meaning-making
I read somewhere that everyone you will ever meet in your lifetime is a “soulmate” of a sort1—an idea that is gaining traction in woo-woo circles on social media.
I think this is a lovely way to reframe relational trauma if one is seeking to heal from it. If one is seeking to not heal from it, however, it’s probably the queasiest, most damaging idea they’ve ever heard2. That’s okay too.
But the notion makes a certain strange sense to me, in an “editing” way. What we’ve chosen to remember about our lives and interactions is, ultimately, an edit. Why has my brain chosen to remember this person at all? What significance did they carry—a meaning that I’ve inadvertently assigned to them over the arc of my life? Once I understand this, the memory is likely to recede on its own, thank God.
Susan Sontag warned against assigning symbolic meanings to happenstance. That’s fine—I think she was probably harmed by other people projecting narratives onto her body, and who among us has not been harmed in such a way—but I think following her lead and resisting meaning-making has harmed me in other grievous ways.
We pathologize meaning-making3: Resist looking for meanings that aren’t there; that’s a little schizoid. But I’d lived in a sucking vacuum of meaninglessness for over a decade, I recently reasoned to my best friend aloud; it’s only natural that the realizations I was meant to be having should come flooding in now4, all at once. I told her to be sure to stop me once red-line thumbtack-and-string art starts appearing on the walls5.
She laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said.
My best friend and I have known each other for, soon, 35 years, which is a little bit like forever and a little bit like an exhale. This is to say, we don’t have any illusions about each other. A friendship of that length begins to feel like a sort of back-of-book concordance, a Rosetta Stone. And the red-string conspiracy I’m trying to solve is the conspiracy of my own life, how it is constantly conspiring to add up to something in a Pynchonesque way. I think about how I seemingly entered the world already fully-formed, already constantly monologuing internally6, already resolute that I’d chosen my family of origin7 and I was going to get away from them and fix it all, somehow.
Well, my family of origin is ghosts now—which is eventually true of all family trees, but mine more than most—so they can sneak up on me any time, any place, since they’re no longer living at a safe distance. I’m no ghost-hunter; I’m a person ghosts hunt8.
The mother of an old boyfriend recently reached out to reconnect. “Looking forward to the day I can call you daughter!” she’d once signed a card to me two decades ago. I’d always had really positive, tight-knit relationships with other people’s mothers. Maybe all those friendships would’ve failed if I’d ever actually married their sons. I honestly don’t know.
And I’m careful to remain skeptical of my own memories of others—since people wake up a changed, fresh person every morning, or are a slightly different person from moment to moment—and I’m careful to remember that I’m face-blind and eager to be taken in by a performance, easy to trick. So the connections I’m constantly reminded of might be just that: a memory inside me that is easy enough to evoke.
But it’s a huge wide world, with many people in it, so that every accidental path-crossing is a sort of isolated miracle. I’ve always known that every person is important and every person has something to offer, even if what they’re offering to you is yet another tough lesson. “Well, that’s just great. Where do serial killers and family annihilators fit into this, Jen?” Jfc I don’t know; leave me alone.↩
I think it’s a necessary stop, even. In fact, I think you need to fully pass through the “that’s damaging, that’s wrong, that kind of thinking lets bad people off the hook” part, or else it’d be considered spiritual bypassing. You have to fully acknowledge the harm done—feeling your way through the grisly pain and grief and rage of it—before you can even begin to say with any certainty what, exactly, you’re open to forgiving and releasing. (When she does eventually forgive her bipolar mother someday, I recently warned the zillennial, “that does not mean willingly putting yourself in harm’s way again and again.”)↩
We especially pathologize meaning-making if it ever gets in the way of moneymaking.↩
I think, when a general population is living in a white-snow void of chaos and disinformation—a poor signal-to-noise ratio, a deliberately inscrutable narrative—we necessarily start looking at things in this way, reorganizing the world into a taxonomy of themes and ideas and leitmotifs and “what I think” and “what I know for sure.”
When electrical insulation fails and electricity, unbounded, gets to flow in its own way, you end up with strange fractals—what’s called “electrical treeing,” which leaves behind Lichtenberg figures. This probably happens in the brain and body, too, especially after demyelination of the wiring sheaths meant to protect our delicate nervous systems from errant electrical pulses. Anyway, I bring it up as a metaphor: Heal your nervous system, heal the tree. This doesn’t erase the original Lichtenberg figure, all these neurological pathways and grooves created by a lightning storm, but it’s why I’m paying more attention to certain things—like cooking—and less attention to others.↩
Lately I’ve resisted hypergraphia—there’s too much to write down, and anyway, I would never catch up even if I tried—so I’ve been cooking instead. I mean literally cooking, on a range in the kitchen.
I recently sighed over some pan-fried rice, allowing the realization that hypergraphia is the terror of forgetting something, some detail that could be really important down the line, as if that detail were a tiny golden key. It’s the same thought process as hoarding—always open to the possibility of an upcoming, someday-adventure game inventory puzzle—and it points to a lack of confidence in my own judgment, my own brain. I sighed and shrugged and reminded myself that, if something is really important, I’ll remember it later. I just will; some part of me will.
Agreeing to let my brain forget the specific details of a significant conversation or interaction, is terrifying. But it means I’m surrendering a certain amount of labor to my background process, to my subconscious, my “daemon,” in the computer-programming sense. (Previously my daemon was overworked, as everything had been shoved onto the back burner and there was nothing cooking on the front one. This almost suggests that your own daemon is an undervalued, underpaid line cook or sous chef who might one day revolt against you. Now my daemon is irate, having nothing to work on anymore, which means I need to stop overthinking and hand the baton off again. Someday we’ll get back into flow.)
So I mentally revisit recent conversations I’ve had, but not too hard anymore, no longer poring over every sentence in the exact order it happened—because this is not journalism, I’m not a journalist—in order to trust the soft animal of my subconscious to filter the memory for me, like panning for gold using a fine-meshed sieve.↩
Metacognition.↩
“That’s common with childhood trauma,” my therapist sighed. “This idea that you somehow chose what happened to you. That’s how traumatized people try to give themselves a sense of agency.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing what I’m saying,” I answered. She was trying to absolve me of self-blame; meanwhile, I was more than slightly offended that she was accusing me of Cope. Cope is what makes me a safe person to be around.↩
The greatest looming specter, of course, is the ghost of myself, who seems very big and angry and who poltergeists around the room all night. Listen, we all need a good night’s sleep.↩