Empire for Ashes

I had a bad high once.

Everything went dark around the edges and threatened to overtake the small amount of visual information I was still taking in. I saw a beach. I saw the people I was with. My dog. He ran away from me and I couldn’t understand why. I was certain that a tidal wave would creep onto the tiny beach and sweep him away. It would miss me.

Detached. Most people feel like they’re watching themselves from above but I felt differently. I had condensed my soul to occupy the tiniest amount of space possible. It resided somewhere deep in my brain, where the November beach before me was dwarfed by the shadows from the inside of my skull. Nothing felt significant. Everything was rocking inside of me. It wasn’t a violent lulling; it seemed as though a thick honey had replaced my blood and my brain responded accordingly.

Next thing, we were in the car. Soaring over a strip of the California One that lines a jagged coastline. I was sure we would die. In the case of SUV versus Pacific Ocean-battered limestone, we were marked. I lay back and came to the stark realization that I had no control, no option but to trust the driver. I didn’t breathe until we got home.

Since that afternoon more than a year ago it’s happened again. We expect college to drag us out of our hometown-cultivated ruts, or shells, but I have found the opposite to be true. A group of people often morphs into an image of that beach and I find myself falling deeper into my own thoughts. Everything out there looks so small from in here. My toes sink into the gritty sand and my dog appears from my peripheries. Withdrawn is a word for it. Misanthropic is a harsher one.

I suppose it’s just sad that the barometer for my social behavior of late was a sunny afternoon, curling streams of smoke, and a million numbed nerve endings.

I haven’t been outside in over 24 hours. Normally I could attribute this to a spell of introversion and misanthropy, but no, this weekend the halls are quiet with the life-resenting force only found in finals week. And while I toil away at a research paper that should have been started a month ago, I leave you with a poem that feels entirely relevant to my life right now.

Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

What a headache.

It’s one day out of the year set apart to show love for people through material things. This one day a year isn’t about how you treat people, or how much you love them, or how much you care for them. No, it’s how those emotions can be manifested into an object.

One day out of the year it’s more important to spend $50 on a bottle of perfume or a nice scarf than to actually appreciate somebody as a human being, whose existence does not have a dollar value (I hope/assume).

Then of course you have the issue of “oh dear, I haven’t gotten this person the perfect gift. And if I can’t find the perfect gift I obviously don’t know them well enough.”

Well that’s not it at all either. If you look in most commonplace stores, the things are so generic, so cheap, so unremarkable, that if I found the perfect gift for someone then that is a terrible reflection on their personality! If my gift seems a bit off, then it should be because no bright shiny garbage from Banana Republic could ever be adequate for you.

To anyone who expects to receive gifts from me this year: lower your expectations. Just bring them down several pegs. Then a few more.

Because I care for you all vastly more than I could ever say. And if I can’t say it, then how the hell am I supposed to convey it in an object? Keep in mind how deeply I love you. This is cheesy, but the best gifts I can offer you are the farthest things from tangible. The time I spend talking to you and enjoying your company is more valuable than any damn gift I could find in all of Georgetown (and believe me I tried).

So recipients of gifts: take my poor gift-giving skills as a huge compliment. You are more to me than some token to symbolize my affection.

And remember this as you unwrap some hideous pair of socks and feign excitement.

“Oh… great! I love them…!”

“No you don’t. That’s fine. Now let’s shut up about this holiday for a long long time, at least until this time next year.”

I have three homes.

The first is a ranch-style house in Northern California, on the side of a valley, positioned between the mountains and the sea. It is on the outskirts of an idyllic liberal town that instilled me with a sense of wonder and wanderlust. It is where my family is, my web of friends who I grew up with, and my favorite Mexican restaurant. It was, and is, the object of my consuming homesickness here at college. It was sugarcoated in my mind the second I stepped over the threshold of my front door with my huge suitcase this past August. It is the home I grew up in but I can’t be sure that it’s my home anymore.

The second is room #111 of a dormitory here in Washington DC. It is the place that I live, that I go home to every night. I have created it. It is not an environment tailor-made for me, a world ready to catch me and cradle me as soon as I was born. I have slowly acclimated to it, to the summer with drenched air and the bitter winter and the strange people. It does not feel like the place I belong, but that’s only because coming here has made me believe that “belonging” in a physical place is a myth. I don’t belong anywhere; I reject the idea of a city or a house owning me. DC does not own me. It may nurture me or swallow me whole, but it is my home, and this university is my home. I am building my own life here.

Finally I have the third home, a home that I share in common with every human, every mythological character, every fable. This is a home that can only be returned to once you rip yourself from it. It is the final stage in a life full of strange passions and discomfort and loneliness and euphoria, stimulus overload until you’ve gathered as much as you can from the world, you’ve held it and sucked it dry, then and only then can you return home. I realize that the homesickness I felt when I first left the home I grew up in was a longing for this Ultimate Home. It was a lust for the end, a desperate desire to skip the chaos and the pain and be enveloped by pure belonging. Yes, this home is where you belong, and it is a belonging free of physical properties. I belong here too, and to think that I cannot find it until years of wandering have passed is terrifying, sobering, wild, and thrilling. Without adventure we cannot know the peace of home. Likewise, without absolute fear that adulthood masquerading as a big, mean city will strip me of any childlike sense of wonder that I have left, I would not know how to inhabit my eventual absolute contentment. It isn’t easy, and it was never meant to be. But someday, somehow, home will be worth it.

It was raining all morning and as I walked through the hordes of pushy umbrella-toting businesspeople I thought this:

• I am moving out of the way for them.
• They do not appear to see me at all.
• Do they think moving out of the way for me is an inconvenience?
• Or does the idea not even cross their mind?

I value altruism. In fact, I put altruism on a pedestal, and believe it to be one of my higher priorities. I understand that as others are different varieties of human beings, others may not value it as I do. I accept that it might not be a priority. Moreover, many people go about their days and lives without letting an altruistic thought pass through their minds. And if a thought does, then they might even acknowledge that the resulting action could be the “right” thing to do, but decides that altruism is inconvenient and a wasted effort. This directly goes against what I believe in but if I claim to value diversity in human personality then I must accept this, even if I don’t necessarily like it.

So why does lack of altruism in others bother me?

If I am truly altruistic (which nobody is; everyone is at least a little bit selfish) and truly interested in doing good for others and for benevolence’s own sake, without any motive or endgame of my own, then my own altruism should be enough for me.

It’s not enough. I expect others to value it as I do—the favors, the manners, the politeness, the simple acts that require minimal effort. It’s unrealistic, but I’m an idealist, dammit. So then I wonder why I want people to be altruistic as much as I do. One explanation could be that because I give unto others I expect reciprocation. Well that by definition is not altruism; this is “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.” I refuse to believe that altruism can be reduced to give and take.

So then I wonder if I want people to be altruistic because it makes the people I come into contact with (friends, acquaintances, waitpeople, family) more pleasant. But wait, isn’t that a selfish motive too? If the people I come into contact with have been positively affected by altruism, then it’s easier for me to deal with them: again, a selfish definition that brings it back to me.

So is selfishness the opposite of altruism? I suppose not. I’ve demonstrated that selfishness can inspire altruism, in the broadest sense of the term. But if altruism is spurred by selfish motives then it isn’t altruistic by definition, right? Is altruism defined by its motives? Does it matter to the giver or the recipient? Does that make it moral or not?

I like to think that my altruism is borne of emotional attachment and caring for humanity. But maybe altruism is best regarded as a logical adherence to duty. This forces me to swallow my pride and agree with Kant (never thought I’d say that). Kant thinks that the highest pursuit in life is fulfillment of duty free of passion, sympathy, pity, and empathy. I scoffed at this idea at first. I thought that if an act of altruism doesn’t tap into one’s emotions then it lacks meaning. Now I’m not so sure. Though I feel all of the aforementioned emotions (I am still an INFJ, of course), if my sense of altruism depended on those things alone, then I would have stopped a long time ago. The world is too cold to depend on emotion as altruism’s sole motive.

So now I agree with Kant. I am logical in my altruism. I feel a duty to humankind and to serve it. This duty is free from emotion at its core, though it is undoubtedly embellished with feelings. Emotion may be present, but it is not the driving force. It’s deep, inherent drive to use my gifts for something.

And this is how I came to the (perhaps half-baked) conclusion that I will be a therapist. This may seem hasty, but it hit me all of a sudden that this (or a similar career) is probably what I’m meant to do. It didn’t hit me with a fanfare of passion, it hit me as a logical realization that this may be what I was born to do. It is my duty to myself, to my gifts, to my existence, and to whatever form of God is out there. I have this odd clarity that I rarely feel, one that can only be found at the end of an extremely introspective, intuitive day where I couldn’t stop my mind from going off on a million tangents to something fascinating and meaningful at every turn. And now, after a full day of following my brain down the rabbit hole in so many places (I had to write a list of “Things to Think About Later” because I was too busy writing all of these altruism ramblings down), I have a sense of purely rational duty to humanity and just how I will execute that.

That is all.

I would like to drag this blog out of inactivity to bring you something totally different. Style does not excite me the way it once did. Since coming to Washington DC for school I have adopted the habit of dressing like another urbanite who looks like she wants to kick everyone walking down the street in the crotch repeatedly (which I do). Fashion in the way that I blogged about it last year unfortunately feels irrelevant. Nonetheless I would like to keep my writing there as an archive of my once-significant obsession, and start something new. Some of you may know about my recent blog dedicated to the delicious and diverse food trucks that roam the streets of DC (Food Truck Lovin’). That will continue as long as I’m willing to eat fattening food and shell out cash (in other words, for a while).

But I think I would like Empire for Ashes to continue as an outlet for my writing. I never saw the need to separate my personal voice from my style posts, so really these new posts will just be a continuation of those, minus the style. I promise my personal voice is still as sarcastic, snarky, doused with pretentious words, and occasionally really heartfelt.

So stay tuned for whatever comes.