Dancing on our own

My early twenties were home to debilitating anxiety. Impending doom shrank each moment into a tiny morsel, each one only enough to survive on. It sounds melodramatic because it was. Anxiety can get that way, and remains a hard beast for me to explain because it’s invisible. It oozes dark and suffocating, from plates and utensils, from car alarms, from colors, disrupting moods, sleep, and daily existence. It consumes through a conglomeration of shadows. After years of familiarity with it, ultimately there were rhythms. The beast did have a logic in the end. And while I now know the foundations of its language I still struggle directing it. I think I always will. But each time it comes back, I find it is showing me something true, perhaps not as dire as it says, but true. 

During this pandemic we wake up every day to different, drastic news from the outside. The government’s daily decisions directly affect our lives. The capitalist system stutters under a looming virus, but it also feels like a haunting. It isn’t a city, state, or even national encounter, this is global. Everyone in the world is dealing with this pandemic. The question becomes where is it? Where is it going? Is it in our home now? Who are we, now that we have encountered it in our communities? I can almost see it. Wandering through the streets, emerging from my own mouth like poison wildflowers. 

Foreign is a word that has problematically come up in relation to this virus. The most foreign aspect to the virus is the unprecedented nature of it, it has made time foreign, not people, not places, but circumstance. 

My apartment is almost 800 square feet and I live here with my partner and my cat. My cat is delighted because we have not left in days, she blinks generously while lounging on various surfaces throughout the apartment. At the moment I am grateful for my quarantine companions. As the weather continues as it normally does, warm for this time of year, a sun and rain mix tumbles as it does at the foot of the great glacier end, known now as the Palisades. Everything else seems to change on a dime for who knows how long. 

I swim at the YMCA, a practice I have faultily engaged with for almost 20 years. Most pools are made specifically for lap swimmers. While outdoor swimming becomes a collaboration with environmental factors, what does a rectangle offer? This is exactly my question as I return every day to the page: a rectangle. As I wake up in the morning, in this boxy apartment. 

Swimming in a pool is an amalgamation of gestures in a grid where sight is imperative. Goggles suck against the eyes to make sure a swimmer stays long in their lane, reaches the plateau of the “T” and folds into a flipturn. There and back, always the same. The only difference is the state of the body. To swim in a pool is to re-engage with the body and mind, watch emotions dance with the body, change with the body. A moment of action in a silent square, is a starkness that illuminates the power of feeling. 

Lap swimming is similar to writing when letters themselves are forms in a grid, small experiments in connecting to something larger through a confining pattern. I can’t help but draw a comparison to computers with their chains of zeroes and ones that make a love language of their own in these times of isolation. While the motions are always the same, the outcome will be different. Where will my mind take me, how will the substances and stresses on my body respond to this practice today? While struggling in the confinement of a grid, something else becomes visible. There is a point while reading when we forget that we are looking at words, against this palid backdrop of ink on page, magic ignites, a magic that connects the mind to experience, that forgets the page and remembers. 

In these thoughts about water and grids I am drawn to the complexity of shells, the whirr of the Fibonacci Sequence, and too, our own bodies made up of similar skeletons, patterns themselves. I think of the heater box my father bought when I was a child. In a matter of minutes I blue sharpied the box into a castle. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t need to look far to find joy we don’t need to break the boxes we’re in right now. And it certainly isn’t infinite. 

Every moment of my anxious depression was a contention with my own mortality. I drew a picture of the beast once, a little purple bug with lots of eyes. Six legs. I carry that image with me. It crawls up me still. It felt so certain. If nothing but death is sure then that is all there is. Which may be true. But maybe these grids of taxes and death, of pandemic and fear, if those are grids we can take them as they come and create. 

How can architectures of confinement be wellsprings for inspiration? As we sit in our apartments, I encourage us to think of the shell. Where is the life within it? Where is the castle in the box?

These are unique times. These are times for you to do your dance, embrace all the poison that seeps into your mind and see what comes out. Make something, speak, write, listen, draw, paint, sculpt, this structure is not the structure you had last week or last month. This one is new and you, as the water, will flow through it differently.