Wanting Everything, and the Road to Nothing

I'm sort of addicted to the bridge.

The act of standing here and imagining there, building the ideal diamond-laden road to perhaps one day use if the stars align just right. Of building the ideal self, tracing the path from who I am to who I could become if only I were somewhere else, living inside a set of circumstances I don’t yet have access to but can see just on the other side of a decision I haven’t made yet.

The bridge lives outside all expectations of realism and remains untouched by the disappointment of actually crossing it.

I’ve moved countries multiple times - Brazil, the US, Italy, back, forward, sideways, always with the feeling that the right life was somewhere just ahead of me, and that staying still was proof of defeat. Each move felt like an attempt to get closer to a version of myself that felt larger, more creative, more aligned with whoever I believed I was capable of becoming.

The problem with the bridge, though, is that it's very easy to spend all your life building it.

And my life so far has pretty much revolved around the same issue: every choice is also a killing. Choosing X means letting go of the idea of Y, and there is so much I would love about Y that I cannot be sure I wouldn’t love it harder, more completely, more truly than X.

“As long as you don't choose, everything remains possible.”

So I stand on the bridge instead, numb, equidistant from everything, perfectly positioned to experience none of it. Which I have historically been able to convince myself is a kind of freedom.

What I’ve been learning recently is that this, whatever this is, isn’t really about simply craving novelty at all. I always labeled it as that, but it doesn't really add up. Someone who craves novelty goes and tries things and changes their mind and starts over, whereas I was mostly just… standing there?

My issue could be something more like a hyperawareness of possibilities. All of them, simultaneously, always, and such a profound unwillingness to kill any of them that I end up killing them all out of respect. Which is to say I end up with Nothing instead of many things, and Nothing is, in fact, the worst possible outcome for someone who loves Everything as much as I do.

I kept coming back to this feeling so often throughout the years that I had to come up with a word to refer to it, so I decided to call it my impossibilitude. Which is not just the acknowledgment that something is impossible, but also the felt experience of those impossibilities - the melancholy of the path not taken, the grief of the door that was never yours to open but that you loved anyway. Standing in front of it for years, convinced that if you just waited long enough it might open from the other side.

Sartre talked about the concept of facticity - the conditions into which you are thrown into the world, such as the year and place and circumstances of your birth, the way those facts make certain lives permanently unreachable regardless of how much you want them or how clearly you can imagine them. The limits of your freedom, basically. And impossibilitude, then, is what you feel towards the lives and choices outside of those limits. Something like grief without a body. The mourning for something that was only ever real in a different version of your life that never got to exist.

I've been here a long ass time. I used to think this pain was the cost of loving the world this much - this sensitivity to all the lives I wasn’t living, all the selves I wasn’t becoming. That's the meat of it, I'd say, but I think it is also, in a way, avoidance. Because as long as I am standing in front of locked doors mourning them, I don't have to fully commit to walking through the one that is open. Which is the scariest thing, because an open door can disappoint you, while a locked one gets to stay perfect forever. And boy, do they!

I can only describe what I’ve been feeling lately, since turning 30, as a sort of clearing of the weather. I can see, for the first time, that the road I’ve been standing on has a direction, and that direction is, unsurprisingly, not toward all possible lives, but toward this one. The one I haven’t been showing up for. And the potentials wrinkling… and going black… and plopping to the ground at my feet.

I cry too easily. For years, that crying came from a kind of pre-emptive grief, from the awareness that this moment, which I loved so deeply, was already itself becoming an impossibility, already joining the pile of everything I would never get back. But now, underneath that grief, there is something that feels, tentatively and somewhat suspiciously, like luck. Like I can’t quite believe I got to be here, living this specific life, with so much still ahead. How greedy can I be, man? How much potential does one even need?

I’d say I’m sort of an experiential perfectionist, a temporal maximalist… I wanted to live at the maximum possible density, every hour containing multitudes, every year containing several lifetimes, every choice life-altering, every connection infinite, and absolutely no ordinary Mondays.

But ordinary Mondays are, it turns out, almost entirely what a life is made of, which I find personally offensive but am slowly learning to accept. A body of work is made of ordinary Mondays. Finished films are made of days when you didn’t really feel like it. The compounding that makes something real never happens on the bridge - it only happens when you cross it and start doing the slow, mostly invisible work of building something that takes years to see.

…does hearing that still make me wanna die a little? Yeah.

I am so deeply in love with every possibility that committing to just one path feels like amputating a phantom limb. I haven't reached nirvana just yet, so it's been a process, okay?

But I’m learning, maybe the first time, that loving something does not require possessing it. That I can see the impossible life, and feel the impossibilitude, without drowning in it. That the people who stayed - in one city, one practice, one discipline, one life - are perhaps not people who gave up but people who chose, which takes more courage than I previously gave it credit for.

So here I am, making peace with partial. With slow. With the ordinary Monday that doesn’t feel like anything yet but is maybe the whole thing???

I'll keep you posted.