1. Overture
(The following is not a piece where everything naturally flowed into my notebook in one effortless masterstroke like I hoped. It is cobbled together from several attempts at it over the past week, and an urgency to honor the promise I made to myself to deliver something bad rather than nothing at all. It is far from where I know it can be, and the truth is that it is just going to take the committed time energy and work, one foot in front of the other. I’m learning to lean into this feeling of struggle and frustration rather than resent it. I think my interest more than anything else lately is to work on living more honestly, which means not hiding my vulnerability. Far easier said than done, but here’s doing it.)
When I was seventeen, after my mom died, I realized that I didn’t know anything.
What I thought I knew, because I’d just learned it, was this: Death was real, and it could come any time for anyone—not only could it, but it would come, inevitably.
The other problem was that I didn’t know what death was. All I thought I knew about it was that it took away people I love. I’d been seeing people die from a distance my whole life in stories and TV, friends of friends, but it wasn’t quite real until it happened to my mom. Whatever happened to her could at any time happen to anyone I knew, it could happen to me.
After my mom died, I walked through the halls of my high school watching everyone I’d ever known acting like everything was normal. Did they know something I didn’t know? How could everything exist and no one knew why or how? How was that possible? And why did no one seem to care? Why did no one feel the urgency I felt about this?
I couldn’t stand the idea that death could come for me any moment. It was unacceptable, and I had to do something about it. The most immediate thing accessible to me was to think about it. So I thought, while the world happened around me as if at a distance while I retreated into myself.
If I knew and understood the Truth about life, death, and everything else, then I’d have no more fear of anything, because nothing would be unknown; I’d know everything! How could anything be more important than finding that?
I was working from a few hopeful, desperate assumptions. I assumed that the Truth would take the form of a sentence in English, a specific and perfect sequence of words that would attach to some perfect idea. I assumed that it would have that feeling of understanding, a flash of insight, where something confusing and unclear suddenly all fit like a jigsaw puzzle in my head.
I assumed that this Truth would be timeless, changeless and eternal, and that it would solve every possible problem forever. It would fit nicely in alignment with my own preferences and desires. I also assumed I would instantly recognize this Truth if I did encounter it. Given the urgency of the problem, since Death could come for me at any given moment, thinking the perfect thought seemed to be the quickest way to get what I was after. So I began my quest.
Sixteen years later, I look back on the situation differently from how it began. I think I can look back on my seventeen-year-old self and see myself a little more clearly.
The simple Truth was this: I was terrified of the unknown.
I saw it as a problem that needed to be solved, or else, something terrible, even more so because I didn’t know!
I was looking for a solution, and over and over, I thought I found it: a thought, an idea, a concept, a sentence with which to make the unknown fully known, to attain perfect understanding.
“Aha!” I’d say. A moment of epiphany and understanding would come that felt absolutely complete in itself, something conclusive and final. A peace would wash through me, and I’d believe it so strongly that I’d meet the world with the attitude of someone who really finally knew what it was all about; I thought I was someone who “got it.” I’d find myself in a moment of what I was sure was enlightenment, the perfect final moment that answered all of my questions, wrapped up all of existence in a nice tidy little bow, and the day would be saved once and for all, happily ever after, The End…
…Then the next moment would come, and I’d have no fucking clue what was about to happen next.
I don’t remember when exactly, but eventually it started to dawn on me, maybe the unknown wasn’t a problem.
When I was seventeen, after my mom died, I became obsessed with trying to find out what was going on. I tried to think it through to myself, but as I saw people around me carry on with their lives, I wondered whether they knew something I didn’t. I was certain that most people my age were just like I’d been before my mom died, just not thinking about it. But I figured some of the adults must have known. After asking enough of them, it seemed pretty clear that they didn’t know what was going on either.
The problem I had when I was 17 hasn’t gone away— if anything, it feels as urgent as ever, since it seems no one has decisively figured it out so that we can agree with absolute certainty. I don’t think the question is asked urgently enough, and perhaps it’s time I say it and ask it of you: Does anyone know what the fuck is going on? It seems to me that no one knows what the fuck is going on.
From all sides, everything has become harder and harder to talk about, buried in static. I see everyone trying to get a lay of the situation and assess what’s going on in the world, and it seems like no one can agree with anyone else. An interesting alternative does emerge through this. I do my best to assess what’s really going on, but everything drowns in an uncertainty. But there is something left over amidst this churning ocean jigsaw pieces, and that’s what it looks like form here, what it looks like to me.
That feels different from all the people who have become prophets and messiahs and authorities who want people to follow them. Instead, when I decide that all I really can do that actually is true is just how it all seems to me, no more or less. then it feels like sharing. I can say it’s true, or at least more true, than any attempt to say what is really going on.
Because right now, it feels to me, looks to me, just from where I am, like no one knows or everyone knows, and it’s all confused, and it makes things worse the more everyone tries to assert they know what’s going on.
In my experience, there’s another version of this communication, which is called sharing. It’s like we run and hide from the battle and dig underground, into the darkness, into ourselves, and somehow, we actually end up running into each other, finding each other in the tunnels. Down there, we can share only what we’ve seen and felt and thought with each other, claiming no more than this truth which is only ours, no more or less, and it is ours to share with each other.
Then the truths don’t cancel each other out. They weave together. And this is what reading taught me. This is the communication I espouse, the communication I think we need in this world, a communication that is a communion, where we confess ourselves, share ourselves, and we receive each other as undeniable truths, because it is no more or less than the truths of our own lives, our own witness, our own testimony.
I want to tell you, and I want to express for myself, what this world and this life has been to me. I want to and need to tell you what I have seen and felt because it is what I have to give. What I think and feel and everything inside and around me, because I have read books by other people who died a long time ago and I feel like I know something about what was inside of them, maybe not all of it, but things about them that even the people in their daily lives could never have known about them. It’s like it was only possible for them to become themselves by creating, writing, painting, drawing, telling stories. And people have been passing each other these little notes across this rushing river of life, each one to each other a lifeline—not that anyone else saved anyone else, it was only the simplest fact of receiving these messages which were proof we were not alone in the mystery, and even if each of us walks their path alone, whatever we shared saved us.
Here I am, here are the facts as I feel and see them: My name is Ethan, I’m 33 years old, I was born and raised in Long Island outside of New York City, and I now live in New York City with my childhood friends. We are all struggling because none of us are living the successful lives we were told to have when we were children. None of us know what is going on in the world, though a lot of it is clearly bad. We are all scared and confused and just trying to survive, and very often it feels like it is too much. We fear that our lives will descend into further and further malice and brutality, that the planet will burn, that we will lose our souls and humanity and become slaves, machines, that we will suffer, that God will condemn us all to eternal flames and punishment for our sins, because human beings are sick evil twisted creatures that have nothing to blame for our suffering but ourselves—unless of course there are evil forces, and horrors beyond our comprehension that can devour us any moment, and we are all still scared because death could come for us at any moment—and it gets even more silly and superfluous than that, because in the face of that, we escape into all the things we can escape into, we make ourselves dull not to feel any of it. We focus on our little petty personal things, the desire for the dream we were sold as children, for our own partner and children and career and lots of money and a house and cars and all the things that tell us we are living the good and right life, whatever goes on in the rest of the world having nothing to do with us, supposedly, each person for themselves, so that we are all competing with each other in Life, like it’s a boardgame with winners and losers.
Beneath all of that is the reality, of how we actually live and feel, as people who grew up with the rise of the internet and have seen more in our short lives than any other generation in human history, with minds that have never been put to this kind of test of information, an overload that is clearly breaking us all into a shattered reality where we can barely find the center anymore that once held us all together, if there ever was one. Where we are lonely, and growing older, where there is no peace, only the urgent sense that everything is wrong, and that there is something we must do about it, but we don’t know what— where there is such a learned belief in our powerlessness, having been trained to watch the world happen on a screen in our pockets where we can do nothing about it but watch it choicelessly.
AND YET— who can say if it’s delusion or fantasy, but in the face of all that, there is also hope, and love? That each of us can still recall and still find in all these glimpses, the parts of life that are joys, bliss, without a single thought or anxiety, these little moments that hint at us that something beautiful and tremendous is possible, that frighteningly so, this world and everything in it can be saved, for generations to come?
And here we all stand, over and over again through every apocalypse and every revolution, through every turn of things through the emptiness of space, once more, no matter what happens, on the precipice of every possibility, our greatest hopes and dreams and our greatest fears, everything we can imagine and even the awareness of everything we can’t imagine—and if you’re like me, looking at this situation, you might feel a sense of urgency to ask, “what do I do?”
The short answer for now, is that in 16 years of asking these questions, I always come back to the same answer, no matter how I try other things. My answer is that I write.
I still have the dream or the calling I’ve had since I was a little kid first dreaming of being an author, back when you have dreams from the purest innocence, with an utter shamelessness, something inside of you that knows what it wants without question.
The answer remained the same even as I got older and was forced to consider what it meant to survive economically, what it meant to earn the approval of people in my life, what I really thought it was worth spending the time of my life doing.
The answer remained the same even as I watched things in the world begin to crumble, even as I felt a greater sense of complicity and responsibility, even as the paths to a secure life seemed to crumble in all directions— even as it felt like the only thing left to do was to try to save the world, survive, save myself, the answer never changed, because for me, it seems to meet every challenge.
I don’t know anything about the nature of reality, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to the world, or to myself. I have sought other people to answer this question for me, I have sought guidance, I have sought someone to tell me what to do. But over and over again, as I’m left only with myself and this thing inside of me, the same bell has never stopped ringing. Writing is what I do, it is my calling, and I go where it calls me.
In my senior year English class, I was miserable. My head was spinning with thoughts that never landed. I discovered existentialism, and I found the comfort of a conclusion. There is no inherent meaning to anything, and that was the simple fact. It seemed to fit the reality of the situation, and I took a comfort in it, but I wasn’t finding any happiness in it either.
In my English class, we read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. It was a story about a young man who was not satisfied with the stories he’d been told about life, and left home to go seek out the Truth about life. He learned many things at every step along the way. He found the answer to the meaning of life, a meaning he was only able to find by living his life and becoming himself.
I tell everyone who asks me that Siddhartha is my favorite book, because it saved my life.
As I take in the world, I see in the world a situation not unlike the one I was in when I was that age. I see a world that is lost and confused and full of despair, a world that is desperately seeking a light, a clearing, a way forward and a way through. I’m seeking that for myself.
What becomes possible if we dare to speak it and make it so?
I write because what if it were possible to save the world by writing and telling a story? I write because writing creates a space for me to access a part of myself that can’t be accessed any other way. I write because if I do this for myself, maybe it can do something similar for someone else. Even if it only saves me, in the very act of doing it, confessing it, finding it, playing with it, then it’s already enough. But then what if it was possible to save someone else? What if it could save many people, and set them free? What if writing could save the whole world?
Don’t you want to find out?