progress update

In the early 2010s, I asked my friends and lovers, “what inspires you?” Second to tenderness1, I think inspired is my favorite feeling. Does it count as a feeling? It must—since like love, you only know it when you feel it.

In a recent speech at the Nobel Prize banquet, László Krasznahorkai gave thanks to the people and things that, in essence, inspired him. It reminded me of these notes I’d collected during that tenuous time in my life, a time when I had less vision than desire. One of my near-fatal flaws, then and now, is an unqualified, inexplicable yearning. It’s a reflection that comes through defiantly in my poetry:

I’m ready to be proven wrong or right or just to know what it’s like to be past yearning.

I’ve always lived with a knowing that I am moving toward something, but that something continues to change shape, to elude me. Year after year, it’s never the same. Perhaps this is what Tom meant when he told me on a nighttime walk through Florence two years ago, “you’re always moving the goal post.”

The odd thing is that I find uncertainty unnerving. It is my greatest source of anxiety. As the eldest daughter, I would be what most would consider Type A—but only to a point. And yet, from day to day, I’m never certain of my own storyline. I seem to always prefer experimentation, to move through seasons of being. I wonder whether it’s intentional or not.

I’ve always been enthralled by the sense of possibility, by the belief that anything can happen, by the idea that so much of life is chance, and if you’re lucky, serendipity. Maybe I don’t want to know what happens yet. I think that there’s an inevitable tragedy in finality, a moment of despondence at the curtain’s close, even when the ending was a beautiful one. Am I purposefully postponing commitment to a life vision, choosing to bloom behind the others, because I can’t stand to watch my ghost ships sail past this lifetime? What if I see myself in Venice on beach walks with my friends and our dogs; in Berkeley, making art with my hands; and in New York, watching a ballet while the snow gathers outside? When I do commit, it’s wholeheartedly, stubbornly. I’ve historically found it challenging to give up on people. I don’t understand the phrase “if it doesn’t serve you” as applied to relationships. Why are relationships supposed to “serve” you? How can you measure that in something as indecipherable as human connection?

Maybe, too, there’s a certain fear of vulnerability. To love anything, anything at all, is to open up the hidden, tender parts of yourself. To love anything is to become breakable.

All that is to say that I don’t have all the answers for myself. Am I supposed to? I’m learning so much right now—about detaching myself from identity, from ego, about being with myself in this present moment and nowhere else. It began, I think, with leaving my job in June, and discovering that there was so much more to me, to life, than anything a job, a career, even a vision, is capable of giving me. All I have and all I need is within myself. It’s nice to have nothing to prove. Maybe it’s because I have more love than I could have ever imagined my heart could contain; or because I’m loved more than I’d ever believed was possible—than I’d ever believed I deserved. I remain a mystery to myself and I finally am wholly myself.

What I do know is that I return to, over and over again, what inspires me. Like love, inspiration changes and compounds. Like love, you’ll never regret letting yourself be inspired. When my vision is murky, I look to the people and the things that inspire me as light.