"no such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in"

On the phone in France, he said: “It’s not worth it.” I was being so negative, too negative, and he stopped me in my tracks. The words coming out of my mouth didn’t sound like me, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d gotten to this place. I’d read in a Buddhist book once that if you’re deluded enough to believe you’re enlightened, a relationship will soon come along to challenge your self-concept. The relationship will make you want to travel a lot, but you should resist the urge. Funnily enough, I met him shortly after a spiritually transformative time in my life. I was ecstatic for a sustained period of time, and then humbled. I am a fatalistic person, by which I believe that I was born to feel what I’ve felt.

Years after meeting this person I met someone else, whom I thought was different in important ways. This, too, I believe I was born to experience. I have at different times in these relationships felt extreme joy, extreme frustration, and quiet faith. Esme Wang, from The Collected Schizophrenias: "Hung on my bedroom wall is the quote attributed to Joan of Arc: "I am not afraid. I was born to do this." However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it."

Was it hard? It’s the same as asking whether my relationship with S was hard. Then and now, I experience love as easy: the easiest thing and the most absolute. Just as being whacked by a dog’s tail is like being brushed by the wing of an angel, to be clobbered by love is to be patted on the head by the hand of God. Love knocks you off course; love is totalizing and ruinous; love is cruel and frustrating; love is the only redemption we can know on this earth.

I believe the primary way in which I am fortunate is that everything I’ve ever experienced has made me believe more in love and not less. Also, I have a great sense of humor.

If I had to tell you what happened without telling you exactly what happened, I’d say: for a couple of years my life stopped making sense because people I loved dearly did not behave in ways that made sense to me, and everything got crazy. And I wondered: how will I get through this? How can anything possibly resolve? What can I say to communicate what I feel? What can I do to make things sane again?

I’m sure many of you have experienced this particular form of insanity: something happens, the unbearable senselessness of the world comes sharply in focus, and you go berserk. You cannot accept what is happening.