This is a part of a newsletter video essay series. The video will be following shortly <3
THE PROLOGUE
The summer I turned twelve I had an existential crisis. I asked my parents every evening as the moon drew my heart closer: What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? And what is it for?
I would walk the halls of my school touching every paper stapled to the bulletin boards–what is it for?
I would spend an hour walking home avoiding the cracks–what is it for?
I would imagine opening my bedroom window and jumping–what is it for?
I would sleep on the couch because the light in my room was too yellow–what is it for?
My mom called me cerebral. I was seriously concerned that I was going crazy. It was all at once a panic ballooning in my chest, and a sticky malaise that followed me like a shadow.
I went to therapy. My therapists told me that these were intrusive thoughts. My dad reminded me that this was natural and just a result of my growing brain. Many people have asked these questions before you, and many will after, he offered. I try to find some comfort in this, repeated it to myself like a mantra, but the feeling lingered. I shut my face like a cupboard and carried on like this for many months. Walking like a twelve year old walking. Cutting watermelon like a twelve year old cutting watermelon and trying not to think of the possibilities of a knife.
And then, it was gone, like it was never there.
I couldn’t know it then, but I was broaching that drop off point. I was playing with the mystery, pressing my hands against the membrane and terrified to find the border to be far more porous than I thought.
What is it for?
I feared I already knew the answer. That summer I could feel the back of my neck prickling. I knew it was right behind me.
If I turned, there it would be. If I turned, it would be there.
Nothing. It is for nothing.
EARLY SPRING: Nothing
~
It was early spring,
I was now living in an apartment that was going to get torn down in September. I was mediating this ending, being the last one to grace the space. Having the sole responsibility of sitting bed-side during its dying days.
I had just moved back to Montreal and there were many stops and starts. A brief spur of creative excitement and then many days coloured by the same gray. There was a deep meaninglessness that was settling over me. I chalked it up to the remnants left over from pisces season. It had taken me under, and I was just about making my way back to the surface.
A memory started resurfacing. An evening when I took mushrooms for the first time at 18. All of a sudden I was so acutely aware of the pure meaninglessness of it all. Growing up catholic I was baptized in the meaningfulness of everything. You could often find the cruel and rushed, “everything happens for a reason,” tacked on to unbearable loss like a participation ribbon. I would pray to god as a kid when I got food poisoning or at birthday parties when I would eat so much that I would throw up. Back then it all meant something. I was being punished and needed to repent. That dark November night when mushrooms were placed carefully on a peanut butter sandwich, I couldn’t believe that nothing mattered. That right and wrong were amorphous and permeable like jelly.
It scared me, just as it did at twelve, and as the family lore goes, I left a rambly voicemail to my mom in the middle of the night. A story my sister likes to tell readily and often.
As the snow was just melting in a muddied slush, pushing towards the center was on my mind. I had this phrase echoing around since Spain. This feeling of dancing and getting so close to reaching some center of myself–pushing towards it, aching for it. And yet, I didn’t quite know what this centre was. It was a mystery. It evaded me, I could only know the feeling in my proximity to it, that feeling I get when I sense I’m getting closer.
And then I found a clue…
This expansion and contraction of life was something I could get behind. I was coming out of a season of writing exclusively about endings. The end of the world, and the end of who I once was. Last summer, I looked at the food compost in the bin and thought to myself that decay and decomposition was an essential process of life, back to the nothingness, back to the dirt, to feed it, to create that rich and precious mulch; fertile and ready for something else to emerge.
Endings were the portal and they produced the conditions for new beginnings.
We were moving out away from nothing or rushing back into its embrace. Perhaps, this was the center. The center we were all tied to. The expansion and contraction that was around every corner. Summer and winter, day and night, being born just to die again.
I have spent a long time running away from some nihilism that creeped up on me that summer, and many other summers after. Once again I had made it to that drop off point, walking that edge where things lose meaning.
But something was different, I was pushing towards it. I desired it like a lover, I longed for it like a crush.
What if living was truly meaningless and what if this was nothing to fear?
LATE SPRING: For it’s own sake
It was late spring,
I punched a hole through a canvas, just to show myself that I could. I really wish I could tell you that was a figure of speech. I was trying to lower some stakes, put them below the floor. I could fuck it all up. I could make the ugliest thing possible and it could still all be okay. If I was braver I would hang it out in the open for everyone to see, but instead I hid it in the closet like a secret and shut the door. I was taking baby steps.
I was listening to a podcast and I heard a word. Lishma– for its own sake. This word tagged along with me for days. It was everywhere, in my coffee, in the wind, in the flowers, most of all in the flowers.
Why do the flowers bloom just to die again in the fall? For what purpose?
It rattled around in my skull: for its own sake, for its own sake.
I picked up the paint brush. I committed something else to canvas. I looked at it from several steps back and decided that this wasn’t what I wanted to express. I went to the art co-op by my house and got discounted gesso. I painted over the entire canvas. It was a fresh start. It was comforting to know that I could always start again in such a way.
Could it be enough that I was experimenting with something? Like the flowers I was trying to express myself and push the energy forward. Could it be enough that after it was all said and done I let it return back to the void in which it came? Could it be enough that the hours I committed to the canvas amounted to nothing at all? How long has it been since I’ve done something just for the fun of it? These questions bubbled over as I walked to the grocery store and back home again.
I cry-screamed to a taylor swift song, something shifted and I began writing again. The feeling was a deep rich purple.
A week later, I got terribly sick. I spent many days lying on the couch staring at the television, head emptied out. I was rotting and decaying the entire week, something needed to die. I thought to myself that when I come to, everything will change. This wasn’t exciting or daunting or even grand, it was just a quiet knowing. I knew it, like one knows the moles on a familiar lover. Many chicken noodle soups and lemon honey teas later, I felt as if I had made it out the other side.
Here it was.
~
The nothingness is not emptiness, scraped out hollow.
It is rich, infinite, the color of brown you get when you mix every color that has ever existed or will ever exist.
It is the meaning that flies out of your fingers in one fell swoop.
It is the muddling, where you and me, might be something of the same.
It is the central condition of living. It ties it all together like a shoelace. Like the bow on a gift.
I think it all might be worth it, for its own sake. Committing to the canvas just to paint over it. Creating for no end. Living just to die again.
~
SUMMER: Pure play
It was summer,
I moved into my studio. I couldn’t help but look at all the art of the other artists and wonder to myself if I was good enough. Did I deserve to have this studio, was it premature? Was I taking my work too seriously? Not seriously enough? These doubts lingered for a few days, like the leaky faucet in my apartment, it dripped at the back of my mind.
L asked, do you dissuade these doubts?
No, I answered, I just let them be.
What if this little corner I had in a warehouse above the light store had no grander purpose? Maybe all I really needed was a place to experiment and play. And yet, it was not just a space, it was a container. My apartment had too many doorways and not enough doors. Things had space to roam. Often, I would wake up from naps with this feeling that something had just disappeared right around the corner.
A told me over the phone that Haruki Murakami writes his drafts in English first then translates them to Japanese. Yes of course, I thought. Limits are essential to the creative process. There is nothing more stimulating then a closed door. Nothing creates movement like a container to travel in.
So, that first morning, I went to my studio, my new container, with the intention of playing. I wrote, all was well. Then I touched my hand to the paint brush and I felt the familiar tug. That feeling of dread bobbing out of the water like an inflated balloon. I held it in my arms and whispered to it.
I started again.
I felt as if I was getting it, really getting it.
This is very serious, and must be approached with a complete lack of seriousness. This is the closest I can get to some truth. I thought some nothingness would consume me whole, but I have never known freedom as I have with a paint brush and no end in mind. To spend a week on a puzzle and send it away when I was finished. To treat life as a medium you get to experiment with, knowing you must leave it all behind when it’s done. None of my dreams could come true and it would still be worth it, I think.
It would be worth it just to play.
Do you ever feel like that?
THE EPILOGUE
I was at my parents place over the weekend and buried my dog. It was lightly raining. We lied her down in the backyard and whispered to her, stroking that place behind her ears. It’s nothing short of a miracle to see life leave a body. How it becomes malleable like jello. Someone was in there, calling that body home, and then they are gone.
Where to dog spirits go?
I buried many things in the dirt that day. It occurred to me as we lowered her body into the grave that I will never be a girl again in this lifetime, never again with my sister and never again with my dog.
Once again, I’m in awe that things will never be as they were.
I’m having an experience.
If you are reading this, so are you.
Can you believe it??
I can’t.
~
~
Love as always,
-Thai xx