where is the sun taking us?

the real truth behind human emotions

I saw a girl crying in her car yesterday. Mascara running, the sun visor shading her swollen eyes, bright red hair covering her increasingly red face. The distance between her sobbing heart and my pitiful gaze was just enough to paralyze me - frozen, even when the light turned green. I felt a desire to ‘play God’ in that moment, but what do you even say to a strangers sorrow?

“Hey, you okay?”
No obviously she isn’t.

“Hey, I just wanna say that whatever happened, it’s gonna be okay.”
Even if true, who the fuck cares to hear that mid-sob?

“Hey, just let it all out, it’s good to cry hard sometimes”
Great, now I’ve made her self-conscious, and she’s creeped out.

And so I sat there, marinating in secondhand grief, wondering if my silence was kindness or a cop-out. But it wasn’t long since I was in her place, tears streaming down my face as ‘tears come streaming down your face’ sang loud on my Jetta’s shitty speakers. I couldn’t give you a reason though - maybe a string of bad interviews, too many losses on the pickleball courts, or just the cyclical nature of negative things happening over and over and over again. The faulty dishwasher and the botched client call and the broken website and the pinched nerve and the fire ant attack and the stock market. Fuck, always the stock market with the cherry on top.

I can’t speak for the other 7-odd billion people on this planet but it seems like a foolish ask to regulate our emotions and keep it all controlled at equilibrium. Things happen, our minds think one thing and our hearts react to another. The emotions come and go, bound to some elastic string of time.

Time isn’t a construct to understand, but only to obey. As disciples of our own internal organs, we have no other duty but to take frivolous notes on the eternal return of our emotions, and learn to respond to the feedback we receive each day. We’re tasked with digesting the pains and joys of every moment, no matter how many Zoom meetings crowd our calendars or how tall the laundry piles grow.

In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes ‘Human time does not turn in a circle, it runs in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition.’ And I so want to believe him, but I do not long for repetition unless it favors me. Maybe that's why we cry in our cars, laugh at 3 AM memes, or feel waves of inexplicable sadness while folding laundry - we're caught in this linear timeline, desperately trying to make sense of our cyclical emotions.

My therapist used to tell me that my only purpose in life was to survive. I would try to post-rationalize my poor word choice and toxic tendencies in sessions, only to fall at the feet of my own heart and mind trying their best to keep me alive. Like scenes from Inside Out 2, but instead of all the emotions working in harmony, it’s just the bad ones sitting up there like cool kids at the back of the bus. Sometimes it’s just my heart speaking up for itself, asking for me to prove my value in some obscure manner. Sometimes that meant raising my voice at someone I love, other times it’s crying alone on the couch at 3am.

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.” - David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

Sometimes I wonder if the higher beings ever get sad and ask, "What do you mean you don't love yourself... I worked so hard on you." As if our emotions are some divine duty, something we have no control over. But in that same vein, if there are higher beings with puppet strings attached to our limbs, then what more are we expected to do? Let them take the wheel. Maybe everything is intentional after all! The moments of despair, of joy, of confusion, or of clarity, just little cosmic dances on a foreign timeline that, at times, feels like a spiral stairway to nowhere.

Do you reckon the sun knows where it’s going? Seems like it - steady, slow, bright. I’ll put my faith in it, as it shows up consistently to lighten the load of the day and illuminate the mistakes I make. I might be confused by my own tears and frustrated by the words of others, but my duty is to emote. Even if I don’t understand - especially if I don’t understand - why. Maybe that's the point.

Maybe we're not supposed to understand. Maybe we're just supposed to feel, to experience, to let the waves of joy and sorrow and everything in between wash over us like emotional radiation. And who knows, maybe the sun knows where it’s taking us; towards a place where tears are sacred, laughter is a prayer, and emotions are a just medium of translation.

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quote unquote

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” - Virginia Woolf

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” - Horace Walpole

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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This piece was inspired by this tweet. And as tough as these past few weeks have been for me, this tweet felt like the right seedling of an idea to water for this post. I’ve been on a string of emotional rollercoasters, and I’ve puked my heart out. I’m ready to go home, or wherever the sun takes me, hoping that its rays just lightly burn my skin along the way. If you felt any sort of warmth from these words, I’d love to know.

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ICYMI - September’s letter was quite the emotional uptick, thanks to Buc-ee’s:

beavers, brisket, and boba