Where are you, Sam?

8 Where are you, Sam?

In a reversal of Steinbeck, I always found in myself a dread of east and a love of west.1 I’d take rolling hills over endless plains, cloudless blues skies over heavy grays. Yet despite my love for the Los Angeles sun, I’ve always feared its heat.2

I decided to move west to east in the pursuit of higher education. I flew 3,000 miles; in that flight was freedom and in that flight was fear. I went east hoping my mind would be opened by a collegiate community of young artists. This was the time for discussion and discovery and intense discourse around topics I couldn’t even imagine yet. It was a time for exploration and selfactualization— I could come to truly know myself.

Once I arrived, I met a boy who had pierced ears and tight leather pants. He wore black boots with a 2-inch platform; he floated above the ground. I tracked his steps with my eyes. I looked nothing like him— I moved into my dorm wearing a green t-shirt and athletic shorts, not knowing leisurewear was one of the liberal arts school seven sins.

I didn’t know where the boy was from or anything about his interests, passions, or hobbies, but I deeply admired the way he blended in with the rest of our peers. He, like many others, adorned himself with flashy clothing and his dorm walls with artful photographs of his hometown and graphic prints of his favorite artists.

He and our peers all seemed to fıt in perfectly with one another. In an effort to look different, each presenting an alt-style and persona, they all ended up looking the same.

College was a costume party but I was never told the theme. The dining hall was a runway and my clothes did not match the brand; I was comfortable being casual.

In this time of rapid change, when I felt particularly lonely, I thought I needed to appear a certain way in order to avoid total disappearance. To attract any sort of kinship, I had to reconsider what it meant to be me. So, I studied my peers and reworked and rebranded until I was acceptable for the outside world. A renaissance, but certainly not the Golden Age. Gilded.

Despite my prior aversion to ear piercing, I booked an appointment with a piercer 20 minutes out of the city. I had my ear punctured and displayed my metal proudly, unaware that it was slowly growing infected. The silver bar that sat in my cartilage hid my rotting insides.

With this new accessory and an improved wardrobe, I would wait until I was attractive enough for my peers. I know now that I would’ve died waiting.

When these changes went unnoticed, I began to doubt my reconstructed self. I altered so much in an effort to stand out, only to feel more invisible than before.

I looked in the mirror and did not know who looked back. I was no longer the child on move-in day, the boy wearing green. I could never be him again. I could not reverse time and reoccupy the self that I now understand as fleeting and precious: he who was inquisitive, curious, and ready to feel the sun’s heat. I was older and I hated the person who stood before me, the person I turned myself into. I hated his rotting insides. Smile lines sat ironically on his upper lip. I couldn’t bear to look.

I refused to accept this as me. But if I could not go back to being the boy in green and I rejected what stared back in the mirror, I was just not. I lost all understanding of me. Everything that once informed my identity was gone. I destroyed it.

I spent a week in limbo, sitting alone in solitude, thinking and writing and soaking in a pool of cold sadness. I needed time to consider my self. Hours turned into a day and a day turned into three without seeing another person. Eventually, I got a call from a close friend.

Where are you, Sam?

When I reached deep into the emptiness of my consciousness to uncover the answer to the simple question, I found that the tendons connecting my mind and body had been severed and reality suddenly seemed incomprehensible. I was nowhere because I was no one. I fell behind in the chase after my own self and despite 17 years of being, I was no longer.

Existential thoughts overwhelmed my already anxious brain and I questioned time and space and my presence within it. Hours went by without me noticing as I went in and out of consciousness.

I stared at photographs of my former self, convinced that the people in the photos never existed and neither had I. I had no past and would have no future.

My actions had no consequences because

I was unperceivable. I could scream and no one would hear and walls could fall because they could be pushed.

I called my father to make sure I, at one point, was. All I could trust was what I saw in my own writing. I existed through the words I scribbled. They all think I’m crazy. No one believes me. I will suffer forever.

In that question lays the ultimate task set forth by the human experience: the striving for supreme self-understanding. Can you ever truly know thyself?

I hung up the phone to return to solitude and my mind collapsed in on itself. The simple question spurred what I now understand as a panic attack, a symptom of my later diagnosed Existential OCD.

Pacing the room, I could only understand myself as existing in nothingness. I forced myself to reconsider what was real and what was a facade.

I’ve seen what is not there. What lurks behind the darkness— What we all fear most— What we cannot see.

It’s nothingness. I think and think and think.

I am not. I was never.

I will never be. I look into the mirror.

I cannot recall. I fear death.

Worse than losing life is losing yourself within it. Where are you, Sam?

Despite these persisting thoughts, I remind myself I once was. I have been the child who feared the heat of the sun, its kiss on my cheeks, its warmth in my hair.

I know I am. I know because I smell the air, acrid and stale like cold soup and wet socks. I know rain and I know the way I become wistful when I feel it coming. I see lamplight melt down the walls. I feel my heart pumping blood through my veins. I feel my head throb and my fıngernails grow from their beds. I taste blood that has dribbled from my nose onto my dry, cracked lips; I don’t wipe it but let it soak into my skin. I let myself rot. I let my wounds close. I have been burned by the scorch of the sun.

Endnotes 1. Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York City, The Viking Press, 1952. 2. Shakespeare, William. “Cymbeline.” Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. England, Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard, 1623.