Anywhere but here
on escape fantasies, longing, and bittersweet presence
As I write this, I’m sitting beside a window that won’t fully shut, looking down on the massive oak trees that surround my building. My desk is covered with faded sticky notes that I can’t read but refuse to throw away. Nothing is important, but everything is significant. I can’t let any of it go. I hear hawks flying overhead, the sounds of never-ending construction, and the gentle humming of the fume hood in the lab where I just finished my PhD. A somewhat anticlimactic end to six years of disappearance and return.
One of the oak trees outside my building is infested with moths. Hundreds of small, feathery bodies swarm the entrance, a nuisance to everyone who walks by. When I told someone this, he said that if people pretended the moths were butterflies, they might perceive the infestation differently. I said that I wouldn't want to be swarmed by butterflies either, but I wanted to say that I was well-versed in the act of self-deception. And years of forcing myself to believe fantasies to avoid the discomfort of reality only resulted in the lingering fear that I’m no longer a reliable narrator of my own experience.
Maybe none of this matters, but writing nothing in four months has made this act of return clumsy and awkward. When nothing is explicitly wrong, but something isn’t quite right, how do you justify the act of disappearance?
Last week, I attended a Dharma talk hosted by the Buddhist meditation group I keep saying I’ll join. So, over a decade after leaving the Church, I found myself in a dimly lit chapel, surrounded by washed-out biblical paintings and a community of people bound by a shared yearning. You come to these spaces seeking a thread to cling to, only to be reminded that it’s your clinging that’s the problem. But you know this already, and all the knowledge in the world doesn’t change that, whether it’s within or outside of ourselves, home is something we search for and find, lose again, and then encounter once more. The repetition itself is what it means to be alive, the cyclical nature of our experience, and the familiar pull of that yearning.
But however futile, the longing to step out of the cycle and deny reality is as present in our obsession with youth as it is in our resistance to change. Time moves quickly, especially when we don’t want it to. No one escapes this fate.
Still, I’m relieved to get older and grateful for the silver strands of hair that indicate I'm at an age I never thought I’d reach. There are gifts that more time on this earth has bestowed: growing acceptance of my ever-changing moods and intermittent disappearances and the ability to let go a bit more gently.
So when I closed my eyes and meditated on that stained red chair, I let the modest Chapel transform into the Church I grew up in, with its stained glass windows and high wooden ceilings, at which point the Dharma talk started to sound like a sermon. The teacher invited us to pray for our happiness. Not to receive an answer but because the act of asking reminds us of the innocence of our longing.
When the talk was over, someone joked that if they could avoid the states that arose in meditation by not meditating, they’d never get on the cushion. Another stood up and shared how he'd wasted much of his life fantasizing about a future more worthy of his presence than the current moment. Everyone nodded at the truth of these statements. As I let resonance flow through me, I was reminded of a text my friend sent the previous week: I don’t know what I need in my life. I feel dysregulated all the time. Within eight months, she'd moved from New Mexico to Arizona to California and back and found that what held her by the throat only tightened its grasp. We all know what it's like: longing to be anywhere but where we are and anyone but who we are.
Two years ago, I took a trip to Hawaii. Part of me hoped that upon my return, I’d enter into a life I wanted to be in. But a week of sleep deprivation and barely eating just resulted in a body that was falling apart and the blurry memories of an unchanged psyche. I have only snippets from this time: pictures of the maroon canyons I hiked while on mushrooms, scarred knees from when I fell off my bike on a highway, and a faded laptop sticker from the strange man who gave me maracuja oil for my wounds. All of these are bittersweet reminders of a self who was trying to squeeze meaning from pain like water from a stone.
Sometimes, I'll trace my fingers across the scars to see if they're still there or revisit the fragmented journal entries I wrote during this time. Maybe they have something to teach me, or maybe some things are best forgotten. It’s difficult to discern when the excavation of the past is in the name of healing or when it’s motivated by the fantasy that if we study all that went wrong, we can create a future without grief or pain.
People often say that if you want to be a writer, you have to force yourself to write, especially when you don’t want to. So I’m grateful I’m a scientist, too, because sometimes, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the narration of my own mind. Other times, I’m too engulfed by a dissociative fog to figure out what there is to say. This familiar psychic defense has protected me throughout my life—inconvenient but, at times, life-saving.
Still, as I’ve left and reentered my life countless times and in various ways, I’ve realized that a return to this moment is both possible and inevitable. Constructing a fantasy more palatable than reality always promises more than it delivers.
Once, I heard someone describe health as the capacity to experience reality as it is, uncontaminated by the need for it to be otherwise. It’s bittersweet. While here is not always a place you want to be, here is where you are.