Food Poisoning

I am jarred awake by a terrible, unmistakable sound, and notice I’m alone in bed. In the softly lit bathroom I make out my boyfriend-who’s-not-my-boyfriend naked and kneeling in front of the toilet, vomiting violently. This continues for the next several hours and into daylight.

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The driver arrives and takes our luggage. After 45 minutes of unforgettably scenic island driving, we are dropped off at the airport where we take a puddle jumper to Trinidad. My boyfriend-who-won’t-call-me-his-girlfriend is fading from green to gray with each lean and lurch. He manages not to vomit during the flight.

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I am sitting on my suitcase on the floor of the Miami International Airport at ten o’clock at night, weeping. My boyfriend-who-checks-out-his-own-body-during-sex is waiting in a line at least 40 people deep to find out what to do since there are no more flights home tonight.

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I once had a boyfriend who refused to say we were a couple. This went on for over a year despite incongruous trips to meet his family and friends. I later learned that this opposition to naming the relationship wasn’t for fear of commitment -- he married the very next woman -- it was because he refused to include me in his decisions or inner life, the majority of which he kept hidden and only ever revealed when all deceptions had run their course.

He was rude to me when I first introduced myself to him, meeting one spring Saturday night through mutual friends. He was seven years older than me and an inch shorter, and handsome in an accessible way. He was the kind of man I grew up around so I was used to and even prepared for his type: argumentative, excitable, belittling, emotionally unreachable. I struggle to place what even drew me to him initially.

After eight or nine months of dating, I financed the majority of an expensive tropical vacation for us to Tobago, the little sister island of Trinidad. I knew nothing about the country but it was the place he wanted to go more than any other. A lifelong lover of sun and sea, I packed bikinis and a book and off we went to escape the winter.

Picture mosquito netting over the bed, geckos darting through the bougainvillea, the waves of Castara Bay crashing below the perch of our retreat. We saw bananas growing wild and goats on tin roofs. While hiking one day, luck had us turn and look just in time to see an entire pandemonium of green parrots take flight from the canopy. We ate curry on the beach and danced to calypso in the street. We bought tuna caught that day and butchered right on the beach, our center-cut filets costing only $3TT.

Our idyllic vacation only seems blissful when you leave out how painfully one-sided the trip and relationship were. Halfway through the week in Tobago, I cried in anger and sadness, reduced to begging for his time and attention. We were two people who traveled to the same place but were not on this trip together. When at the beach, he set up several feet away from me, needing space to unwind. When back at the retreat, he stayed on the deck smoking cigars, writing in some journal, and needing privacy. Bringing up my frustration only gave him a new occasion to deem my needs childish and overwrought.

It wasn’t only like this in Tobago, it was just more noticeable without the familiar trappings of everyday life. He was dismissive and demeaning back home, too. He was obsessed with himself and his vision for his life, a vision that never really included me, no matter which direction I approached or the angle I took. He was impenetrable. I don’t know when it got bad, or if it was ever even truly good.

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In stark and painful contrast to the overwhelming beauty of Tobago, the airline puts us up for the night in a three-star hotel in Coral Gables, to which we catch the last shuttle. I sit on the floor, the seventeenth passenger in a sixteen-passenger van. The hotel isn’t prepared for the midnight influx of guests and it takes half an hour to get our room. I eat a soggy airport sandwich in a bad bed while my boyfriend-who-never-cared-how-I-felt stays up and watches an action movie on TV. I see my life’s first cockroach run up the wall opposite the bed and sleep with the polyester bedspread pulled over my head.

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A few months after Tobago, he disappeared overnight without any explanation other than needing to help a friend. It would be months before I learned what it was about. It hardly seemed worth it at the time to complain. Getting repeatedly berated for thinking I had a right to know what was going on in the life of this man who wouldn’t love me back put me off asking altogether.

When the man you are dating sneaks away to a hotel off the interstate to provide his semen as a favor to his ex-girlfriend and her new wife, he is not planning to build a life with you. And when he makes you out to be a monster for feeling betrayed and confused about where this leaves you, he does not respect you. When he gives you a drawer to put a change of clothes in but won’t make room for you in his life, he doesn’t value you. When he ends the relationship because he finds your discomfort unacceptable, he does not even see you.

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Our last night in Tobago, we endeavor to eat all our leftover food, since anything beyond granola bars isn’t going to travel well. I cannot stress enough that you should never eat the unfinished tuna two days after buying it on the beach. Put that directly in the bin.

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The above is a personal essay submitted in the third and final round of the Yeah Write Super Challenge contest in March 2017, garnering a Second Place prize. Click here to learn more about Yeah Write.

Tyrants

Your thoughts are lying to you.

They don’t yet know what I’m about to tell you so we should act fast. It’s best to catch them off guard and tackle them in one big group to start, because lined up they go on forever in a daisy chain of misery and loathing. They’re going to fight back. You won’t be rid of them easily.

It’s a long time that you’ve been together and I know you’re really enmeshed in this relationship, that their influence matters so much you’ve built an identity for yourself around them. Do you even know who you are when you’re not Angry, Lonely, Anxious, or Depressed? I don’t ask in judgment because I’ve worn these identities, too, and sometimes will put them on for a brief twirl, like remembering the good parts of an old romance. This isn’t about shame, it’s about untangling a very old knot.

Don’t call me hysterical. I have been there and heard the lies and you will not be the first to point at me and accuse. I know the chorus of tyrants that live in your mind.

I know first-hand because my thoughts are vicious liars and I catch them in it constantly. I’ve been unraveling this knot of my own for a while though and have successfully stripped it down to a few last holdouts, and yeah, we go a few good rounds every now and then. They have told me uncountable lies about myself that have taken years to unravel, and I’m not done. My hands are cramped, my fingertips raw and bleeding, a nest of discarded strands at my feet. But I’m stronger and I know myself better and I keep finding gold and silk spun into every fiber of me.

Somewhere along the way they showed up and hooked you, too. Usually, they come when you’re alone -- a little protector. Don’t raise your hand, don’t make eye contact, don’t get called on, you’re going to get it wrong, one whispered over your shoulder. Don’t wear that, people will laugh at you, one shrieked as you got dressed. Don’t dance like that, oh my god, don’t even dance at all, you freak, another spat in disgust and so you never went to another school dance again.

They have you under their control.

Over the years they slowly amassed into a legion of thoughts smart and good and useful, and you felt safe, confident that they would take care of you out in the world. They had helped you so many times that you truly felt like you could depend on their guidance. Cunning and patient, they subtly took over the whole show, making every decision for you, about you.

Until that one day when your boss yelled at you in front of your coworkers and you just burned in shame, unable to summon a single one of your supposed protectors. Over the next few days, one by one, they chimed with their rebukes until they were a shrieking, taunting chorus: How could you be so stupid? Your boss is right, you know, you’re never going to amount to anything at this job because you’re so pathetic. And then there was that time when you fought with your first love and she broke your heart, and the chorus of voices that sang out included some that sounded familiar -- a relative, that horrible boss, a mean kid at school -- and they joined with the others in the refrain: Worthless, selfish, needy, ugly, loser.

You are their hostage.

Because they were helpful and seemed so invested in you, you surrendered to their plans, never questioning their motives or designs. You trusted them, and trust made you blind to their invisible machinations, raveling and twisting within you, weaving themselves into a spectacular knot of self-loathing, shame, and fear. Like any long-term captive, you developed Stockholm Syndrome and falsely believed they cared about you, that they remained your steadfast protectors. It’s not your fault; I know you were only trying to exist in a world that is too hard and unkind for people like us.

They may be trying to kill you.

I don’t know if it has happened to you yet, but if you don’t start resisting them now, their lies will turn sinister in an escalating series of questionable decisions, emotional havoc, maybe physical harm. The legion of liars in my mind told me I was trapped, unlovable, and better off dead. They took turns finding quiet, unexpected moments to tell me quite matter-of-factly to swallow an entire bottle of pills, to slice my blood vessels open, to drive my car directly into that tree. I don’t know what lies they have in store for you, but I can’t sit idly by while they concoct and scheme your eventual demise. You matter so much to me.

The thing that saved my life was realizing they were liars. I couldn’t get rid of them entirely, but I could reject what they told me, I could disobey at every turn. It didn’t mean doing the opposite of what they said, it just meant not marching to their orders. It meant living, on any terms I could scrape together. It meant untangling that first knot. It meant a weak, shaking warble: I want to live. It meant finding the courage to defy the shame and sing out: I deserve to be happy.

I have looked long enough into the void to see how far that rope goes. I can help you with some of the untying, but there are some places I can never touch. I promise to be here when you are done, or when it’s too hard and you need someone to remind you of how free you’ve become with the loosening of each knot. If you stop listening long enough to the mortal song of the tyrants in your mind, you will hear the softly chanted truth that always hummed beneath.

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The above is a personal essay submitted in Round 2 of the Yeah Write Super Challenge contest in February 2017. Click here to learn more about Yeah Write.

I Don't Presume To Know the Meaning of Life

I’ve been trying and failing for the last two days to solve all the world’s problems in a tidy little thousand-word package of twelve-point type. I feel like every different thing that is wrong needs at least ten thousand words devoted to it that can be crafted better than mine would. I don’t think I have what it takes to fix this.

The world is scarier than it has ever been in my lifetime and I am enraged and stunned daily. Meanwhile, my cat is morbidly obese and can’t clean her bum. My house is a mess and I’m convinced that not only is your house cleaner than mine, it also makes you a better person. In a completely impotent form of protest, I refuse to pay Comcast on time. I work too much. My health is slipping. My attention is fractioned to the point of deficit.

I wanted to write you an inspirational and humorous essay. I wanted to entertain you, make you feel something tug in your gut, compel you into some sort of meaningful personal action that I’d never see. It’s arrogant of me to think I deserve that kind of influence over you, that my arrangement of artfully chosen five-dollar words would somehow be that powerful. I haven’t earned that, and you certainly didn’t sign up to read one thousand words dredged in self-congratulatory sanctimony.

Sometimes I wonder how Lutheran minister Reinhold Niebuhr would feel about how his Serenity Prayer and its evolution in our vernacular. The full prayer is a simple and rather beautiful meditation on letting go, which has long since fallen out of fashion as people now half-kiddingly pray for the serenity not to kill a motherfucker. But the part that I think is the real meat of the prayer is probably the most overlooked — not the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, not the courage to change the things I can, but the wisdom to know the difference.

Here is the only thing I’ve ever learned that matters, the one pearl of wisdom I have to impart: I can control only myself, nothing else. Every attempt to influence or control anything beyond the boundaries of my skin is based purely in my selfish desire to make the world fit my image for it. Sure, sometimes selfishness can look pretty good on paper: wanting to help others, fighting for justice, trying to manifest a better world according to my terms and conditions. But mostly it is a fruitless exercise that only frustrates and confounds me while alienating those I try to bend to my will, no matter how altruistic my intentions.

With all our learning and understanding and psychology and industry, we are still slaves to a consciousness that can only assure us of our existence. We are still inside the matrix. When you zoom out to that view from outer space, where you can see the clouds moving over the continents and oceans, you can’t see me, my messy house, my fat cat. You can’t see my fears about my job and my health, the angst that keeps me awake at night, the money I throw at charities to assuage my liberal guilt.

These worries that you can’t see from outer space consume me. They consume all of us, but they are worthless in the bigger picture. We are like ants busying ourselves with the industry of civilization, but ultimately none of it really means much or makes a significant mark on the world. Generation after generation, we are sitting around an eternal campfire telling ourselves stories to pass the time until we die.

And this is okay.

I truly have no idea what I’m doing. I am making all of this up as I go — this essay, this life — and in my more rational moments I comfort myself by saying that you are, too. In the darkest, loneliest moments I’m convinced that I am somehow the only one who didn’t get the instruction manual and am squandering every shot I’ve ever had at a meaningful existence.

But in the light of day, I’m pretty sure that we’re all winging it. Thousands of years of human existence, of our spiritual, cultural, and social evolution have not yet distilled into a simple set of easy-to-follow instructions on how to capture that meaningful existence. How would we ever agree on a single set of instructions? When pressed, we wage wars over every notion of how to be alive on this planet, with each side saying theirs is the better, more righteous way.

Our consciousness only provides awareness — of self, the world around us, a framework for our sensory experience. What it doesn’t give us is meaning, and that’s the struggle, the thing we’re all desperate for. The mother of all unanswered questions: Why Are We Here? I don’t know why we’re here; I don’t presume to know the meaning of life. At some point in the existentially charged search for meaning, I gave up, surrendered the Why and decided to ask How?

If there is no inherent meaning to our existence as a whole, do I get to decide what my little blip on the timeline of humanity means? If I want my time here to be about something, how do I bring that to life in this hard, unrelenting world?

I think about this continually. After years of contemplation, I’ve found that the Serenity Prayer isn’t about the outer world as much as it is the inner one. When I ask for the wisdom to know the difference, I’m looking for help distinguishing between myself and the rest of the world, remembering the limits of my effectivity and influence. When I accept those boundaries I can achieve the courage to take meaningful action as well as serenity in meaningful inaction. Only then do I have a remote chance of fixing any of this, for myself, for you.

That’s the only thing I know.

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The above is a personal essay submitted to the Yeah Write Super Challenge contest in January 2017. Click here to learn more about Yeah Write.