I think you want to be sad.

On self flagellation and never letting a single thing go.

I remember telling someone that I only get my life together when my life is falling apart. I spent an hour on the treadmill and ran six miles the other day. I usually can’t go past 2. I laid on a picnic blanket in the sun and read Joan Didion. I hadn’t picked up a book since August. I had a few cruel interactions and—oh god! I can’t stop writing!

Months went by with happy, wonderful evenings and time well spent with people I cared about very much, and I thought I had lost the ability to create.

I stood in a friend’s suburban basement awkwardly answering their parent’s questions while wondering why I was there in the first place.

“What do you study?”

“I study film and writing,”

“What kind of films do you like to write?”

And then I realized that I hadn’t written a script in months. I hadn’t written anything meaningful at all in months. I was a senior in college with one decent film and a handful of short stories I was proud of. Comfort breeds complacency.

My dad used to warn me of comfort when I was younger.

“Don’t ever get too comfortable,” he would say, “Someone will always be hungrier than you. Don’t wait around for them to eat your lunch.”

And in those moments, I wasn’t hungry. I was satiated, I was happy, I was full.

“What should I do?” I find myself asking my dad this question whenever I feel the most lost or hurt or frightened or confused.

“You’re going to get to work,” he said. “Make something.”

Suddenly, somebody hurts my feelings and I’m drawing again, and making things and filming and writing essays and reading books and articles and I feel as if I am who I am, again.

I think I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to get over things. I have been in a state of recovery for a very long time. I’m not sure I know how to behave without these sustained periods of convalescence.

“I’d like to be happy,” I said.

“That’s not true,” a friend of mine said to me.

“Yes, it really is,” And I believed wholeheartedly that I’d give anything for some kind of comfort.

“No,” she said, “I think you want to be sad.”

I was talking to my dad about a girl I knew. She had been in an abusive relationship before and she’s in a different, only slightly less abusive relationship now. This man has been nothing but unkind to her, she left him for a while, but now, she’s with him again.

“I can’t understand why she went back to him,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“She’s hurt. She doesn’t know how else to be,” he said.

“But she left him.”

“You’ve never been hurt like that before,” he said, “Sometimes you feel like you need it.”

Maybe there is comfort in familiarity—in what is common, what is known, what is constant. There is pain and effort in change. There is uncertainty and in what is new. I am not a gambler by nature. I will never choose to relinquish what I have in my hand for what I might gain by letting it go. There is something addictive in it. In keeping it. It is mine.

“My faith in humanity can fit in a thimble,” My dad told me over the phone. Or very often: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody’s not out to get you. If your expectations are low, no one will disappoint you.”

I believe that raising daughters must be a terrifying thing. Fear must be the smartest thing to teach little girls. A healthy level of distrust in the world.

“Maybe—and I might be wrong about this—but being open and honest is the whole point of a relationship,” I was sitting on a church pew in an eclectic cafe. A friend of mine sat on a small wooden stool across from me. She told me this in a way that implied that I should very much already be aware of this. I had just told her that she must stop telling men things about herself, that she has to be more careful. People will use these kinds of things against you. I had said.

I watched a friend going through a breakup a while ago. Despite the sadness I felt for her situation, I experienced this sense of awe and almost jealousy in her ability to tell someone that she loved them, in her ease of honesty and vulnerability. A part of me does desire what could have been had I been different.

And yet, a bird in hand. I will not let it free.

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