A self-revision
A few years ago, my great aunt’s husband bought her a plane ticket and told her to go. They had shared life’s greatest challenges—childbirth, the purchasing of homes, unemployment, a wayward son—and yet, it was over, one month before their fiftieth anniversary. She stayed with her sister for a while, and then her son. When my dad offered her a job, she moved to Utah where she lived in a stranger’s guest house by herself, uprooted, lost.
Such events are not traumatizing so much for their physical reality—the change, the fear, the exhaustion—but for the psychological reconstruction they induce. A divorce, or a downsizing, or a deception, causes you to question not only who you are right now, but if you have ever been who you thought you were. “If not the wife of so-and-so, living in such-a-place, who am I?” These moments of shifted perception—of dilated awareness—force you to confront the horrifying truth that the story you have written for your life does not correspond with reality, that the character you had imagined for yourself is an inaccurate reflection of who you really are, that everybody you know must know you in a way that you yourself do not.
*
I felt like a salty solution dissolving in the greenhouse air of Paraguayan summer. My white shirt clutching me like a wet leaf; cotton collar soaked and gritty. Having walked through the trash-scattered streets of Asuncion, my two companions and I arrived at our destination and knocked. Jose, the strange, thirty-something, collector of Elders, opened the door and let us in.
As always, it was a shock entering the cool conditioned quarters of the middle class. We laid down our dust-stained bags and sat at the beautiful dining room table, enjoying, and contaminating, the cushioned chairs. I remember, in the way future events shape the past, how the chattering of silverware, the savory steam of fried chicken, the sleepy ceiling fan all emitted a static buzz—like the sizzle of raised hairs before the circuit of heaven and earth is made complete and lightning splits the sky.
As we ate, Jose talked—more like dug. He pried and dissected; we, not the traditional Paraguayan meal, were his lunch. Asking about past companions, past lives, girlfriends, sins, he slowly and meticulously accumulated missionary gossip. I always felt unsure of his intentions. As if there was a secret behind every laugh. As if he knew something about me I didn’t.
This particular Sunday afternoon I was honored to sit closest to him. But don’t let this chosen seat fool you. Jose did not like me. I didn’t play his game. I felt uncomfortable opening up, relaxing, acting like his friend. This made it hard for him to collect from me what he wanted, and he resented me for it. But I didn’t care about being his friend. Back then I didn’t think very much about whether he, or anyone, liked me.
By this point in my two-year mission, and my two-decade life, I was obliviously confident. I had been in the country a year and a half, walking and teaching, directing meetings and counseling members, speaking Spanish to the children and Guarani to the dogs. I felt present. I was supposed to be here. In fact, being here, on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was who I was. My location, my purpose, my mission, were inseparable from who I perceived myself to be: Elder Tomco, the missionary.
*
However, a simple story is as good as a lie. My great aunt and her husband had had a tumultuous relationship from the beginning. She was always able to find something upsetting in his behavior (not that there wasn’t anything to be upset about). Her discontent—and disappointment—only grew when in his 60’s, her husband lost his job, and they were forced to leave their adored Texas home. He found work in North Dakota, but a few months later his entire department was closed.
The following years were spent house sitting. Not making a profit, just getting by. Eventually they received an invitation to go to Mexico. My great aunt hated the heat and got sick from the food. She felt neglected, tired, and frustrated. She was vocal about how her husband failed to take care of her, failed to keep a job, failed to realize their dreams. Then, out of nowhere, it seemed to her, he bought her that plane ticket. Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe my great aunt needed to go.
*
“I’ve talked to all your previous companions,” said Jose that day at lunch. I looked up at him, my jaw slowing its chew. Then, with a chuckle and a gleam, he said, “None of them liked you.”
That one sentence divided me, Jose’s words becoming, or maybe just exposing, a fault line in my self-understanding. My self-perception, which before had been almost entirely introspective, self-assured, unified, was ripped from its soft, baby-flesh soil, and forced to gaze upwards—embarrassed as though naked—at the eyes and the thoughts of others, of strangers, of friends.
I felt exposed and completely disoriented. I could see everyone around me in such stark clarity but saw nothing but uncontextualized history—disassociated places and personalities—when I looked at myself. This was three years ago. My identity has not yet settled.
*
The recovery has been slow for my great aunt. The loss of her husband shook her, dismantled her self-esteem, left her vulnerable and insecure. She said it changed her view of the eternities. Though she meant this in an explicitly religious way, the thought is an apt metaphor for such a cataclysm of self-consciousness. Without her role as wife to her husband, she floundered for new purposes, new identities. She spent hours preparing meals for my family, cleaning our home, volunteering to help in any way possible. She was trying to prove, to herself more than anybody else, that she was still capable, still valuable, still supposed to be here.
One day she decided to go to a church fireside for older single adults. I imagine her nervously preparing, applying lipstick, looking in the mirror and seeing what the years had made of her. She felt far too old to date, to find somebody new, but maybe this was a step towards patching up her torn identity, towards reclaiming the eternities.
*
A month ago, I attended a missionary reunion. As I entered the church building, I saw tight groups; all brunettes, smiles, and “no way’s!” They seemed to be skating, a choreographed assembly, on that amber-bright basketball court. I felt like the yellow light illuminated every stain, divot, and intention I had hurriedly stuffed into my too-tight jeans. Scuttling around the perimeter, like an ant in homo sapiens garb, I felt my crust-thin confidence dissipating. I told myself, “I am supposed to be here.”
I have to tell myself things like that all the time; when I’m in the grocery store, when I’m whispering to my wife, when I’m grieving my mother’s death. My emotions, my longings, my proclivities, are no longer—maybe never were—internalized, accepted as axiomatic. They require justification. I can’t just be. I must justify my being anywhere, my saying anything, my very existence. To whom? To everyone. And more than them, to myself. I am, I often feel, stuck on a plane of abstraction, caught in the web of my own overly raw, still consolidating public self-consciousness.
*
As we left Jose’s house that day, I looked at my two companions. I did not know myself, but I had a better idea of how they knew me. I looked at their faces, pained with compassion and discomfort, their eyes focused where mine normally were—on the ground. I looked down too and noticed the crumbling asphalt strewn with threadbare soccer balls. I felt strangely absorbed by my surroundings. The dystopian concrete of a family-filled shack, the cackle and roll of native slang, a toddler’s laugh, a distorted radio. All together, a static buzz. A sort of harmonious jumble. The noise was a real-world symphony, but I felt it as a claw on my tender, still-being-born self. My consciousness had been painfully rearranged, my focus violently reconfigured. The world was already a different place, my eyes opened to new colors, voices, and shaping forces. I could see everything more clearly now, everything, that is, but myself.