Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
When I was younger, my family had its share of fairly normal problems: My brother teased me relentlessly for being chubby, my grandparents said despicable things about my dad after he and my mom divorced, and my mom essentially made me into her personal therapist. Now that my brother and I have graduated from college and are independent, self-sufficient adults, our family has mostly made amends for all of that. But as we plan our next vacation, I can’t help dreading being locked in a hotel room for a week with this perfect storm of people.
Even though nothing terribly bad happens on these trips, my nervous system is constantly firing off. I wish I could just appreciate the good parts of the experience, but so much has happened. I know you’re all about the big embrace. How do I get myself to enjoy this next vacation?
Dear Reader,
What a remarkably compact and effective expository paragraph. Have you considered a career in journalism? I’m serious. The modesty of your adverbs, in particular, is telling: the fairly normal problems, the mostly made amends, and the jolts of panic you continue to suffer even as nothing terribly bad happens.
Does anybody ever really get over anything? That’s my question. Don’t we just haul it about with us forever, our luggage, our baggage, our draggage, our laggage, the gunk in our cells and the fur in our pipes, because life isn’t long enough or spacious enough or gentle enough for us to truly leave any of it behind? And at what point is all of that stuff just who we are? At what point does it become the prima materia of our personalities?
I dunno. The family will do it to you, that’s for sure. With our people, we regress, act out, drift into behavioral dream states. We play weird ancestral roles. We collapse into a soup of stimuli and wallow, wallow, wallow. Chuck the brimstone of divorce in there and you’re really churning. Nervous currents run wild, no circuit breakers anywhere, because with our families, our private electricity is strictly knob-and-tube—it’s outdated and superannuated, and it’s way too late for us to strip out the wiring and start again.
I’m glad you think I’m all about the big embrace. I’m also all about hiding under the table. My advice for this upcoming vacation is: Hang in there. Get through it. You already have some survival strategies, I’m sure. You’ll go on pounding, mind-emptying runs. You’ll sit in the hotel bar saying bleary, inappropriate things to strangers. Always stay alive, if you can, to the human comedy—the deep ridiculousness and rather lovable futility of all these entanglements and counter-entanglements. And kick back against the anxiety. You’re grown up now; you made it. And you see everything very clearly.
Staying up late because I can,
James
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