#10 The urst but for everything

Journey//destination

I was at Siglo on the weekend and pretended I was in Europe the whole time rather than where I was, which was almost just as novel.

Dear friends,  

Happy Wednesday! Oh, here we are again, another week closer to success and failure and sweetness and death. Morbid but exciting!  

I started writing this piece pretty much exactly this time last year when I was feeling really anxious and as though I hadn’t lived my life properly. Having just turned 30 and living in lockdown for months, this feeling came at the overwhelming confluence of forced reflection and a milestone birthday. It was a lot.

I guess at it’s core, it’s a piece about how I so often hunger for more. And how I think partially I thrive in that liminal space because it makes my life feel juicy and caffeinated. It seems I’ve always wanted to feel uncomfortable and brave, as though I am living on the edge of something new or different. Pressure makes the diamond and all that.  
 
But, the beauty of starting and then finishing a piece a year apart, especially in a pandemic year where life has been an undulating series of contradictions; fast and slow, introspective and collaborative, too much and not enough, is that I started one way and finished a whole other. I realise now that the machine I was raging against, was probably just a nice place to be. These days I’m walking a tightrope of accepting (loving?) my propensity for grass is greener syndrome and gently redirecting myself like a puppy, ‘stop that, look here’.

And I’m not a diamond but a stone on a beach.  

Does that sound sad? It’s not meant to.  

Anyway, step into my heart-office.  

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I’m thankful that my lockdown life is sweet and gentle. I drink coffee in the sunshine and walk around lakes, along beaches, with friends. I have a partner, I can work in my pyjamas, I’m healthy and I’m 30. Which is to say, life is slowing down and everything feels soft (including me).  

And yet, and yet.  

Lately I’ve had a hummingbird heart. The anxiety is something new for me. My body feels too small to hold me. Constricted and pressed-down-on, as though no deep inhale could ever bring me enough air. And I feel a little bit sick all the time. Teetering on the edge of nausea.  

I am not quite sure how I got here, to this nice and soft place with lattes and long walks. 

It’s as though I fell asleep floating down a river, only to wake up on my raft in a place I wasn’t planning on getting to. But when I stopped to look around, I got caught up in the pleasantness and stayed. In the soft, quicksand of it all.  

The seeds I’ve planted in pots along the porch (coriander, marjoram, borage) are starting to sprout. A print just arrived in the post for me to hang on a gallery wall I’ve started. The sun dances off a disco ball in the lounge room at 8am. Liam makes us pancakes on Saturdays and we play music loudly; Bill Withers or Johnny Cash or Cardi B. And at the local café, the baristas know my order. It’s all so sweet and lovely.

But sometimes, when I’m lying in bed, in a rare moment when I’m not staring at a screen. I look out the window at the fence, with the jasmine growing on it and I dream of another a life. Maybe somewhere cold and European. Or warm and American. Where I am hardened and brave, not soft and safe.

When I was growing up, my dad would constantly talk about moving to Tasmania or Norway. Such wild, beautiful places.  

We lived in a lush hilly town punctuated by vineyards and orchards. We were always having interesting people over for dinner, potters and silversmiths. We didn’t own a TV but we played Backgammon and argued. It was nice.  
But dad was always dreaming of black rocks and a hard sun and fjords. Life would undoubtedly be better in those other places.  

It could be true that I’ve internalised my dad’s reluctance to fully love the life at hand. As though he passed the torch of seeking on to me and I carry it along, high and proud like an old Olympian.   

And there’s comfort in blaming nurture, it’s someone else’s fault that I’m perpetually lusting after greener pastures. I learnt it from a man who learnt it from another, handed down like an heirloom, a gold watch.  

Or maybe something else is true, maybe people like my dad and I, are hardwired for something else, for wanting a sourness or an edge that a neat suburb, or orchards or long bouts of sameness can’t give you.  

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In an episode of Secret Life of Us, my favourite crooked grinned cad, Evan, talks about this phenomenon he calls unresolved sexual tension, or the urst. He posits that the urst is the best part of any romantic relationship and once it’s gone, everything is kinda downhill from there. Evan reckons it’s the unknowing, the uncertainty, the desire that makes us feel bristling and alive. The sweet breathless waiting: it’s here that we write poems, and our hair looks the best.  
Of course, afterwards when the urst is replaced by certainty and love, there is stability and a quiet confidence, but there is also boredom and listlessness. Our hair stops looking so good and we stop penning love poems. A new normal.
This piece is not about love and relationships, but I’m scaling Evan’s theory to include life in general.
All this to say, I’ve diagnosed myself with a condition called the urst but for everything.  

I’ll always be straining my eyes, walking too fast to greet the rise, to get to the top of the hill and find something else on the other side. Because, more than anything, lying in bed and staring at the jasmine-y fence, thinking about all the ways my life could be sharper, more painful more fun, gives me something to do.
Like a guilty pleasure, I love the act of fantasising about how if I’d only been more courageous, more decisive, I might be another version of myself; brave and self-directed. Whip smart and cynical. In Prague or Paris, with black finger nails and a turtle neck.
This longing will make everything sourer. And it will also make me feel oddly satiated, kind of like the way a bitter plum is much more satisfying than a perfectly sweet one, because eating it feels like an experience. The way it makes your mouth move, your feet hop from side to side in recalcitrant glee.  

This is OK. It’s ok to know what’s not great about you, the inside of you. Maybe the wisdom is just knowing yourself enough so that you can temper the gnawing hunger with gentle self-talk; hey, the greenest grass is the grass you water, the only moment is now, compare yourself only to the person you were yesterday.  
 

A fun meme in the vein of this week’s theme from @notallgeminis

Letting what you know and what you feel peacefully coexist, makes being human easier and more interesting. It’s the dark and light, really.  
For me, the beauty of the urst but for everything, is sitting in a state of wanting and knowing you might never get what you want. And this breathless waiting, the striving, that is actually the beauty. The bitter plum. Because once you get the thing; the success, the life in Prague, the published novel, the wardrobe full of turtle necks. It’s just a thing you have now, not at all what you thought it would be, maybe nice for a while, but mostly just your new normal. And it’s time to want something else, in perpetual forward motion.
I’m running up that hill and the hunger can’t be fed. 

And I recall the idioms;
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
It’s the journey, not the destination.