The pandemic shut down immigration procedures for tens of thousands of people across the United States, and my partner was one of them. Because of this, his visa expired before the next arrived and he needed to quit the job it had taken six months to find, and it was unclear if they’d keep the position open while he waited for the visa.
Surviving 2020 with sanity intact was already like swimming in a tidal pool, but now it was like doing so in the dark. I needed a plan to feel at ease, but without the job, it was impossible to form one for where we would move when our lease in Miami runs out at the end of this month, where I would continue my job search, whether we’d be caught in this in-between state indefinitely.
Uncertainty makes me panic. Each time I’ve graduated, it’s as though my flashlight has died in a dark cave. I’ll take any way out, whichever tunnel I first grope towards, regardless of how much I want what’s on the other side — a job offer, a new degree, a new state — if it brings me out of uncertainty, I’ll take it.
So when our plan failed, anxiety pumped through me as though I was on a raft about to hit white water rapids. Though it had been years since I had seen it, I felt the absurd need to watch something that would explain what was happening. At 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, I switched on “Into the Woods” (make fun of me if you must) to explain what was happening.
In the musical, each character is questing after something — a cloak, a prince, a grandmother’s house — and will do anything to get it. They beg, borrow, and steal to reach their desires, but once everyone’s reached their “happily ever after,” the unintended consequences of their actions throw them back into chaos. No one gets what they wished for — the prince is a womanizer, the giants turn vengeful when Jack steals a golden harp, the broken curse gives the bakers a child but the baker’s wife suddenly dies.
The chaos we were in finally made sense — this, it turns out, is what life gives you, regardless of what you want. You cannot predict what you’ll be given. Instead of longing for a happy ending, be glad with your lot. My anxiety dissolved, and I returned to my work, content in uncertainty because a story had helped me make sense of my life.
Stories have power. We invent them to bring order to disorder, definitions where there are none. You only need to look to how Greek mythology explained the seasons, war, darkness, everything else that was unclear. Even though we now trust science to explain the universe, we are still surrounded by myths.
To name a few:
Hard work + college + relationship = success and happiness
Love rescues you from yourself and makes your life complete.
The wedding, the couple’s first kiss is the beginning of an eternal happy ending.
Men with families are incapable of treating women poorly.
Shopping at Whole Foods means you are conscientious and compassionate.
If you’re polite to strangers, you’re probably a good person.
Follow your dreams, and you’ll be wildly successful.
Adulthood = a stable income, a house, a family, owning a vacuum cleaner.
Myths and stories can comfort us, but they can also blind us to uncomfortable realities. The truth is there’s no formula to being happy or successful, to who you can expect to be kind and decent, to what the different stages of life bring you.
Let’s take this even further. Here are the myths I had in mind when I began this article:
Work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.
Once upon a time, we enslaved, lynched, and segregated black people. But through the Civil Rights marches, segregation was illegal, and all was well.
What these narratives leave out:
Redlining, the race-wealth gap, discrimination in hiring and housing
My primarily white, suburban school was much more well funded than the inner-city, primarily black schools
The War on Drugs was invented to disproportionately put blacks in jail to an unfathomable degree,
Still-unpaid reparations and that major historical figures had wanted them: Sherman had wanted to give freed slaves two acres and a mule, Lincoln had wanted reparations, Martin Luther King, Jr. had planned to continue marching for economic equality before he was killed.
“Don’t worry,” our cultural narratives told us. “All is well.” And if all was well, there was nothing left to work for. You can’t act on what the story leaves out.
We rely on stories to see us through the darkness, but sometimes we need to let our eyes adjust to the dim light so we can understand what’s really there. If we believe a relationship is only real when it feels like a fairy tale, we can let ourselves off the hook for working through whatever hang-ups we have with intimacy or wait for the other half to save us rather than taking responsibility for our own well-being. If we believe hard work and a degree is all you need for success, you don’t need to confront what your soul longs for after you finish the commute home. If we believe our system is fair, we don’t need to fight for equality.
Stories can become weapons for good as well. But the danger comes when we don’t understand the truths behind them and think for ourselves.
If you live outside of these myths, it can feel lonely. You can feel helpless by the weight of how much stories dictate our choices and keep us from questioning. This poem, “The Last Day” encapsulates that helpless feeling that defies explanation.
Read it slowly, read it out loud if you want it to add anything to your life.
The Last Day
Lucille Clifton
we will find ourselves surrounded
by our kind all of them now
wearing the eyes they had
only imagined possible
and they will reproach us
with those eyes
in a language more actual
than speech
asking why we allowed this
to happen asking why
for the love of God
we did this to ourselves
and we will answer
in our feeble voices because
because because
Read it again, more slowly, not racing to decode its meaning.
What I find:
The eyes “only imagined possible” and language “more actual/than speech” can perceive and speak more than our poor human body can.
The question is asked by “our kind.” They say “we allowed this” and “we did this to ourselves.”
We can only say “because.”
It can feel overwhelming and paralyzing to understand the degree to which stories can keep us from confronting our personal and cultural darkness and how helpless we feel to change the realities behind them. But we need to believe in that possibility. To do that, maybe we need a different kind of story, or maybe we need to see our systems for what they are and take responsibility for our ability to change them. I don’t have any simple takeaways. But I know our world is too complex to fit into a narrative.
It looks as though the visa is coming through, and our lives will move forward. But we’ll find new problems, and we’ll travel through more uncertainties until we die. All I hope for is we don’t become frozen by the fear of something keeping us from a permanent happy ending that won’t ever exist. Like Jack in “Into the Woods,” the metaphorical prince we long for might bring us more trouble than good.
Instead, I hope we enjoy life and do what we can to be better. And when I tell the story of my life, it’ll have a thousand-page appendix of everything I took out in order for the narrative to make sense.