by Lisa McKay
I stopped typing and stared out of the window beside me at the view, thinking of this time in my life and other questions Mike had asked me.
What had I done when my faith turned to aspartame?
I had moved to L.A. and almost crumbled under the solitary weight of loneliness during my first four months there.
I had started to drink. I was no stranger to alcohol – in Australia, drinking is right up there with mocking on the unofficial “national sports” list. But during this time I crossed a line that I had never crossed before. I started drinking alone, and then I started doing that most nights. Sometimes I drank myself to sleep on the couch, waking up to terrible headaches and empty bottles.
I had put up profiles on dating websites, looking to finally leave behind the pain of an unrequited and impossible love.
I had reveled in the nourishing warmth of Jason’s affection when it was lavished on me. I let him hold me too tightly, too close, because I got something out of it, too.
I had seen the salvation of understanding in the words of a stranger in Afghanistan and then chased him down across borders.
I had hardly stood still for a single second.
Out the window of the plane, the early-morning sun was gilding the clouds below with a fresh golden pink. It was doubtless cloudy on the ground, and still raining, but it was celestial up at thirty-three thousand feet.
The seat-belt sign came back on and a voice above my head warned me that we were about to start our descent. It was time to shut down all electronics.
I looked down at my letter to Mike and added one more line before turning off the computer.
“I don’t feel like that way (spiritually depressed) anymore – most of the time, anyway.”
Los Angeles, USA
Some pivots are sudden, born of formative instants. Others are long, slow arcs. With these, the change in direction becomes clear only when you check your rearview mirror or raise your eyes to see a different vista stretching out in front of you.
This is the sort of gradual pivot that has unfolded in my life since the end of my relationship with Jason. I look back at that time now with the same odd hybrid of recognition and puzzled wonder that ambushes me whenever I see photographs of myself in high school staring down from the walls of my parents’ house. In those photos my face is unlined and softly rounded. I want to reach into those images and pinch my own cheeks.
I can’t believe I ever looked that young.
I can’t believe how unmoored I felt during my first year and a half in California.
And now, more than three years on, I find myself in a different place.
The way I see God and the way I think God probably sees me has changed. As core issues of living faith have become less neatly edged by dos and don’ts, they have inhabited instead the far messier territory of awareness, attitude, action, and intention.
I’ve changed in other ways, too.
I see and feel more as it’s happening, I think. The cheerful beacon of a small orange flower by the path. The grounding warmth of a cup of coffee against my palms. The triggers and trajectories of my own mood swings, and the thoughts, fears, and exhilarations they typically tow in their wake.
I value solitude more, and silence.
I’m a little less imprisoned than I was by my perceptions of what other people think of me.
But it’s far easier to point to specific ways that I’ve become more at home in my own skin in recent years than to explain exactly how these changes came about. The catalysts weren’t the same things that had galvanized me a decade earlier – or, at least, they didn’t result in the same uncomplicated reaction. Services at the church of five thousand that I attended in L.A. still sometimes stirred or challenged me deeply, but they also sometimes left me cold, or contemptuous, or simply conflicted about my own judgmental attitude.
The changes that have taken place during the last couple of years certainly didn’t happen during early mornings spent reading the Bible, because I wasn’t doing that.
I suspect things started to shift around the time, about two years after I arrived, that I started to feel that familiar tickle pushing me to seek new pastures and I decided to stay put in Los Angeles until I had a better reason to leave than an abstract sense that my life would surely fit me more completely and more comfortably somewhere else. Anywhere else.
As odd as it might sound, staying put was the harder choice. I probably would have been more comfortable immersed in the intense dynamic of learning a new place and new people than I was meeting the challenge of continuity. But although I still longed for the adventure of change, I was also getting tired.
Increasingly I was finding myself haunted by a doubtful sort of melancholy, a constant low-level ache. On one trip to London around this time – as I wandered through the chaos of Heathrow, as I manhandled my bags up and down the Underground steps, as I ate alone in an Indian restaurant that night – I was overwhelmed with the sense that my life was fracturing so irrevocably into a thousand disconnected people, places, and sensations that I would never stand a hope of feeling fully integrated.
“The glass window facing the street is entirely patterned by a complex web of fine cracks,” I wrote in my journal as I waited for my food to arrive. “It looks solid enough at first glance, but I wonder how hard I’d have to hit it to trigger a noisy shower of shiny, sharp fragments?”
To others, I knew, I looked solid enough. To others, the life I led looked fascinating, even charmed. But I was also sure that this – my habitual tendency to judge my life through the prism of others’ perceptions – was itself part of the problem
“Outside of comparing, we cannot feel,” Andre Acimon said when writing about the benefits of his own globetrotting. But, I was starting to wonder, when does all that change? When do all those differences, all that opportunity for comparison become too much of a good thing?
At what point does a constant stream of change blunt our ability to feel and connect to the present and to ourselves? At what point do we become the Transit Loungers described so poignantly by Pico Iyer as those “sitting at the Departure Gate, boarding pass in hand, watching the destinations ticking over. [Those] who feel neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder; who alight with the same emotions with which we embarked; who go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.”
And at what point do we become such practiced chameleons – sometimes choosing to blend in, others to stand out – that we no longer know our native color?
How had I ended up with this life? And did I even want it, or was I largely enjoying playing a role others marveled at?
These questions were among the many that demanded to be addressed when, after breaking up with Jason, I slowed down long enough to hear the internal clamor, and it was mostly writing that helped me start to address them.
By the time I had been in L.A. two years, writing had elbowed its way into my life and established itself as both a core passion and a need. I had started writing my first novel without the faintest idea of why I felt compelled to do so. After it was finished I turned to journaling and essays to fill the gap it had left. Over time, without me even really noticing, writing became something I needed to do, and it was writing more than anything else that helped me name and face questions Pico Iyer asked me, and others that I asked myself.
How did I answer when a friend asked me whether I was “fulfilled”?
What did I think of when I heard the word hope?
How did I really feel about being by myself when my younger sister announced she was pregnant or yet another good friend got engaged?
What could pull me back from the edge when, temporarily overwhelmed by the scope of tragedy and pain in this world, I felt temped to level the playing field and join others in their distress?
Usually it wasn’t that I found great answers to these sorts of questions while writing. It was more that the writing forced me to s
tick a flag in the sand, no matter how small, and say something. It pushed me to figure out what I actually thought and wanted rather than simply reacting to a constantly revolving merry-go-round of people and events. It helped transform happenings, thoughts, and moods into things acknowledged, clarified, and manageable.
It made me commit to being more myself.
It made me own my life.
Vancouver, Canada
I’d told Mike that I was nervous about the interview I was flying to Canada for, and it turned out that I had good reason to be. In addition to the expected discussion of work and my novel, the host of the show didn’t hesitate to venture into completely unexpected and far more difficult territory.
“With all your experience and training,” he asked me during the second half of the interview, “what do you think we should be doing in Sudan?”
“You’ve worked in the past with sex offenders – are these people redeemable, are they fixable, can you heal them?” he asked.
“How have you shifted in your theological positions and spirituality over time?” he asked.
If there are truly excellent answers to any of these questions that can be delivered in less than thirty seconds, I’d like to hear them.
“I’ve shifted a lot in terms of how I act and interact with people,” I said in response to the last of these questions. “I think, I hope, that I’ve gotten a lot better at asking questions, at being genuinely curious and accepting of where people are at. I have more questions and far fewer answers.”
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
Hope Chases Us
As Mike and I continued to email each other throughout December while we waited to hear whether he would be granted leave from work to come to Australia, Mike also – one country at a time – systematically sent me all the mass emails he had sent out during the previous five years. There were about forty of them. He had several years’ worth of my monthly essays. I guess he figured fair was fair.
These earlier emails weren’t written to me, but I pored over them just as carefully as I read his current ones. I knew the broad details of where he’d been, what stuck with him, and how he talked about it all now – that showed up fairly clearly in our give-and-take. What I didn’t know was how Mike had felt and reacted in the pressure cooker of then. How he’d gotten from there to here. Who he had been, not just who he was now.
This story mattered, I knew. It would provide clues to how Mike might cope with the pressure cookers of a future I was starting to sense just might be a possibility.
Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Around the same time that I was drinking myself to sleep on the couch at night, wondering where my faith had gone and asking myself whether I’d made a mistake in moving to Los Angeles, Mike was wondering what, exactly, he was doing in Tajikistan.
“Once upon a time there was a young man named Mike,” began one of these mass emails, written almost six months after Mike first set foot in Tajikistan. “Mike enjoyed traveling around the world spending time in various countries. He easily befriended people from different cultures. He learned languages quickly. Then one day Mike came to a place called Tajikistan. Now there’s a different Mike.”
In his own words, Tajikistan broke Mike.
He arrived outgoing, passionate about development work, and so eager to embrace the language and the culture that he moved in with a Tajik family.
It wasn’t one thing that broke him; it was many. It was the complete lack of privacy, the squat toilets, spotty electricity, revolting food, and cold brown water. It was the fact that it was so frigid during winter that he had to wear five layers of clothes to the office. It was spending much of his time being sick with giardia and other nasty ailments. It was serving as the engineering expert on a seismic awareness project when all the technical materials were in Russian. But more than anything else, far more, it was his failure to live up to his own ideals and expectations regarding what the work should be, how it should be done, and how he should live while doing it.
Six months after arriving in the country, Mike hit bottom. He didn’t like Tajikistan, he didn’t like the Tajiks, he didn’t like himself, and he had a hernia that needed surgery. During the six weeks that he had to spend in Australia over Christmas having that surgery, he realized that he couldn’t continue to live as he had been. When he returned to Tajikistan he moved out of shared housing and into a small flat. He reported in his emails that he was trying to be less consumed by his job. He was going on more hikes, he wrote, and had learned to unwind at the end of the day by listening to music.
Mike had enough determination to finish out the last six months of his contract, enough sense to leave at that point, and enough honesty to lay himself bare to faraway friends.
“For the rest of my days, I hope that my expectations of myself and my outlook upon life will be different,” he wrote. “Part of me would still like to view myself as extraordinary, unbreakable, and indestructible. But I’m not. I’m flawed, weak. I’m ordinary. I’ve failed my own expectations of myself. Failed miserably.”
But even after the beating Tajikistan had dished out, Mike also had enough spirit left to say, “I am profoundly grateful for these painful experiences. There are many things over which I have no or little control, but I can take specific actions to move in the direction that I want to travel in my life journey. And despite my weaknesses and limitations, I can offer love to fellow travelers I encounter along the way. Onward.”
*
Continuing onward took Mike next to northern Uganda to help provide water and sanitation facilities in camps for people driven from their homes because of a particularly vicious ongoing civil war. Eighteen months after that, Mike moved to Sri Lanka to help rebuild the tsunami-devastated coast. Eighteen months after that, Papua New Guinea.
The transparent honesty I’d seen in Mike’s early letters from Tajikistan continued, month after month, in these mass emails. From them, I learned that he loved Australia so much he’d applied for permanent residency in 2004 and just missed out. I learned that after his last girlfriend had called it off by phone while she was in Indonesia and he was in a hospital bed in Sri Lanka, he had only ever written of her circumspectly and graciously. I learned that he usually managed to hold light and dark together in the same letter.
I also saw some things in these letters that raised warning flags in my mind. Mike had been hospitalized three times in Sri Lanka for stress-related infections, and I recognized in his emails periodic episodes of burnout, with all its attendant self-questioning. How long could he keep doing this? Did he even want to anymore, anyway? Where had his early passion gone?
But I also saw Mike turn a clear lens on his struggles with a daily slog that was anything but glamorous and repeatedly search out moments of beauty, hope and humor in the midst of it all. I saw much to respect.
Lira, Uganda
During his stint in Uganda, Mike was shadowed for a week by a National Geographic photographer as he went about his work. When the issue came out, the online feature was titled Hope in Hell: The reach of humanitarian aid. One of the photos illustrating this article features Mike. In it, he is a six-foot-tall white beacon surrounded by dozens of children all reaching for him. He has his arm out, passing something into one of the waiting hands while scores of others clutch at him. The sea of cupped palms is very dark against the pristine blaze of his T-shirt, and Mike’s expression is difficult to read. His eyes are fixed on the one hand he’s grasping, but his forehead is lined, his eyebrows tipped up toward each other in a small, worried salute.
Representing hope in hell did not look like an easy gig.
“I’ve been circling back to this topic of hope a lot lately, but I haven’t even come close to figuring it out,” I w
rote to Mike in early December, shortly after returning from Vancouver and reading his letter about the National Geographic article.
“What is hope?” I wrote. “Can hope exist independently of something to place that hope in, some larger external source, or framework? Joy seems simpler to me, and being joyful in life is something I feel I have a better handle on than being hopeful. But hope – it’s a puzzle. Attached to this letter is an unpublished essay called Hope Chases Us about an anti-trafficking benefit dinner I attended earlier this year.”
Los Angeles, USA
Hope Chases Us
What do you wear when you’re going to spend the evening learning about sex slavery?
This was only one of the many important questions in life that I didn’t have a good answer for on Saturday. Two hours before I was due at a benefit dinner for International Justice Mission, I was staring into my closet at a loss.
A black dress and boots doesn’t work. I love these boots. They’re the most extravagant pair of shoes I’ve ever bought – knee-high, buttery, black leather with mini-stiletto heels. But leather-clad calves and dark draped curves feel too vamp to me. A suit and jacket seems too clinical. What I really want to wear, jeans, is too casual. In the end I go for international eclectic – a blue cotton shirt from India over black pants, embroidered platform shoes from Malaysia, and a silver Orthodox cross from Ethiopia…
It’s been two hundred years since the first abolition act was passed that made it unlawful for British subjects to capture and transport human beings, yet there are still about twenty five million people in the world today who are being held as slaves. That’s almost twice the number trafficked from Africa during the entire four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade. The buying and selling of people is now the world’s second-most lucrative illegal profession, outranked only by the global trade in illegal arms.