Aphorisms on my twenty-third birthday (or, Being a Self, Vol. 3)

These are not in fact aphorisms on my twenty-third birthday.

I turned twenty-three several days ago, but I could not write anything, because I had just come out of a depressive episode and, now happy, I felt discontinuous from the sentences I had written before, when I was sad. How do you write joy — or, at least, happiness? How do you write a piece that is both joyous and sorrowful but still feels whole?

The Bible, full of wisdom, says that there is a season for everything, a season to weep and a season to laugh, but it does not say that these seasons can be seconds-long, and that there can be weeping and laughing, in the same moment, from the same mouth.

A doctor told me recently that I had a high pain threshold. I should have been offended: black people are thought to not experience as much pain as others (and are abused as a result), but I was only sad. Because I have just now begun to understand the importance of rejecting stoicism, expressing pain. It is easy to absorb pain quietly when it is not chronic, when you know that it will end, and when you have grown up with the Christian lesson that everything will be better in the literal and metaphorical morning.

There is something deeply tragic about Christianity. Whenever people pray for suffering to — God willing — escape them and their loved ones, they are faced with the likelihood that they will not, in fact, be spared. They understand that they are only biding time, because no matter how much they pray, they and everyone they love will die. For Christians, every loss is a betrayal.

Faith is the precondition of faith. In order to believe that something is real, one has to believe that things can be real.

Traveling alone is both dangerous and boring — that is, exactly like everything else, if you understand that our lives are always at risk, and always cliché.

Traveling alone, I am afraid but I am grateful. I am grateful for my legs, my hands, my phone, its data. Traveling alone, I am grateful for maps, for hostels, for rivers. Traveling alone, I am grateful for kind people. Traveling alone, I am grateful for, reminded of, and floored by my privilege: to be able bodied, to be resourced, to be prayed for — that is, assured.

To be prayed for, to be cared for, to receive gifts on your twenty-third birthday — these are not small things.

There are very few things that are truly democratic in this world: fully accessible libraries, brilliant and generous television shows, a within-reach future where said television shows are screened in said libraries — but birthdays are the most democratic of all.

I have been trying for the past two years to write an essay on the joy of television shows, but what can I say about TV that it doesn’t already articulate itself? Nothing, except what it means to me. But what does it mean to me? What does it mean for a thing to mean something to someone? And I don’t mean to belabor the point, only to say that there is an excess of feeling which I cannot name. Perhaps it is a personal failure, perhaps there are words for what seems like magic to me.

Each term in boarding school we had school-wide socials, and I cried during every single one of my first four years. Last weekend, on the verge of tears at a crowded house party, I realized that parties are overwhelming because they are so much about navigating your inarticulable desires and the confusing, variously charged electricity of other people’s.

I do not believe at all that our lives are sublime (that is, heavenly, exultant, awe-some, worthy of worship, romance, or even poetry), but I admit, reluctantly, in this moment of writing solemnly but not passionately, that there is a depth of feeling which escapes language, even when it is created by language.

It appears that I have failed. I am told that I have a good laugh, and it is true, I have a good laugh, so I have wanted to write an essay that laughs as well as it mourns, but I have failed to do so. Because, I suppose, everything that is funny is also tragic. All laughter ends eventually.

If I have conflated laughter with funniness with happiness with joy, it is because I believe that they all stem from the same impulse: to forget that we are always mourning what is lost and what will be lost.

In the end, all joy is ironic, but you already knew that.