The Bearable Heaviness of Being
Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed, I go for an aimless walk.
My college campus was flanked by Lake Michigan. Between classes, or after hours under the cover of night, I would go sit on the boulders alongside the lake. The beat of the waves would drown out the noise in my head. I could focus on specific thoughts and emotions, come to an understanding, and find peace.
When I think about times I’ve felt overwhelmed, it’s always been attributed to weight.
Weight anchors you to reality. Weight reminds you that you are a person in society with relationships to maintain, with bills to pay, with the ability to affect and be affected by others.
Words, emotions, and feelings have weight. Words have the capacity to convey affection or dissatisfaction; they can be the source of joy or the bringer of sorrow.
Commitment and future plans, and committing to future plans, and love have weight. Treating another’s heart as your own is never a light affair.
Things have weight.
I appreciate a certain amount of weight in my life, but I never want to feel overwhelmed by it.
When I was a kid, I didn’t really know how to deal with weight (ironic since I was also an adorably overweight kid in the most literal sense).
I escaped into the worlds of MapleStory and RuneScape. My worries were simple. How many logs would I need to cut and sell to afford a new sword? How many animated slimes would I need to massacre to get to the next level? I made online friends, and spent 4-5+ hours every day in my fantasy world.
On one of my hangouts with A, we happened upon the question of “what level of escapism is healthy”?
Looking back at my childhood, I don’t regret the thousands of hours I poured into my fantasy. Sometimes I imagine what wondrous things I could have accomplished instead with that time, but I still believe that it was what I needed back then. I was dealing with the weight in the way that worked best for me.
Now, I go for walks. I journal. I incessantly catalogue and write things down. I talk to friends that will entertain my thoughts and ruminations. I laugh with my therapist.
I want my life to have a good amount of weight to it. Too little weight, and I’ll drift off untethered into the ether. Too much weight, and I’ll be unable to move. With just enough weight, maybe I’ll be able to fly.
I don’t see myself ever getting to the point where I pay someone to deal with the pots and pans and rent for me, but I want to have agency over what weight enters my life. I want to better understand my values and desires to decide what should actually have weight in my life, and what should be tossed overboard.
Here are some photos taken at some of my favorite walking spots in NYC, and of my dinner today (highly recommend Mikado sushi - especially for their lunch deals!).
A bearblog post that inspired some of this thinking:
On retaining the desire to fly
My background music while writing:
To support my burgeoning curiosity, the CEO of my company and my work sister have kindly shared some poetry books with me.
Here is a poem from one book that caught my attention:
Written Deer
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
—Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing
different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote
the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,
branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples
their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.
— Maggie Smith