I keep sitting down to say anything about how the last six months have gone, but I don’t know how to get the words out. How do I tell you about a trip I almost didn’t return from? That I went to the place where taking my own life had been first pressed upon my consciousness, and it was a question I had not yet answered?

No matter how hard I tried, even after all the therapy I’d been to, I wanted to believe understanding the past would bring about wholeness, but it didn’t. The truth is, no matter how much I stared at the holes in my past, no matter how much I measured the contours of their edges, tested the dirt in which they were dug, and answered all manner of questions about the physical properties of the holes, I could not change the fact that they remained holes. However, unlike in my mid-twenties, I was actually enjoying how life turned out. Like really, deeply, feeling lighter than I ever had, enjoying it. But there was still something tugging me down, like a body at the end of a string to this kite that held me tethered, pulled me crashing into the earth.

For years, I accepted that perhaps this was just how my life would be: brief moments of flight, long moments of being wrecked on the ground. By accepting this, I could move through both, understanding the brevity of joy and the long duration of sadness, and believed it was enough. That I could face life this way until I died. I didn’t know if I needed to go farther. I figured I was good and could be happy with this measure of peace.

Until it wasn’t enough.

As I dug deeper into myself, as I absorbed and examined the language that others used to describe the pains of their lives, I began to realize that almost no one I knew had come to peace with their past. Like really, truly, deeply come to peace. In ways, there always seemed to be a war between the present and history, and I had learned to believe the present was the rightful heir to an existence where the past attacks like insurgents in occupied territory. Why won’t the past die? Why doesn’t it simply erase itself so that we never know that today is not the same day as yesterday? Why do we have to be time beings in this time being? And there is the intoxication of endlessness, of futurity, of eternity, but all we ever have is now, and the now that is no longer. Why do we remember? Why do our bodies remember? Why does the form of memory work like a virus through the whole body that no manufactured medicine can stop?

I’ve wondered about these things. I’ve wondered why my body is this repository for memory. But I’ve also learned from the last five years that wandering around a thing, measuring its edges, does not make it disappear. Could something else do that? Though I understood so much about what had shaped me and why, I had not yet grieved the make you wish you could press RESET god I wish I didn’t have to live through this kind of loss that stayed with me for all of those years. The losses were the very basis of who I am.

It’s ironic to think of myself as a person only in terms of what is missing.

I found that I could no longer go on this way and had to figure out how to let go. I wanted to know if I could make peace between everything my life had been and the present in which I live. I knew that everyone had losses and that our sense of loss is relative to the circumstances surrounding us, and I found that poetic because it doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of privilege you have in this life; pain is pain relative, which is to say that emotional pain assaults every human, to some extent, equally. And if I was doing something that caused me physical pain, what would I do? I would do anything to stop the pain or heal the source from which it stemmed. This seems to be the correct, instinctual response. Yet, for some reason, I am more likely to attend to my physical wounds with much more care than I respond to my emotional ones. Part of it is because emotional pain is not physical but abstract. Yet, it is still the function of my nervous system that tells me that something is wrong and that I must get to safety. I had understood this, but what I had not yet understood was how to care for those emotional wounds in the way that I might have for a physical trauma of similar proportions. I thought that as long as I understood the loss well enough, I was just supposed to get over it at some point.

That didn’t happen.

 My losses still held on tight to the end of the string, ready to pull me nosedive at any moment. Could I change this? Could I ever be free?

And so last spring and summer, I did the thing I knew how to do. I wrote, and I wrote. About those moments that seem frozen in time, eternally past, always so here and now. I wrote about love, family, and friendship. I wrote about the times I thought people cared about me but didn’t. The ways people had taken a bite out of me on their way through. It was hard. It was one of the hardest things I ever did to go back to the center of my pain and empathize with the person who had brought that pain to me. I wasn’t just trying to understand how they could hurt me but how this action was a survival response to the pain they felt inside.

In going deep into the center of the pain, I needed to remember what I didn’t see then. I had to remember again and insert a perspective I had not considered the first time. What kind of pain would make a person act that way? And since I did a good share of inflicting pain, what kind of pain did I feel that made me behave that way? Instead of asking, why would I/they do that? I wondered, why was [x] the best possible decision for my/their survival? Then, I made a pact with myself not to judge actions by myself or others but to look at them from as many angles as possible as subjectively as I could. I made another pact, too, to feel everything and not judge a single emotion. Sit with it and let it sink.

So, I wrote, and I wrote. The memory of my past ballooned; I could feel something changing in myself, but I didn’t know how to describe it or tell what it was doing. For a long time, I wondered if I was simply being a masochistic artist, getting off on the pain of my traumas, but I kept going. I had to find out where it ended.

Mostly, I just cried. I have never cried so much in my life, and I cried in equal parts for myself and the pain those people must have felt in order to treat another human in such a way.

There is a reason we are sick with pain and loneliness as a people. I believe it is not something that our technology or educated answers will ever be able to tell, and this is the great cause of our collective suffering. The poisons, disease, murders, and disasters are all just a byproduct of this pain. The world inside ourselves becomes manifest in the world around us. We need a cure, and since religion didn’t exactly give us peace on earth, we would be wise to rethink where and from whom our cure comes.

The crying stopped feeling bad after a while. It was like cleaning a wound and feeling it heal day after day until it gets all tickly with new skin. Crying wasn’t the end, but the beginning. Months passed, and I felt lighter than ever; my string let out, and I coasted the currents far above the ground. But I was still tethered, still so there and here now, and as the summer drew towards its middle, I knew that it was not enough to write about these memories and revisit them in my mind but that I needed to go to the place where they happened. I needed to go back to those geographic repositories of memory. That was all I knew. I didn’t know what would happen or why I was doing it, but I’ve learned to trust that force inside me—it is the voice of reason; it’s the reason I have to.

So, after the summer quarter ended and my research seminar was finished at UW, I planned a trip to Alaska and, soon after, to my childhood home—both places I had not been since before the COVID-19 pandemic. I’d been away for nearly five years from all of these locations. At the beginning of the trip, I went with a good friend; in the middle of the journey, I was alone, and the last leg ended with family. I went in with no expectations. Frankly, I was unsure that anything would happen. I wondered if I was insane in my pursuits, that the only answer was that something was wrong with me. That something about me was too fucked up, mentally or emotionally, to be healed. Perhaps I was fucked up from the beginning before I even had memories, that it was something I’d never escape. Like history. Like memory. But I knew that if I was going to answer that question and condemn myself, I would follow my investigation until I had enough answers to make a call. Was I just fucked up? Does anybody ever really heal? Does the past ever stay the past? How can the present be good if memory is always right here now? Can I ever let go? Am I crazy? Am I too broken?

These were the questions with which I rode a plane to Alaska at the end of August. I didn’t know then that I would get answers to all of them and even answers to questions I hadn’t asked yet. The experience, beginning and ending in just under four weeks, felt as if I was slingshot across dimensions. I won’t go as far as telling you that I am entirely healed or that there is nothing left to learn, but I will say that I am more curious than ever why we as a species have tried to remove or forestall grieving from our lives. The hole will always be a hole, and it’s okay to grieve that. It’s OK to be happy in some ways, even if it was a hole, because it made you who you are.

In months since then, I’ve been working hard to compile my journals from this period and make them into a legible story. I’m perhaps halfway through this project right now, but I have been able to dedicate more time since the start of the year and hope that will speed up its finishing. I will compile, arrange, and release all of those entries. Except for pseudonyms, fixed spelling, and some rewording, I plan to keep them as is. This is for two reasons: It will be a long time before I can turn it into a polished piece, and I feel an urgency to let it go. I also want to see what you think because it is raw and messy in all the ways a journal can be. Sometimes, I don’t think we were supposed to live so augmented by the ability to perfect our presentation of our experiences. Life cannot be contained within the lines of this language with which I deliver these thoughts from my brain to yours. It is difficult to say how long it will take me to do this, but I hope it will be before summer. And then it will just exist in the world rather than being a story I’m trying to tell. There are too many stories and so little time.

That’s why I have been quiet on here. Not because I’m not working, but I’m so deep in getting this piece together that I forgot that I could talk about anything I want to, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m trying to be better about that while balancing my desire to tell you a story that is as good as possible. I forget that the whole point of this page, for me, was to talk to you directly, the way good friends do, and it’s not like I don’t—for better or worse—have anything to say. I’ll try to do better.

Until then, be good to yourself.