Lost

"One afternoon when I was twenty, my eldest sister, Marcia, appeared at my front door, needing to ask an important question. “What is it?” I asked, shocked by her appearance. In spite of the unseasonable L.A. heat, Marcia was wrapped in a bulky Mexican sweater tightly belted at the waist (just like a crazy person, I thought), her dark hair unkempt, eyes bloodshot: a dramatic decline from the attractive thirty-year-old banker she had been only months before.

I sat Marcia down at my kitchen table, poured her a cup of tea, found a comb in my back pocket to run it through her messy hair, as she had once fussed over me as a boy. She had been my surrogate mother—ours wasn’t really up to the job— reading me Aesop’s fables before bedtime, packing lunches, explaining riddles (birds, bees, our disappeared father), comforting when my feelings were hurt. Now it was my turn to comfort Marcia. Her spirits had sunk so quickly that winter.

I kissed my sister’s cheek and asked her to please tell me what was the matter. Marcia seemed unable to speak, simply shook her head and drifted away to that no-man’s-land where none of us had been able to reach her. Marcia had been viciously betrayed by her husband, filed for divorce, had a nervous breakdown. She was hospitalized, then released prematurely when her insurance company refused to pay more. Now she found herself alone, unmoored, and terrified in a world that had always distressed her. The mensch in a family of hooligans, Marcia was the gentle, obedient daughter who did as she was told without question and cared for others more than herself. Newspaper tragedies sent her to bed. She wept for people she didn’t know. I never once witnessed her being cruel. My sister appeared to be sinking fast, unable to locate solid ground.

I begged her again to talk to me. At last, Marcia looked into my eyes and spoke. “How do you do it?” she asked. “Do what, honey?” I was confused. “How do you live?” The question froze in the air between us. In every life there are red-flag moments that seem to flash out, magnified, against the soft focus of everyday contentment, warning us to pay attention—that something essential is happening. I snapped to attention when Marcia said this yet had no earthly idea what to tell her. I was a wobbly piece of work myself at that age; the bravado my sister seemed to admire was largely a mask for bitter self-doubt.

Having grown up as the only son in a fatherless, four-kid, welfare home, I believed that denial and monolithic ambition were the only tools at my disposal for surmounting such disadvantaged beginnings. Pessimism seemed to be evil juju that winners must avoid at all costs. Failure wasn’t even an option, of course. Yet here was my beloved, defeated sister posing a heartbreaking question I hadn’t yet dared to ask of myself. I told Marcia that she had to keep fighting. No matter what. “I can’t,” she said. “You have no choice …”

Marcia opened her mouth to answer—then stopped. The kitchen fell silent; she slumped in her chair; that was the end of the conversation. I tried to distract her by rubbing her shoulders. She drifted away again. When she stood up to leave, I felt guilty relief as I followed her out to her beat-up Buick, parked hastily at the curb. Marcia fumbled in her purse for the car key, then sat there without moving, hands clutching the wheel. I asked Marcia if she was okay to drive. She stared at me without answering. I leaned down to kiss her good-bye. “You’ll be fine,” I promised. Marcia touched the side of my face. She attempted a smile, which wasn’t much but gave me a bit of hope. Then she started the engine, waved good-bye, and disappeared slowly down the street."

~ Mark Matousek, When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living

“Every so often, when I made the mistake of taking a serious look at what I was actually doing, I did my best to shut myself up, convincing myself that mine were privileged problems. How could I complain about lunches with movie stars, film screenings, free tickets, invitations to parties, constant solicitations from publicists who treated me like a VIP? Though I was perfectly aware of how tinny all this was beneath the perks, I whitewashed my conscience with the excuse that I was just biding my time till something better came along, paying my dues till my next break. When the sheer absurdity of having to sing the praises of Calvin Klein’s latest poster boy made me doubt my own credibility, I comforted myself with the thought that this was just my first stop on a more significant journey, that my real life hadn’t started yet and I’d be out of there at the first opportunity.

It’s hard to say exactly when my breakdown started, but sometime in the winter of 1985, everything began to fall apart emotionally. I began having panic attacks—daylong bouts of depression under my bedcovers with the phone machine turned off. I tried to write off this growing anxiety to stress—the grind of the year-in, year-out climbing, straining to hold my own in the midst of chaos. But the distress I felt was more mysterious than that, and had less to do with my career than with an inner loss of meaning. Though I now had had nearly everything I’d always wanted, I’d become increasingly aware as that winter wore on of a nagging, growing yearning inside me, a hunger I could not seem to satisfy. The higher I climbed on the masthead, the more successful my life appeared on the outside, the more secretly dishonest I felt.

At times this hunger felt like a knot in my solar plexus, a rock-hard fist of grief clenched so tight at times that I couldn’t breathe. In those weeks and months before I realized what was happening, this fist would choke me at unexpected moments—during meetings, interviews, dinners with friends—sometimes sending me into the bathroom, panting like a dog, struggling to catch my breath. When this suffocation overcame me I was flooded with a strange emotion—or something deeper than emotion, a kind of growing soul sickness. I could almost hear the steady, moaning noise in my gut at these times, like someone starving and crying out for help. I didn’t understand this voice or what it was asking for; I knew only that more and more, at ordinary times—normal times, when I should be happy—I felt lost.”

~ Mark Matousek, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story