A month in the trenches

I gave myself one month.

After the retrenchment, that was the whole plan, and it was hardly a plan. There was the one who could start a business with the opportunity already in front of him. There was the one who had been meaning to return to full-time creative work. There was the one with a video essay channel half imagined, philosophy spoken to whoever would listen. And there was the technical writer, who knew where work could actually be found in thirty days. Each arrived with a story about who I would finally become. I followed the least interesting one.

The stories were the loudest things in the room: the layoff that becomes a calling, the artist finally set free, and the man who bets on himself. These are the most-said stories we have, worn smooth by repetition, and each of them wanted to be the whole meaning of what had happened. I told myself then that I was trying not to be swayed by the Real or that unnamable source of all that anxiety. I had the word wrong. What I was refusing was the opposite of the unsayable. It was the overly said, a script with a crowd behind it.

And I did not refuse it with silence or by simply turning away from it. I refused it with smaller, duller words. Income. Thirty days. The people who depended on me. These were frames too, but I used them the way one uses a knife, to cut through the others, and not the way one uses a house, to live inside. If anything outside language entered that month, it entered as weight: the days actually passing, the income actually needed, the plain fact that pressed every story toward an answer.

I used to picture independent parts of myself as circles. Rings intersecting, and somewhere at the center a point that connected them and decided. There is no such point. What there is instead is a knot, the particular way one person holds incompatible things together without coming apart. And a knot can be retied without being undone. The dutiful one leans toward the artist or the writer, whichever comes first, and the entrepreneur gets bound along the two of them in some specific way, a matter of priority, of exposure, of who is facing whom. That month, the dutiful one and the one who needed income came forward. The artist stepped back. He did not leave. The rope was the same rope. Only the crossings had changed.

What I was looking at before I decided, I think now, were traces. Each self carried the shape of what the others would cost. The entrepreneur carried a missing paycheck. The employee carried a shelved collection. The artist carried an income that would not come. I was not choosing between options so much as reading absences, each one outlined by the others, the way a word only means by everything it is not. Making a choice did not end that deferral. It only moved inside it.

In a stubbornly academic sense, I could say I took deconstruction and read my life through it, a way of reading I had studied for years turned on a single month. That would be too neat. It also has a less flattering twin: that I reached for theory to keep the failure at arm's length, so that the pain became a reading instead of a weight. It is truer to say that I recognized it afterward, that the month had already been shaped like the thing I once wrote a thesis about, and I only saw the resemblance once I was standing on the other side of it. I cannot fully rule out the twin. Recognition after the fact is also what distance looks like from the inside.

There were easier ways to fail. I could have let one story swallow the month and spent what I had saved on something that never opened. I could have kept every story open so carefully that the month ended without my moving at all. I did neither, and that is not the same as having done right. Even then, I could feel myself being fed by the belief that I was doing the right thing because I was following a framework, and a framework can be sound and still lead somewhere tragic.

There was a month of anxiety. I filed for unemployment benefits in case nothing came. I guess it is important to stress that this was a period of vagueness and uncertainty. A lot of opportunities presented themselves but it was not up to me if this door would open for me or not. It was a period of pushing myself to every possible direction because getting late is a sure ticket towards financial instability and probably a couple of years of actively digging myself out of a hole I fell into. It was a period of self-reassurance that always borders on self-delusion. I had to be aware of how empty the words I was saying to myself. I just needed that push to think that everything is going to be alright even if the forecast clearly says otherwise. In this case, I am stuck between two pairs of signifier and signified. And the worst part is, I knew that it had to be my duty to stay in that middle and feel the tug of both directions splitting my body as a prerequisite to keep my sanity intact.

And then something came, better than I had let myself expect. I want to be careful here. It was luck and it took every nerve in my body to keep myself grounded and deny the idea that I was being rewarded. The universe did not answer my discipline. I had read the field honestly, I knew which doors my work could open and which it could not, and then a door opened that I had no hand in building. A mix of luck and a read of the playing field. If I let the framework take credit for the job, I give it the right to hand me the blame the next time the market has nothing, and it will.

What I'm still deciding is whether or not I grieved them: the artist, the entrepreneur, the voice reading philosophy into a microphone. When I made the decision, did I know I was losing something, or did I tell myself they would still be there later, waiting where I left them? Those are different deferrals. One sacrifices. The other only postpones, and a choice that sacrifices nothing has not really refused the total story. It has spread it out over time, so that every self gets its turn and none of them has to die.

I do not yet know whether the paths I set down that month are waiting for me, or whether I have only stopped hearing them. One would be a knot holding. The other would be a loss I have not yet called by its name.