The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 55: November 7

Today instead of working I watched YouTube interviews. For no particular reason I watched all of the interviews I could find by a singer I like and know nothing about. Now I know quite a lot about him. Before he became a songwriter and singer he was a drunk and a drug addict. Now he responds to interviewer prompts such as, “It’s interesting that, in this song, you don’t judge the teacher who raped you and then later killed himself,” with stock recovery responses. I was angry at others as a way to express my anger at myself. Now I’ve accepted who I am and no longer need to blame other people for my shortcomings.

Until this year, I was not the sort of person to find sentences like these profound.

My best friend from college recently started saying such sentences. After years of psychotherapy, she’s switched gears, found a guru. This guru has, as gurus must, an origin tale, a story tracking her path to enlightenment. Roughly it goes like this. Before she became a guru, she valued what people tend to value — love, money, real estate. Her first marriage failed. Her second marriage failed. She became a shut-in, subsisting on ice cream and pain pills. One day she awoke on the floor of her bedroom and saw a mouse crawling across a foot. She was filled with joy. She saw it as her job to love everyone and everything unconditionally, but her conviction was still challenged by old anxieties that cropped up every once in a while. She created a series of questions to ask herself whenever she felt tempted by real estate, or jealous of other people’s money, or self-pitying, or hopeless, or if she could not find beauty in even the most agreed-upon beautiful things, never mind a mouse.

These questions she asked herself are now an official product, a mental map you can buy or a head dance you can be taught. I am sounding dismissive here, but I really don’t view this guru’s work dismissively. She has measurably helped my friend. I was hoping she might help me. I did not feel entirely ready yet to be helped, but I did feel open to the possibility — maybe this guru could make my life better, too.

Recently I met this friend and another friend at a cabin on the coast. The cabin was runty and constructed of press board and plastic and propped up by rusted propane tanks. The view was astonishing. We are scarcely ever together nowadays, the three of us; we are far-flung in more ways than just geography. When we do meet, confession is our shortcut to intimacy. We bypass the years and our widening differences by confessing. We confess and confess and confess. We confess about our bad behavior toward husbands, children, other friends, ourselves. We are each other’s priests.

On this night, I had my usual confessions to make; I waited for my turn. Though the confessions on offer (I thought) were good ones, my friend with the guru seemed distracted. When I finished, she wanted to know with whom I’d shared one particular confession. She wanted to know if I’d shared it with another woman I see more frequently than I see her.

I had.

The next morning I woke up to ocean and a painful amount of sun. My friend emerged from the small back bedroom; she announced that she’d spent the past two hours asking herself the questions she’d learned from the guru. She’d gone to bed upset last night by what she saw as my betrayal (she understandably felt betrayed that I would share news with this other woman before I shared it with her); now, however, she was perfectly fine.

We ate breakfast. My friend was calm but also unsettlingly distant. I wondered if she’d experienced a moment of acceptance in that bedroom; what she’d accepted had something to do with my inability to stop disappointing her. She was finally resigned to this fact, and her resignation required she stop investing any hope in me whatsoever.

Formerly I’d loved her guru. Now I was not so in love with her. I was emotionally quite dependent on the dysfunction my friend and I had co-developed over the past twenty-five years. I depended on my friend to get mad at me for doing mostly totally reasonable things that I then got mad at her for being mad about. I started to worry: our durable friend romance, the one that survived, and even thrived upon, our regular breakups, was finished. Her guru had killed it. Gurus, I’d always thought, were so airy and ephemeral — they encouraged your thoughts to drift around wearing the mind equivalent of an Indian gauze dress with a tinkling bell hem — but my friend’s guru, it seemed, was the most practical of taskmasters. She dressed people’s minds in an off-the-rack skirt suit and sent them to an office job where they laid people off.

I tried to remain circumspect in the face of my friend’s resignation; maybe it was for the best. How much longer could we act like schoolgirls with crushes on one another? We were forty-four years old.

After breakfast we all three sat on the rocks. We arranged ourselves at distances from one another so great that we nearly needed to shout to be heard above the gulls. We were literally speaking over a small crevasse. My two friends assumed one plane, like jurors; I faced them with my back to the sun. They began to worry aloud about me. Their worry amounted to a personality critique, but whatever. They cared enough to care. After my close run-in with total guru annihilation, I thankfully accepted their concern.

Whenever I am not with them, they said, I am Not Me; I become a person they are certain, because they know me so well, I am not.

There is a complicated truth to these claims. Historically, when I am in a shallow tizzy, or just really depressed, I do tend to pull away from these two friends. Historically, the explanation for my disappearance has been: they know me too well. When I’m not interested in (or capable of) being who, at my core, I am, I steer way clear of the two people who hold me to this unappealing standard.

However — and maybe it was because the guru had messed with things, and so now our narrative seemed open to restructuring — a part of me wanted to disagree with this long-running interpretation. A part of me wanted to point out that this Not Me facet they strongly disliked — this “other” buzzy and irreverent me — was, if we were to deal in pure percentages, the person I predominantly am. I liked people, lots and lots and lots of them. I wanted people around me much of the time, and I wanted for the most part to never directly speak about serious matters. If a serious matter arose, I wanted to dispatch it in an unserious manner (which manner, in my opinion, would nonetheless result in its very seriously being dealt with). What they were saying, in short, I wanted to point out to them, was this: we are worried about you because we don’t like who you are.

I said nothing. I chose not to seize the restructuring opportunity offered by the guru. Instead I listened; I nodded. The sun was hot on my back. I was struck by a guru-worthy koan to describe my current situation: To face away from the sun is not to hide from it. My friends and I have our friendship origin tales, just like the guru has hers. These are our paths to enlightenment, or maybe just our paths to this cabin, to this beach, to this day, to our girlhoods, to which we are fast losing the connection. I believe it is not wrong to protect these stories, even if such protection requires a little dishonesty in the form of silence. I did worry, however, that the crevasse over which we faced one another would eventually grow too wide. As yet, it had not. I was thankful for this. It was nearing noon now. My shoulders were starting to burn.