A Tree With My Initials Carved Into It

My name is Isra. I’m eighteen years old and I’m studying for an English degree. My favourite color changes, but it’s almost always some kind of earth tone. Currently: burgundy. My favourite season is fall, and I’ve never been a fan of hot weather. I especially dislike humidity. I like cats even though they scare me a little bit. I feel the same way about dogs. I’ve always been described as sensitive but I think I’m starting to appreciate that about myself. You know, to be tender-hearted and everything of the sort. I’m so, so proud to be from Sudan. The pride flows out of me in endless waves of hope for a country that can be a home again. I’ve lived in three countries and two continents and they feel like three different lives sometimes, like the Isra born in Ireland is not the Isra that lives in me now. I guess there really is no permanent state of self. I like to write, even though I feel like a fraud whenever I say that–what good is a writer who can only churn something out every few weeks… months, sometimes?

I’ve always been absolutely terrified of dying in my sleep. Sometimes I would lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and will myself to never, never go to sleep. It’s been a fear ever since I was very young, but it started to be more concrete as I grew up–if I died tomorrow, what have I left behind? Does it matter, the mark we leave in the world? Have I carved my name into a tree somewhere, like they do in movies, so a stranger can trace the four letters and remember? Maybe they’d think about me as grander than I really am.

The burning need to make a mark on The World (as vague as this is) leaves me in the weirdest way. I watch The Fault in Our Stars with two of my cousins during one of the rare stretches of quiet in my grandparents’ house in Sudan, and Augustus Waters emphasizes his fear of oblivion–”I fear oblivion… I fear it like a proverbial blind man fears the dark.” This frustrates me. I turn to my cousin, and I tell her that fearing oblivion doesn’t make sense since you’d be dead anyways. His memory would live in Hazel Grace and his mother and his friends anyway. What a waste of time, I thought.

I spent so long in this seemingly endless pit of depression that was all-consuming in that way everything is when you’re in that space between thirteen and seventeen and grappling for some sort of identity. I decided, then, that being miserable would be my identity. I was attached to my sadness, I romanticized it in every little way I could. And then I grew up… and my grip on the miserable version of myself loosened. Honestly, it terrified me. I had sunk into this hole of sadness so much that I didn’t think I could be anything without it.

I recover from a 6-month-long depressive episode years later by talking to the people I love and going on walks very, very early in the morning. I look up at the endless expanse of sky and it makes me go all teary. I crouch down on the sidewalk and I write an idea for a children’s book in my notes app, a story about a little girl with two frizzy braids who finally feels safe. I stay crouched down for around twenty minutes, my face turned towards the rising sun. It feels like forever. A woman walking her golden retriever passes by and the fond smile on her face when she looks at the dog makes me teary again.

I love my friends a lot. It makes me emotional a lot of the time. A lot of things make me emotional, but I think the love I have for my friends is infinite. And I think the notion of platonic love somehow being less important than romantic love is stupid. How can you explain away the little glowing golden ball in my chest when I see that my friends are happy? I think I’d like to be inconvenienced by them for the rest of my life, and isn’t that what love is?

Anyway, I can’t really speak on romantic love anyway. I still believe it isn’t somehow better than platonic love.

I love my three siblings very much, but I think that would be a different article. It feels very good to love them the way we’ve grown to.

I spent so much of my life trying to work towards a better me. An Isra who is elevated in every way. I made this work a part of my identity. I would pause my life until I became that version of myself. The “then, what” of it all never particularly occurred to me in my desperation. Recently, I’ve decided that I want to let go of that idea of striving towards a permanent state of self that is Perfect in every which way. I still fall back into the idealizing, maybe because it’s comfortable. Sort of like holding onto a rope with all your might and having to deal with the scars all over your palms afterward. I’ve realized that it feels very good to try and love the mess of me instead.

l try, despite the rope burn.