This piece is a part of the OneFiveHundred series. Read the mission statement here.
i: CRASH
You wake up to the first day of the rest of your life. Your Google Calendar looks like Rothko’s Color Fields. Something in you might hurt a bit as you scrape yourself out of bed: sore back, abdominal ache, jaw clenched too tightly, inch-long scrape in the vertebrae, pinch-sized wound in the underbelly[1]. You do your morning routine. You go to your classes by taking the desire paths between Baker and Lovett, checking your Instagram or email or messages as you do so. And then, from nowhere, the world kills you.
It’s so over. You’re cooked. The center can’t hold. She’s packed / up and split[2]. You’re crashing out. But what does “crashing out” mean? To put a precise definition upon the term, I would characterize it as a feeling of immense calamity that needs to be rectified immediately through extreme actions. It’s not an “et tu, Brute,” rather, you’ve grabbed one of the senator’s knives, and you’re trying to fight back. No matter the circumstances, crashing out entails drastic action in response to something. It is a feeling born from a response to something, no matter how small.
I was always a sensitive child (or that’s what my parents told me), and being under a depressive spell in my early years of high school didn’t thicken my skin any better. The causes of it matter little. It got better and it got worse, but there was someday in the spring season of AP Physics ½ when I carefully inscribed my history in my spiral-bound notebook, simply all my fault lines and ridges, my mistakes arranged in a Ten of Swords against my personhood in some tight slouching script. Why?
I was crashing out because my friend told me to stop annoying her in class. It could be scarcely more obvious how much I’m echoing that Joan Didion essay[3], but what happened nonetheless occurred for a very banal reason. Yes, what I did that day was a result of misplaced self-respect, or lack thereof, but what I’m more interested in is how I reacted; I rubbed salt on my wounds instead of licking them, I was cruel towards myself to a degree that would excommunicate my friends if I held such enmity towards them. And as I was crashing out, I said to myself: stop caring so much.
ii: slouching
What I’m talking about isn’t anhedonia or depression (although I theorize it is comorbid with practiced uncaring), but, like I just said, practiced indifference. The theory for this practice is based on the belief that your body can be impermeable, a warped form of self-respect Didion talks about “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.” If I choose to, I can take anything and compress it down to an atom, so I think about it for no more than a second. And then, if I don’t think about it, it isn’t real[4]. It can’t hurt me. I can’t crash out. Now, here are the tools to enact such action.
I hate thought, I’ve been saying to myself recently. This is why I’ve been listening to music more on my AirPods whenever I shouldn’t: in between classes, waking up and in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. Changing my clothes, changing my sheets, trudging up stairs.
This was a habit I developed ever since my schedule last year necessitated it — between my classes and extracurriculars and daily workouts — there was simply no time in my Google Calendar that I blocked out to think. Or rather, there was no room for me to crash out, for the twin time-killers of melancholy and rumination to catch my mind unawares. After all, every second ruminating is one stolen from locking in. Certainly, bad things happened: I got a 38 on my COMP 222 exam, I bombed a few interviews, I stress-dreamt of COMP 182 homeworks and yet they granted me no insight into RDMST algorithms. But there simply was no time to burn on stressing out because every day I woke up, there was a midterm or problem set to finish for the next one.
But having no time to live is good…so tighten the strap. Negotiate your breaks down to meals and bathroom breaks, tell yourself that it will be better after three days, before the weekend comes and your chores rip your carefully aligned schedule in half. If scores of students have done what you have but harder, how much longer must you continue to smear your pencil across the test until you can breathe? If I turn my life into work and sleep, pouring the slop of my phone into my free time, I can’t crash out. I won’t even think of the word. I won’t let myself.
It is true that caring about things too much has a negative E[X]; to do so is to demand untenable/false expectations upon ourselves, to enter into unbalanced romances, to pull one too many all-nighters. So you can settle for second-best on your assignments or demand that in your life, no inconvenience should ever burden you. And if something unavoidable crashes into you, you can say to the happening, there is no space for me to hold you and point to your schedule with your upcoming internship, or midterm, or club-required event. I will drink or party so I never need to come to terms with how I’ll feel. I’ll make myself immune to pain. Believe it or not, you can turn your body into a solid being devoid of love and affection, devoted only to productive force. For all of human history it has happened, from the serfs to the child workers. They are dead now, but they prove that you must live through this. Through this, the body is no longer a variable body, a permeable surface[5]. It is immune to penetration (and to interpolation) because you can dull a guillotine into a safety razor.
My inner self is untouchable.
iii: i hope this hurts!
But let us operate from the fact that there is no clear distinction between the inner and outer self; rather, that the body is “a surface whose permeability is politically regulated,” “that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent.”[5] Repression can dam up the flow of desire, however, it’s an arduous process, one that falls into morays. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway[1]. So what do we do when the sting hits?
You can double down on the world. This failure is good because every mistake you’ve ever made gives you the chance to do better next time. Whatever happened to you was your fault, and you should rub salt in the wound so you never make a mistake again. You are someone’s son, so “Now tell them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’”
Say to yourself: I don’t think that I deserve people deserve to be happy. Repeat it.
If I am wounded, I will prevent myself from being hurt again. I make myself untouchable in a different fashion: to prevent bad things from happening. If you misstep a conversation, do not talk to your friends anymore. You don’t deserve things if you’re going to mess them up. If you fumble a date, crash your car on the way home, take them with you. And if you fail a test, make sure that you don’t get anything less than the class average — and that standard’s being reasonable, the lowest one, merely mediocre.
(Black Swan, 2010)
Do we think that people deserve anything that they don’t need? What do we think that people deserve? If we strip people down to their bare essentials, nerve and bone and exposed flesh, it’s just glucose, slumber, liquid. Nothing more. You must earn the right to live.
I do think that this attitude and practiced indifference do go hand in hand. You can use hate to destroy love. You can love things that close yourself off to love — pure objects like horses or nations or wars[7]. But it can also operate singularly: you become the wound and you dwell in it; instead of wanting the absence of pain, you obsess over it, say that it has damned you[5], that you are irreparably broken and must compensate for it by earning your right to live.
iv: (a side) note on grace
Do you believe that people deserve what happens to them? That if they mess up, they should be punished? In what ways can we carve out blame? Yes, while this man committed a crime, systemic factors led to that, etc, etc, so they should be forgiven. We should choose kindness. What if they annoy us, harass us on the Red Line, or panhandle too aggressively? Isn’t it much easier to say about their situation:
that’s exactly what
those
soft and gentle
fuckers
deserve.[8]
Okay. Do you forgive yourself for doing bad things? Even if other people don’t forgive you?
v: saccharine
Once, my father tried to / collision a child into perfect.
– torrin a. greathouse, Burning Haibun
You will do bad things. You will crash out. No one is more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped, as Sexton writes. But how do we react to such things? Certainly, immunity is an idol, but what is the most effective way to deal with our feelings?
I don’t think there is necessarily a clear-cut way. To hurt is to be hurt. Crashing out means you do things you regret. But what’s worse is not regretting at all, telling yourself that what happened was nothing or that it will never happen again. Sometimes you’re in the animal soup, stewing in the grating pain you yourself brewed. And that’s okay, to not be okay. Or is it?
Somewhere in our cultural consciousness[9] has fermented the idea that cliches are boring, that we ought to be telling ourselves new and different stories, that we aren’t stock characters in plays or movies or children’s books. I’m built differently, one says. This trope doesn’t apply to me because I’ll restore my life by myself, or without setbacks, or with setbacks that don’t rip you open. I want to be wounded without showing my wounds, tender but not hurt, sarcastic but not off-putting. And while it’s true that cliche is overused, or vapid, or co-opted by an evil corporate organization for profit. There’s no denying that. But as David Foster Wallace writes in Infinite Jest, “It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”
Being a human is complex. No one’s fully a perfect narrative (but if you are, dm me). But too often, we want to forgo narrative entirely and embrace complexity while disowning the irrationality of sophistication. Still, to want to be perfect and complex is an irrational quest in and of itself. What kind of enduring love is it if it’s frictionless? What kind of multivariable success is it if you can’t fail?
I think that as I’ve grown older, Romeo and Juliet makes sense to me in a way. They live for love, then she dies for nothing, then he wakes up and dies for love. It makes no sense that they’re melodramatic, so tragic. Or it makes sense, and the rational actor is a myth. And if I’m offering (unqualified) advice about how to crash out now, I’ll say that when you crash out, you should carve out the space for yourself to be temporarily insane, or you can just sit in the pain, letting it carve you empty. I guess it’s cliched, but it’s also true. There’s more on this from Leslie Jameson in “The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” “the wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true.” I think that what I’ve said also fits into a later piece on sincerity, but to thy own self be true, you know. But it’s also true that nobody acts in their own self-interest all the time. I don’t know what I want.
I think that we should believe in wrong things and give ourselves the grace to be better. “I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land,” William Faulkner writes in As I Lay Dying. “I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air.” The speaker is Addie Bundren, the dead mother at the center of Faulkner’s story. She is by no accounts a good character, she has a virulent hate for almost everyone else, speaking of her schoolchildren, “I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.” But why then do I love her?
I think you should do bad things and regret them. You should play risky games and pay the consequences and realize that the consequences are unfair. You should act in your self-interest and act against your self-interest and recognize it is you with the butcher’s cleaver. Or you never provide the necessary room & board for the demon in you, and you’ll never grow. I think that you can negotiate with the world and tighten your actions but you should never be so afraid of it that you let it kill your one and only soul. I think it’s okay to be afraid. I think we need to be afraid more often. I think it’s okay to cry. I think that I mean it.
OneFiveHundred is a series by Wild Grain Editor Hongtao Hu, all thoughts are his own and not necessarily representative of The Wild Grain or the Rice University English Department.
Works Cited:
[1]: Cheng, Jennifer S. “Velella.” 2015. The Volta, https://ioffershoes.com/twstbs-poem145-jscheng.html.
[2]: Knight, Etheridge. “Feeling Fucked Up.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48752/feeling-fucked-up.
[3]: Didion, Joan. “On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue.” Vogue, 23 Dec. 2021, www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961.
[4]: I Saw the TV Glow. Directed by Jane Schoenbrun, performances by Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Helena Howard, and Lindsey Jordan, A24, 2024.
[5]: Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999.
[6]: Sharif, Solmaz. “Social Skills Training.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1580548/social-skills-training.
[7]: Theweleit, Klaus, et al. Male Fantasies. I, Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Polity Press, 1987.
[8]: Choi, Hedgie. “Salvage.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157047/salvage-61d46f73eb93a.
[9]: Quann, Rayne-Fisher. “no good alone.” Substack. https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/no-good-alone