Once You Label Me You Negate Me
On existence and the forgiving blunder of being.
In those dark moments in the corners of my mind, I find myself begging to vanish from the courtousies that life implies. I want to be cloacked as the cloud that was above the street where I once walked — and is now no more. The sweat of aging achingly weighs heavy. The frightening scream of a life wasted sounds oh so loud with every tick of the clock.
These are the cyclical thoughts that I have. These are the flirtatious moments the abyss beckons me. I wilt and wander in every conceivable space of my mind. The inside of my room feels like a burning furnace and the outside is an abysmal hell. There is not a place I can escape to — my mind is now the master, and I the slave.
This dramatic rendition of my thoughts is revealing. It summons rationality and begs for forgiveness. “I think therefore I am,” says Descartes: My thoughts today are filled with monsters and dragons, but luckily I still exist.
To be alive is damn hard, the alternative is even worse. It is inconceivable to digest that even the most wretched thoughts bring forth a certain sweetness to life.
I am not alone when I say that we honor a proclivity to think the worst of ourselves just after we were at our best: a fantastic Saturday night party brings forth a wicked Monday hangover. A weekend getaway is only ushered by the grim reaper of routine. a sabbatical year full of personal success eventually runs out of days and calls upon the return of miserable clock-ridden days in search of a paycheck.
The world is cyclical and cynical and predictable and yet ever so beautiful — and so are we: wretched and cynical and predictable and yet awestruck in beauty. The extreme worst that has ever been fathomed by the infinitely unfathomable mind has come and gone and quickly turned into a distant past that we strangely long for. The heart yearns for a person that could have been us in tragedy and success, almost wanting to be anyone else besides our own mediocre selves: this is why we endure and engage in stories of others’ tragedies and triumphs, fantasizing ever so dearly “what and why this was or wasn’t me?”. The conjured dream of being is drowned by the nothingness of things that were, and are now not.
I oscillate between there and here, touching transients of knowledge that I could have somehow grasped. An emotion that once was real within me, beating the blood up my neck and making me rise with passion, has now disappeared into nothingness. How could wisdom, immortality, and freedom be so elusive? How can my very existence by thought be so troubling in its trapping?
And then an invitation comes. An invitation so threatening that my first instinct is to fight it with all my power — everything that has existed and ever existed in me shall see this invitation to its very demise. The invitation is simple yet frightening: be still, be patient. all shall be revealed. “For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” Luke 8:17.
My monkey mind then might mock: If I am the patient, then patience is for the ill waiting to be healed; yet I am not broken, I am not sick. Sick is for the weak-hearted, sick is for those who fail and are frail.
Well if that is the diagnosis, then I am ill indeed: I am ill because I have failed, I am ill because I am human, I am a patient because without my mistakes there would be nothing, and with nothing, I am no longer alive.
Where are those phantoms plaguing my heart? rendering my blood at boil? Where are those clouds? Shrouding my mind with mockery? Where are the ghosts lurking beyond their etherial blinds? Where does nothingness bid farewell when the sun claims back its shine, and everything is once again, alright?
Those are the deep dark days when I am paralyzed beneath the “trenches of adult life” as David Foster Wallace writes. The trenches of adult life is where you find yourself: the coward and courageous self all at once mingling together in eclectic symbioses. It takes courage to wake up every day and believe that the world will be a better place today than it was in its yesteryear. It takes courage to lie awake at night and ponder “how could I be better tomorrow?”. It takes courage to look at your own meagernesses and pledge to make things right morning come. It takes courage to look at the hungry ogres and command them to“leave! for today you shall not devour me”. It takes courage to be afraid of the unknown and accept yourself for your cowardly humanly surrender. It takes courage to witness the miracle of your everyday struggle of asserting yourself here and now:
If I lead and fail I shall rise, If I love and betray I shall heal, If I am lost I shall be found, If I am done and undone, well I have finally lived; and If I have ever thought once then I have been.
And just like a moon does not cease to be a moon when it is completely dark, it so happens to be that “I think therefore I am” is just two sides of the same coin. Our frantic frightened existence is a stream of rumbling high tides and lows. For millennia on end, the moon itself screamed at itself for having to shed its light and live in a gape of darkness, only to light up again and wonder why on earth was it so frightened. Compounded and infinite time would make you think that such majestic and wise god would learn from its pattern — but it comes to be that if a moon ceased its gyrating fullness and destitute, shine and infinite dark, sheer courage and ubiquitous freight, then it would cease to exist as the rising and falling star that it has ever so romantically known itself to be.
And here we are, disgusted and albeit exhilarated by the melange of our meandering progress, paralyzed by our inability to laugh at ourselves, bewildered by our capacity to wake and face yet another roll of the dice in the neverending gamble for a better tomorrow. Let’s ask ourselves: how courageous are we to simply put up with the confusion that transcends us into a reluctant will to fight? It is truly a miracle that we made it this far and shall carry on forevermore till there is no more an ounce of courage left in us to rumble and toil and call life a thing worth fighting for.
“Once you label me you negate me”
“Once you label me you negate me”, wrote Kierkegaard. Very much while perhaps observing the cycle of the moon — as it rises and falls: full, partial, half, lost, empty. How can you label yourself a troubled person; euphoric, a success or failure, an importance or of impotence in the world? How can you possibly assess yourself as being this or that, when you are neither that or this, to begin with? If all beings exist in cycles, and the minute you declare that you exist because of your own judgment of this existence, then I invite you to be still and cease to think, till the moon changes once again and presents itself in yet a new image — a reminder that just because you think this is so, it does not mean that it is so.
I remind myself today as the clock ticks and the winds come and go, that my existence is not to be labeled, perhaps as Kierkegaard pointed and the moon highlighted: “Once you label me you negate me”.
