For April, April is Over
I don’t particularly like the month of April so I’m profoundly glad it is now May.
The four worst things that have ever happened to me occurred between March and May (one in March, one in May, and two in April) but for one reason or another, I’ve always associated April with death in a way I don’t associate any other time of the year. This of course is ironic given April is the middle of spring, supposedly a time of growth and renewal, but I thrive in being ironic.
I’m not a pessimist, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been fixated on morality and mortality, especially my own, and have publicly and privately grappled with it, unnerving people I love and loved, as well as people I never have or will. I read a lot of Nietzsche in my teens, Camus, and Kant as well, and of course, my girl Sylvia Plath, and perhaps as a result, I believed in the irrevocable and looming inevitability of my premature death for a long time, long after I stopped being passive (on a good day) at the concept of being alive.
Leo Tolstoy wrote,"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and my family is no different. I come from a long history of mental illness and addiction, suicide and poverty, and I almost feel guilty that I haven’t suffered as much as those who came before me, my grandmother and great-grandmother and my father, and I feel guilty about complaining as much as I do. My dad’s grandmother, my great-grandmother, who died in 2017, was married at 13 to a 22-year-old, and had her first of 12 kids at 14. Her husband killed himself the year I was born, her daughter killed herself a few months later, and she was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. But, their blood, my great-grandfather and my great-aunt and my grandmother and my father, runs in my veins, and I’m never going to escape who I was born as, and it took a long time for me to come to terms with that.
I know that we’re collectively supposed to be over Hamilton, but I’ve always been a huge fan of Alexander Hamilton, ever since I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda performing what would become the opening number of the musical at the 2009 White House Poetry Jam as a high school junior in my AP US History class. I even wrote my Common App essay on the man himself, 4 years before the musical premiered, so I’m not even exaggerating here. Anyways, in “My Shot,” Alexander sings, “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory… See, I never thought I'd live past twenty
Where I come from some get half as many,” and you could say I related.
To be honest, while I’m happy to be alive and am very much looking forward to growing older, not so deep down, I’m very guilty to be alive. I sometimes think that if I was born 50 years before, I wouldn’t have lived to see 20, and I wonder what I did to deserve this life, my job and my apartment, my beautiful dog and my parents and everybody else that loves me. Do I do enough to be worthy of this life? Am I wasting it all? After all, my late great-aunt never had the opportunities I do, my great-grandfather didn’t either. Would they still be alive if they’d gotten the help that I got? But there is nothing I can do to alleviate these concerns, or rather, nothing that I’m willing to undertake.
When I was a teenager, I wondered if there was life after survival, if I’d continue being alive after I stopped anticipating my premature death, and now, I’m getting the opportunity to answer that question firsthand. Some people are not so lucky as me, their sadness and pain outpace their resilience, and I’m well aware of this fact. After her suicide attempt, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote, “God be at mine end, and at my departing.” She wrote about searching for a God that she long believed had abandoned her, about the shame and sadness associated with almost dying at your own hand, and her work gave me relief that I was not alone in the conflicting sentiments I felt. Like Jamison before me, I was given a second, or admittedly a fourth, chance at life and I’d be foolish if I squandered it.
So I will continue live, for my father and grandmother and great-grandfather, through the line of people defined by their suffering in a way that I abjectly refuse to be. I can’t go back in time and fix their lives, but I can live in a way that they’d have wanted to live, free and open and loving. I resolve to live as Joan Didion would recommend, to not complain, to work harder, and spend more time alone. After all, Didion is the patron saint of smart girls who aren’t quite sure where being smart might lead them, and well, I’ve always been smart™️ if nothing else. I don’t love myself all of the time, or even most of it, but I have self-respect in a way Carrie Bradshaw never will, and that’s enough for me.
Some people think with their heads, some people think with their hearts, but since I was a girl, I’ve always thought with the hole in my heart so I’d never have to give it all away. Nobody has ever really lived up to my expectations, so for a while, I attempted to stop trusting others, to stop loving, to stop believing in their goodness, but it’s now become impossible to be so hard and cold. I like to love, I like to care, I like to be happy in a way I was never taught; my father didn’t know how to be happy and my mother didn’t know how to teach it. Albert Camus wrote in The Stranger, "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer” and I always did regard myself as an absurdist. And so, I will hope again.