I Am a Magical Fucking Unicorn

By Savannah WC, October 14, 2015

The last couple of months have been manic for me. I’ve been saying yes to everything, being constantly social, finding the strength to let the excitement of new things outweigh my fear of them. I’ve been tapping into wells of energy and power I didn’t know existed in me. There is something unknown, lurking right beneath the surface, some feeling I still can not put my finger on. An itch. But today felt distinctly like fall: I woke up to rain and the day felt slower, placid, pensive.

Summer was all about frantic, constant motion. It was about doing fun things and trying, for once, not to worry so much about what comes next. This summer was about reopening myself to people. I’ve spent a lot of time being terrified that I am not good enough, not charming enough, not interesting enough, not friendly enough, not strong enough. In fact, I may not be enough of any of those things but that shouldn’t get in the way of living.

Now, I sense a calming of things. More solitude, spending time getting in tune with myself. I wanted so badly to keep going at my frantic pace until I found my happiness. But how dumb because our happiness is constantly changing forms. Plus, isn’t being alive in and of itself “keeping going”? Just what am I hoping to find, a way to scratch the unnameable itch? Bliss? Nirvana?

Nirvana: “n. A transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and the subject is released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth.”  I remember looking up this definition when I was younger and having the same reaction I have now— that sounds horrible. Clearly, I’ll never be enlightened. I just get too much enjoyment out of suffering, I guess. I think the closest I’ll come to Nirvana is learning to embrace the unquenchable thirst that lives deep in my bones.

The last three years have been dominated by a post-collegiate gloom, a combination of intense anxiety and unwarranted self-pity. This summer I went home for a visit and something clicked. All of the cities in Wisconsin I call home are spaces I move through confidently and comfortably. Most of the people I interact with in these cities are people that have known me my whole life or at least long enough that I trust their love for me is unconditional. I can be myself without obsessing over how I am being perceived. I usually return to Portland from home visits very depressed and lonely, but this year I came back determined to carry this comfort and confidence with me. This involved coming up with lots of strange mantras to recite to myself each day like “I am a magical fucking unicorn!” and embracing the potential humiliation of being myself. It has involved doing lots of things that make me nervous like, you know, leaving the house. And it has involved listening to this song on repeat:

All of this has had me thinking a lot about satisfaction. I filled out the Proust Questionnaire recently and one of the last questions is “how I wish to die.” I answered, “loved and semi-fulfilled.” I think I’ve been unhappy in my post-collegiate daze because I’ve been leaning away from my dissatisfaction, trying to ignore it altogether. I’ve been trying to numb the mysterious ache of yearning with incredible amounts of television instead of embracing it. I wanted so much and felt completely uncertain of how to go about getting it. I’m pretty unsure but I have felt immensely happier spending my days creating and socializing, doing things that feel like they are creating forward motion. I’ve been feeling grateful to wake up wanting things, it gets me out of bed. So it is my new goal to always be full and never be satisfied. Is that gluttonous? I want to be insatiable. To feel the beautiful, joyous sorrow of being awake, as often as I possibly can.

The infinity of things excites me. I don’t mean to imply an endless stretching out of time.  Infinity is not the forever of things. It’s the continual evolution of things, a way to express the strange way that time moves forward with or without our permission. Perhaps some things go forever, but not without changing form. Things are in constant fluctuation, there is never an end to our learning because as soon as we have our shit figured out something comes in to upset the balance. This is terrifying, how fleeting and out of our control everything is. And yet, what a relief to know that the only thing we are in charge of is ourselves. Whenever our lassitude has us down we can celebrate that it is temporary, because everything is.

Categories: Ceremonies

Tagged: happiness, nirvana, satisfaction