Consistency, or How I Stopped Running and Learned to Love

On ego death, compound grief, and losing ambition.

It’s been two years since I left New York for Los Angeles on the wings of death. It’s very evident to see now that what I experienced was a total annihilation of whatever sense of self adulthood had been building. I hadn’t considered a life where I must confront loss at a thousand miles a second until suddenly I’m in new locations unforeseen emotionally. I’ve been slowly making room for myself to admit what I need to say, any moment now. I got tired of feeling the need within myself to be as ambitious as a shooting bullet. My aim doesn’t have to always be accurate or fast for that matter. I now grasp my ambitions must flow as a river does into a bay out into the ocean until someday you can barely tell they’re there at all.

I referred to it exclusively as an ego death up until a week ago. I was walking through my neighborhood, the palms swaying in the air, while talking to my friend Caroline. Caroline has been there for me through so much, in many ways I’m lucky to say I have been loved through the years and held accordingly by many friends, yet Caroline was there the day Daniel died. I was at their apartment in New York when the breaking began, my face as white as a sheet when I returned to their living room from the bathroom.

A month later my book came out, a moment many dream of their whole lives, myself included. I couldn’t feel anything, nothing at all. The idea of promoting my book just made me hate myself because how could I promote my book or even care about having a book when I lived in a world where such violence was possible?

Caroline over the years watched me try to feel through everything. Through my friend being murdered, my book coming out, moving to Los Angeles amidst that, an abortion that destroyed my ability to know my own body, witnessing more friends die before the age of thirty at the hands of hard drugs and depressed brains. Last year Caroline reminded me that it was okay to cry, that I should cry, that if I wasn't feeling, it would be worrisome.

So last week I was on the phone in my new life. It’s been about two months since I suddenly could feel joy again, feel anything other than regret and bitterness and anger at all that had been taken away. I said to Caro about how because of my ego death I don’t have ambitions anymore, they pointed out how fundamentally false that is, that my ambitions have just changed and how I have changed. I don’t want to have the life I had before where I was so focused on becoming I lost what was around me. The amount of love I’ve had and allowed to just slip through my hands.

The problem for me is for so long I believed people only wanted me this way. In the version of myself I was several years ago, trying to grasp what was happening inside me, rejecting all I had known in favor of what was new and necessary. The even deeper issue is I didn’t want all I had known for my whole life. Even as a child, I dreamt only of new faces and places that had unfamiliar smells and sounds. Like possibly most or all young people, I didn’t grasp death as a child or a teenager. When I would see a friend at school or after, I wasn’t tainted with the worry that someday they’d be dead. The possibility wasn’t real at all, they were there and always would be. When I went to travel the world for years, and then settled in New York as an adult, I was glad for the parallels others brought to my life and me to their lives. We weren’t distant, we were just living our lives.

Now I have a prayer that is just a mantra, a repetition, a truth. A list of names I thought would be here. A list of names I was a bad friend to because I was too busy being whatever I was attempting to be. I say to myself Daniel, AJ, Katie, Benjamin, Steven, Karla, Jeremy, and then move on with my day, whatever that day will be at any given time. I accept they are dead now and don’t hear me, or I accept that they do and that the world is unknowable.

Every birthday wish I give now remarks on the joy of being alive, the surprise and fantasy of life’s foreverness traps us, but two days ago I turned twenty-nine and I know several people who didn’t make it here. I know twenty-nine is an old age to get to. That I am blessed and lucky to be here. Not everyone is. Life isn’t guaranteed and someday we will all be out like a snapping lightbulb in an empty room.

The ego death I refer to might as well be summarized as having a Becker moment, as in Ernest Becker the best writer on death possibly I’ve come across. The reason we have terror management theory, the reason we grasp that everything is a race against an internal clock (or a widespread one in the case of the human species) screaming at us as if birds on a wire “you will die” and there’s nothing we can do. Not a damn thing. Two months ago I started feeling joy again, as mentioned, in the form of the life I built. I felt the wind on my face on the second anniversary of Daniel’s murder, hard to believe it’s been two years and there's so much I’ll still never say to him, and it reminded me of the wind on the first anniversary of his death. There’s so much that can only be said to one person, and the worst thing is you’ll only really know all that there is to say once there’s no one to remark back to you.

I quit smoking cigarettes because it feels hopeful and a movement forward. I plan on making a short film this year and it’ll be another thing that is missed by those already gone. I want to pray their names at the end credits forever, no one is forgotten as long as we are alive to remember them. Every new friendship I make, every old friendship I continue, every time I fall in love with a friend or an animal or see a beautiful bird, is a continuation of love. All the love I have ever felt is full in my chest and I carry it every day. I’m glad to be alive now, I am happy to have some ambitions and not be ruled by them, and even more so, I’m happy to have learned consistency.