Going through the motions is how you hold the door.

A Buffy/Game of Thrones death reference mashup

Last Thursday I got back from Vermont. The night before I slept in a treehouse at a hiker hostel south of Woodstock, and then a shuttle driver I’d arranged for —uncharacteristically — mostly I get around in Vermont through bumming rides from people I know or hitchhiking from people I don’t know — the shuttle driver came at 9am and took me to the bus station in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where I got on the Dartmouth Coach to South Station, and when I got to South Station I walked down the stairs, then up the stairs, then along a train platform, then inside, and down several more staircases, and then I got to the subway. I went on the red line to Park Street and took the C train to Coolidge Corner, and I got off the trolley there and walked three blocks and then sat down on a bench outside a church across from my street, and there I sat.

I took a Klonopin and sat there for 20 minutes or so, trying to be ready to go home again. Then I went home. It was July 31st and I had successfully avoided July in the city.

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What am I doing here at home? Dunno. What will I do? Dunno. I’m more lost than I’ve been in years, who knows why, though we could all make guesses, offer hypotheses, confidently assert theories as though they are facts.

I’m lost because my younger kid just graduated high school. I’m lost because I have no job and do not like the job I did for decades anymore. I’m lost because of the fascism, because of the genocide, because of the climate crisis. I’m lost because of perimenopause, because the planets are misaligned, because of the air quality, because of too many microplastics, because of some inflammatory process no one understands. Maybe you’re lost because of B Vitamins, have you checked your B vitamins, my therapist asks, grasping for straws.

Actually, I know why I’m lost, it turns out. I found that out while I was bumming around Vermont, but I don’t much like the answer.

I’m lost because I’m not really lost, I seem to be going nowhere in particular because I am going somewhere very particular, I pretend I am lost because then I do not have to admit where it is I am going, because I’m not supposed to be going there.

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If you want something very badly but you’re not allowed to have it, not allowed to be it, not allowed to go after it, then anything else you do will look scattered, unfocused, passionless, empty. You are unconsciously trying to go toward the thing that you want, while consciously trying to make yourself go anywhere else at all. But the body knows where it’s trying to go. You can try to drag it some other direction, like an unruly toddler, but it’s exhausting. You can get your body to pretend to go some direction other than the one it wants to go, but even if it sort of does that, it lacks conviction. It’s an imitation, a bad play.

Sometimes this is something we want or need sexually, or something about our identity we’ve been deeply denying, or we are in the wrong job or the wrong marriage or the wrong body. In those cases, if we are willing to face the hard thing and make a big change and risk a kind of metaphorical death, we can actually head toward the thing we want. We might get there.

But that’s not the case for me.

I spent five weeks bumming around Vermont this summer, backpacking and hitchhiking and sitting around at hostels and cabins and borrowed ski condos and at the tops of mountains on the decks of ski huts. But the whole time, I was dragging an unruly toddler around with me, DO THIS FUN THING INSTEAD, LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL THE MOSS IS, LIFE IS A GIFT, while the unruly toddler who knows exactly what she wants is trying to yeet herself out of existence.

There is nothing right now that I want more than death. I do not want this to be true, but it is. Naturally anything else I do lacks conviction. I am, as Buffy sang in her musical, only going through the motions. I cannot give myself my heart’s desire. I just drag myself along anywhere else but where I want to go, hoping if I can hold out long enough I will stumble across something else that I want more than I want death, or that eventually death will lose its death grip on me again, for a while. This isn’t wishful thinking, really. I’ve slipped out of death’s death grip plenty of times before, in fact, every time.

But it’s a curious trick. I deny and distract myself, I do the things I know I should. I have a walk. I go to a yoga class. I clean the sink. I look at the sunset. I write. It feels empty, of course, it feels meaningless. It certainly doesn’t feel right. It’s not hopeful or life-affirming or nourishing. It seems to have no heft or reality, even to me. I’m just holding the line. Or — here’s the game of thrones reference! — I’m like Hodor, a giant man who could only speak one word, “Hodor”, and whose entire life purpose turned out to rest in a single plot-critical act, holding the door against the army of the dead. “Hold the Door!” people yelled, and Hodor did.

I’ve held the door before.

Anyways, I know I look like I’m not up to much of anything, but I am.

I’m holding the door.

PS if you want to help me hold the door, you should know that I don’t need arguments, or exhortations, they will do me no good. I know the arguments, I have made them all myself. What I need is distraction. I need James Marsters in a trench coat, I need bad romance novels and stinky cheese and patio drinking. I need Jazz hands. Jazz hands are no substitute for joy, life purpose, actual desire, appetite, dopamine, a zest for life. But they do help hold the door.