we’re okay, that it’s alright?
And if it’s not: please, finally, what’s the password? Not for my sake. For his.
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