#54 In pursuit of wonderland
where you been loca?
I didn’t honestly think much about last Spring until I got to Venezuela this April in 2024. I think that I had to survive and so I survived, and I performed well where I could — I invested myself in my friendships and I threw myself into finding work — but the reality is that it made me look at my relationship with work right in the eye, in more ways than one. I realized I attached a lot of my value to my employment — I wanted something to do, and I wanted to find it, and I got so focused on finding it that I was in a sort of temporary disembodied disconnect. I hired a coach, I went to exercise every once in a while, but the reality is I was feeling depressed. It was different this time than the last blue period, much less desolate and lonely in a different quality; the blues weren’t so noticeable and the lows felt so subtle, I was always an undercurrent of low. And to the external eye, I just kept getting bigger and bigger and I think it had a lot to do with finding refuge in comfort foods and trying to feel solid and safe in something I knew. So many different demons came out to play. The grief and the sudden loss of someone I love. The endless procedures and interviews and the blows to my self-esteem, the endless grey of a Dutch winter. The truth is, there was no other way the year was going to go. And there’s so much there, still; and now I feel this grief and relief of letting that version of myself go — the light is back in my eyes, the gratitude keeps me alive, the knot in my throat when I tell my friend I’m so blessed to have a home to return to.
I used to think returning home was one of the lesser evils in the choices I had to make to survive life abroad. But I wasn’t meant to survive life abroad — I was meant to build a life abroad. And I found myself unanchored and unknown to myself, this new version of me — side of me — I never met before. Nowadays I’m also curious about her and what she had to show me; the grief and how she felt through it, blindly following her footing into darker thoughts like what if I were to die tomorrow and nothing is in my control, everyone I love will always be a frail, little thing in the face of the world and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The pain or the suffering or the joy or the grief of it. How can I bear it and then there were daily things like client outreach and emails and creating content on LinkedIn and I can see now how the banality of it was offensive to me. Everything felt banal and kind of useless in the grander scheme of things except I was also a lost soul like in the movie, before breaking out of a trance, before I rewatched it for maybe the 5th time, this time with my dad in the living room, in April 2024. I held back my tears as I told him, see, this is everything that we were meant to do. Life was meant to be lived all along right here.
I think the gift of everything is my eventual understanding that life isn’t meant to be done in the pursuit of joy. Life is just meant to be in the now, and again, and again, and again. Life only asks you to be here. To be present for the feelings and the emotions and the thoughts you’re having and to witness them. Life just asked me to be there for it while it was happening. It was never about reaching some kind of joy that could sustain itself through the grief, but about being present for the grief with the patience and understanding that it would become easier to carry, one day. One day, even if it wasn’t today or if it wasn’t tomorrow. All it asks of you is to be here. What a simple and difficult thing to do.
Having certainty is having faith. Having security in yourself that the difficulty of something will pass eventually is faith — faith that nothing is permanent, not even the weight of feeling like this will last forever. Certainty is faith because it’s solid and also intangible in the way it can hold you through. I understand why people become spiritual or are born-again Christians or fervently pray to a rosary at Sunday church. The way we circle back, always make our way back to something that gives us a reason to live, to navigate whatever it is we are going to, can be beautiful. God can be beautiful. The world isn’t beautiful, most of the time, and grief is present, most of the time, but brilliance is possible. It is always possible. Sometimes it will crack through my chest when I feel grief but the color of it is always brilliant. Blinding. Love can also be this — presence — it can also be sitting with everything that is here. The pursuit of an eternal wonderland is reductive. That isn’t the whole picture. The whole picture exists alongside brutality and injustice, pain and suffering, brilliance and joy. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot exist in an imaginary place where everything is only joy. Joy is possible, but it is also fleeting — the more you grasp to it, the quicker it slips through your fingers. And it is true because pursuing it means so many things nowadays. The little silly treats, walks to get coffee, going to your favorite cinema; these things exist whether the joy exists to carry them or not. All life is asking you now is to be here for it. I punished myself for a long time thinking that I wasn’t reaching the joy I should reach, only to realize it was always there; but more multifaceted and sometimes trickier to access. If I didn’t give the grief the space to suffocate me, how could I come up again for air?
And then the weight falls when you decide to go home. This year was a lot about going home for me so far. What feels like home? What does it represent? I have the blessing (and the curse, always both) of feeling at home in two different countries. I travel the vastness of my homeland with the practiced tempo of someone who’s done this for close to a decade. My family, running veins across opposite sides of the country, different accents marking their Spanish, the house my mother grew up in, four generations of them and yet it still stands every year, the balcony opening the world to me as if to say we have always been here and we’ll always remain. The mountains surrounding my hometown, the drive to my grandmother’s house, where she raised my father and my aunts and uncles. The old room at my other grandmother’s house, painted lilac and soft baby pinks, my Hello Kitty radio. My cousin’s apartment in the capital, marbled tabletop, my beloved cream sofa bed. The birds coming for breakfast every morning at 7 a.m. feeding them rice. The shopping streets and winding roads up, up, and up, to the hill where my dad stays every once in a while. The clinic where my grandfather died.
And yet all these places mean nothing without the people in them. My great aunt serves me coffee every afternoon over the weekend, chopped fruit in the mornings. My dad installs a small TV so I can watch Netflix from bed without my laptop screen. My grandmother covers my back in body cream and draws my age, 27, like she did when I was 11. Her practiced hands travel down my shoulders and to my arms, just like they did when I was a child. I have a difficult time imagining a day in which none of them will be around to hold me. When I will no longer be someone’s daughter or grand-daughter. And how important it is to acknowledge it. My sister tells me on the drive home, you forget about moments like these, between everything that goes on in a day. You forget to appreciate them. You forget how you don’t know how long these moments will last. And I know it.
May 16th, my cousin would’ve been 33. I go to church on a Wednesday to meet my aunt and our cousins for mass. I stand there and wonder if he would’ve come to the service had it been someone else. I tell him I don’t know whether he believes in all this, the ceiling covered in beautiful paintings, swirling pastel clouds of yellow and pink and blue. I swallow my tears back because I hate crying in public. We repeat after the reverend and I listen to how he says it’s important to keep caring for one another. Someone reads the names of people who’ve died on a long list and I make out his name and realize it’s the first time I’ve heard the name of someone I love in the prayer list for church. I wonder if he thinks this is appropriate or if he believed in God, or even this kind of God. I realize I can’t ever really know.
Surrender my cap reads, accidentally left on furniture high above my bed, right across it. I happen to read it over every time I wake up lately. Funny, I think. The last thing I ever wanted to do was surrender but here we are; melted and laying on this bed that’s been around nearly for as long as I’ve been. In a room I used to dream in when I was 10. And it doesn’t feel at all like I thought it would feel. In your childhood room trying to make life work! Not at all. It feels like being someone’s daughter for a while and being held in a home that’s always been there for me, whether life feels like it’s working out or not.
And life is working out. I am alive. I only have to be here to watch it unfold.