Do I need a huge break from everything and everyone? Yes, I do; or else I can have a nervous breakdown. Sometimes I feel it, as if it’s just moments away. From the time I set foot in Dulles airport in 2005, I have been under pressure constantly; I have never, seriously never, had a vacations or a break from life and work. I have been working continuously difficult jobs with difficult people, with assholes mostly; and already I am a sensitive person. Besides all that, I have been struggling with my immigration case for the past 8 years, spending a lot of money on it, at the same time supporting myself and my life, and at the same time going to school studying theoretical physics, and also the difficult and draining relationships I was in; they were all kind of hurtful. Although most of it has been my own choice and I am not at all regretting them, such as my immigration to US and going to school, but I think I have had a lot of pressure the whole time without having a chance to get some rest or take it easy. My immigration itself has drained me a lot. The shit I had to go through, the courts and witnesses, the belittling and insulting shouts of Paul Harr, I took it all, swallowed my pride, and said nothing and did nothing. But now it seems it’s fixed, but still I’ve seen so much trouble in it that I won’t be so sure until I have my green card in my valet. The point of all this is that I think I am allowed to have a nervous breakdown, or I might even be obligated to have one for safety reasons. I don’t know how much more I can take, not the problems themselves but actually the lack of a break from them. I need a serious and long break from things and people; but I have no clue when this break would be possible. I can’t afford not working for long, for I have to pay the rent, the expensive monthly tuition, the still recurring lawyer fees, and cigarettes. My comfortable father sitting on his glamorous office back home, earning huge amounts of money as a defense attorney, lecturing law students in return for their admirations for him, “Dr. Javidtash,” “You’re wonderful,” “Would you take a picture with us,” “Would you teach us how to multiply numbers,” “How’s your physicist son in America?” Says him with inflated pride and ego, “He’s a journalist also and writing a book now.” And here I am writing of how I am not writing a book, writing rather of my anticipations to my share of nervous breakdowns. And I had the stupid pride from my teenage years never to ask for money or any allowance from him. And the goddamn pride, that good old virtue and a modern vice, was took for granted. Now I wish every day that I didn’t have it, and rather that I was one of those demanding lazy children asking for money to buy my underwear and lotion. Well, I needed some help, some without the strings attached as to how to choose the law school over my passions of physics and mathematics, to sell my soul for a pair of underwear, and a help with tuition so I could take it easy and push under the rug the consequent failures of character. Yes, I do need my father at times as one unconditional lover. It wasn’t even two years that I was in US and working 6 days a week, 14 hours a day as a dishwasher. I rode a used pink bicycle to the restaurant. And one evening after a 30 minute break, I went to the kitchen and saw dirty pans and pots stacked up to the roof; I couldn’t see the walls; and as a result my fast and good work, the owner had already fired the help in the kitchen, for I could handle it alone, and I did so he saved more. But that day, seeing ahead of me hours of rubbing the burnt steel, I couldn’t take it. The visuals were frightening enough to scare me away; and I quit right there; they insisted and I said I can’t do this anymore, and I had the shame of it, that I had failed the universal immigrant test, disappointed and broken under pressure. I rode the pink bike for a short distance; then I stopped at the curb and sat down; half way to lighting up my cigarette I burst into tears, loud and hard, as I’ve said before. It wasn’t the dishes; it wasn’t the pink ride; it was my condition, everything I did to follow that calling of childhood awe, that calling to see and comprehend the Being of what just is; the road was hard and I at the very beginning of it. And I don’t say this as though I’ve had too much on my plate; I am aware of the misfortune and misery of children who have to witness the execution of their bearers. I am aware of all that and the rest; yet I am at times entitled to the weight of my own pain and misery and the corresponding break. I cried and cried, and I remember it vividly whenever the good side of my coin flips over and gives me the finger. I’ve sought to comprehend that which constitutes the essence of humanity, whether it’s logic, language, dread and anxiety, untimely fear of death, etc. But I see it now, clearer than ever, that my essence lies in the possibility of my break; that I am that which breaks or at least can be situated at the verge of it. And it is now, these days, one of those days that I feel like sitting on the curb and bursting into tears and let my cheeks soak into the long-borne weight of my patience, as soft and sensitive a person I am. If I have sharp eyes to penetrate the beauty of the world I also have those same eyes through which the pain of the world penetrates me: An opening is an opening from either side. I am in one of those days that my essence, Being-toward-break, pulls me hard to the ground; one of those days that I can admit firsthand that “I breakdown, therefore I am.”
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:00:15 +0000
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