Loves pulls us out
Have you read My Year or Rest and Relaxation? Oh please do. But that's not why I'm writing this.
Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a short essay in the Guardian about the book. About creating a protagonist who just wants to sleep through the misery of being unloved and alone. Anyway, in the essay she writes powerfully and evocatively about why being inside during a plague involuntarily sucks so much:
“Doing time” is what we call a sentence in a penal institution. I like to recall what a former prison inmate told me when I asked him what it was like living in solitary confinement: go into your bathroom and lock the door and don’t leave. I tried it. About six minutes in, I started to panic. If I was any good at meditation, maybe I could have actually left my body. I told myself to imagine sun-kissed beaches, puppies, my living room, my mother’s hands, a field of flowers. But the entrapment laced every thought with menace. I got dark inside. Even as someone who has made a career out of her “dark” imagination, I didn’t like it in there. I lasted 10 minutes. And I left, angry with myself that I wasn’t better at thinking nice thoughts."
Then she wrote something that literally made me stop breathing.
"My dreams these days are about my husband falling out of love with me. I wake up desperate and shaky, imploring him to confirm that he has not abandoned me while I’ve been asleep. “I love you,” I say. “Do you still love me?” I understand that this is my mind resting on the only real thing it knows outside of itself: love. Without it, life is just “doing time”.
First of all, HOW evocatively has she written. Secondly, YES.
Now that I think about it, our interior lives are not that much fun. When we're alone, often we're stuck inside ourselves, trapped in our own ego, looped in this recursive string of our own -- usually deranged, usually unkind -- thoughts without anyone to snap us out of it. We get lost in the weeds of ourselves.
And love is what breaks that. Love is what gives us an exterior existence. Love is why we go out, or return a call, or try to make someone laugh, and so get out of our own heads for a bit. Love is why we think a little bit better of ourselves, even if just for a moment. Exit the misery of otherwise solitary confinement. Love is what makes our lives real.
Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a short essay in the Guardian about the book. About creating a protagonist who just wants to sleep through the misery of being unloved and alone. Anyway, in the essay she writes powerfully and evocatively about why being inside during a plague involuntarily sucks so much:
“Doing time” is what we call a sentence in a penal institution. I like to recall what a former prison inmate told me when I asked him what it was like living in solitary confinement: go into your bathroom and lock the door and don’t leave. I tried it. About six minutes in, I started to panic. If I was any good at meditation, maybe I could have actually left my body. I told myself to imagine sun-kissed beaches, puppies, my living room, my mother’s hands, a field of flowers. But the entrapment laced every thought with menace. I got dark inside. Even as someone who has made a career out of her “dark” imagination, I didn’t like it in there. I lasted 10 minutes. And I left, angry with myself that I wasn’t better at thinking nice thoughts."
Then she wrote something that literally made me stop breathing.
"My dreams these days are about my husband falling out of love with me. I wake up desperate and shaky, imploring him to confirm that he has not abandoned me while I’ve been asleep. “I love you,” I say. “Do you still love me?” I understand that this is my mind resting on the only real thing it knows outside of itself: love. Without it, life is just “doing time”.
First of all, HOW evocatively has she written. Secondly, YES.
Now that I think about it, our interior lives are not that much fun. When we're alone, often we're stuck inside ourselves, trapped in our own ego, looped in this recursive string of our own -- usually deranged, usually unkind -- thoughts without anyone to snap us out of it. We get lost in the weeds of ourselves.
And love is what breaks that. Love is what gives us an exterior existence. Love is why we go out, or return a call, or try to make someone laugh, and so get out of our own heads for a bit. Love is why we think a little bit better of ourselves, even if just for a moment. Exit the misery of otherwise solitary confinement. Love is what makes our lives real.
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