in love with my philosophy professor

In my first year of college I read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Not in its entirety, mind you, nor with any amount of enthusiasm, a denser text than I’d ever managed I struggled through pure force of will reading and re-reading night before, morning of, minutes before my lecture, highlighting in three different colors as if the visual stimulation could somehow jumpstart my brain into comprehension. It was a 100 level course but even in the introductory lesson I immediately grasped a sense of suspension, classmates referring to texts—Kafka, Camus, Plato—that I, woefully under-read, had never studied and had no foothold in. When I spoke into the empty receptacle of the air I did not look for responses from my classmates, moreso to hear my own voice, admittedly for partly vain purposes but also to know that it could still make sound. My professor echoed my words with a better shape; I stared only at her face, blocking the rest of it all away, the classmates, my friend next to me watching the physical measure of my own inadequacy, my ego and my shame—distance, distance, distance.

I find it easier to write about things that have passed than are still happening, a certainty in facts that have already expired into remembering. Actually it is only my third week of classes, and I have not read Kierkegaard so long ago that I can truthfully refer to it in the past tense. In lecture what I thought A meant about esthetic living was proven wrong, but I still clutch onto the fragments that are significant to me, this idea of holding life at an arms length, as if it were a work of art. A disassociation, a romanticization: myself as the protagonist. But unlike A, it was not endless possibility I chased, not the boundlessness of beauty, but the existence of it in itself, a whole object that I could hold and something that would stay. On the weekends I drank too much, puked up everything I regretfully held in my adjusting stomach, losing, in the groggy mornings, the intricacies of the memories, only impressions of senses: dew from the grass on my socks, my body twisting frictionlessly against the merciless exhalations of collective drunken pleasure, and starbursts of smoke held for too long in my ribs and my lungs. A distillation of a desire put into purpose for one night. To be somewhere outside of myself, with the other people, on the other side of the glass for once. In a strange way this distance from my body brought me closer to it, letting myself loose pinballing shattering the fragile structures of my imagined reluctance. To stop thinking so damn hard. In other words: to be consciously unconscious.

The foremost method to hold beauty is to be beautiful. I believed this for a long time, so what I desired was to be desired. A persistent cynic in my own subjective reality, I really think that my beliefs are nothing more than personal delusion without external reinforcement. What does it mean that for a year I starved myself into despair, that I had crossed back over into an era of desperate over-indulgence to repair what damage I had done, what does it mean that no one noticed either way? Now in college I am still reconciling a sense of distance from my body as it had been to how it is, the physical healing against my admittedly still-fixed mental state. This distance, an alienation within my own skin, was not like the serene alcohol-induced un-inhibition, but a lack of control that I berated myself for. I tried to rationalize myself into healthy understanding, but no matter what I did—gain or lose, up or down—felt like the wrong choice. I wanted someone to tell me I was doing the good thing. I wanted someone to prove it, but no one could. Partly this is why I had the idea that I was such a repulsive creature; it was as simple as that. If I was wanted I would be wanted. And yet. Le plus loin, le plus serre: the farther you go, the tighter it gets.

I am probably a little obsessed with my philosophy professor. She has a set of writings on her website, some essays I could wring out of JSTOR, other reviews, cultural criticism on the Washington Post or n+1 or something or the other, names that meant nothing to me but the idea of status. In a publication I hadn’t heard of, she interviewed another philosopher. He has written books about the “perceptual and sensual textures” of love and war. Distance from oneself. From one’s homeland. From the realities that exist away from, but nonetheless influence, one’s life. In class, Professor had defined alienation as “a problematic separation” between subject and object. Again, in the interview, the two embark on a brief excursion to define the difference between desire and longing, namely that desire requires an object of desire whereas longing retains the sense of absence without the knowledge of what, exactly, is missing. Exorcising my wanting did not make me strong, did nothing but make the delineations of what that was even blurrier. Laboring on it through navel-gazing half-essay. Now I know not what I want because all I want is to want, and to want well. I maintain that to be human requires some degree of self-reflection; to that extent, some degree of desire. Freire said it is a quality of humans to strive to be more fully human. We are not born whole, but we are born subject. And yet, most of us are lucky if we can even locate our object of desire, much less grasp it. In that case, longing might be the natural state of humanity.

I don't like running

But it’s the only sport I can do because it doesn’t feel like a game. I was always useless at games. Fucking Catan with my family to in-class icebreakers, there were no exceptions. Too many rules and strategies to exploit. I didn’t like to think. I didn’t like that other people on my team would rely on me, watch me with their hopeful and hateful eyes, and it was always easier to let them down. When I joined the cross country team it was because the school forced me to take a sports credit. I walked my first 5k idly playing with my phone pretending on Google Maps to need to know where I was going. I didn’t care where I was going. I was lapped again and again. My time was somewhere above 45 minutes. To this day I’m not sure how I accomplished that. Walking it all the way probably would have been faster. I told people this with a laugh in my voice like I always do with my failures, and I didn’t receive respect like I wasn’t expecting, but at least the slightly-smiling reaction every time felt like a laughing with, even with the kind of disgusted look on their face. Seriously, why are you even here, I remember being asked, so many times at so many different occasions. Why come if you’re not even going to try? I don’t know when it was worse—when I didn’t know the answer, or when I really had been, with the full force of my effort, trying to try.

To be honest I hated this person, this useless, frail, impotent person. I was sick of always watching. I knew it was safer to stay on the side but that that was a sort of cowardice, too, a moral failure. So I mustered up the courage and I threw myself at the world. For a brief moment at seventeen I had everything I could want and it wanted me back. It really felt like a reward, like all my trying meant I won. Then the collapse.

Senior year I think for at least a hundred days straight I didn’t stop running. Every day. At school. After school. Outside and on the treadmill. At first there was some facsimile of reasonable reason: cross country meets, the beauty of the leaves on the autumn trees, sunk cost fallacy rearing its ugly head. And then it was a form of punishment. I had nothing to do after school, no friends, it felt like, who desired to spend their lazy hours with me, and slouched in bed I felt like I was becoming nothing. I ran to feel a sense of accomplishment. To know I could change something about myself—my body if not my mind.

Lots of colleges I really wanted to go to rejected me. I was lucky some colleges I didn’t accepted me. And then one I ended up at took me in at the last minute. I expected something like that. Through grueling senior year I knew I could withstand everything if I just made it through the school day, the week, the month, the year. Move out of the house. Be someone new, somewhere new, with new people, who would really get me. In a manic episode over the summer I ran twenty miles in a shorter timespan than I ever had. It was a hollow accomplishment but they were numbers. I was in love with numbers: they felt like ticking marks on a line towards my goal.

Well now that I’m here I want to say that I wish I never quit running. My legs don't move like that anymore and whatever I’ve been chasing has disappeared only further out of reach. There’s a metaphor to be made about Zeno’s paradox but it’s too obvious that it feels lazy. Even this writing is lazy. I know I could be using better words. Sentences with rhythm and meaning. But you know when you get that feeling like there’s something gnarled and caught under your throat. I was really coughing moments ago, recovering still from last week’s bad cold. Too much potential energy stored in the chest. Wanted to run off the face of the earth. But it wouldn’t do me any good.

I don’t want to die and I am glad I was born. And I love life. But not my own. Now that I have been in play I want out. Other people are beautiful and demanding. I can watch them forever and never move again in my life. Not one muscle. Not even my eyes.