“Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail.”
It was during the whole ‘Troubled Waters’ film debacle and I was a mess. It’s incredible what sleep deprivation and constant stress will do to your mind, especially when you’re already prone to making intuitive leaps. People kept asking what was going on, and each time I answered, I was less certain that I knew.
After three weeks of this, I’d come temporarily unhinged. I started hearing and seeing things that weren’t there. I began making assumptions that were ridiculous. I actually started to believe that I’d done something cosmically wrong; I’d kicked a giant hornet’s nest and now they were coming for me. If Colin hadn’t been there to anchor me, I don’t know what I would have done, but after awhile, he began to lose his bearings too.
I can now describe to you just how tenuously our minds are connected to reality: A few days without sleep is all it takes for the connections to fray. And what does the fraying look like?
Staying up all night, staring at words on a screen, convinced that everything is written in a code that you just need time to decipher. Questioning every assumption you’ve had about people, and as a result, being suddenly unable to face them. Sobbing uncontrollably at the dinner table; chewing food, but not tasting it. Drinking whisky to quiet your thoughts, then passing out in a ball on the couch, only to wake an hour later from a nightmare. Ranting at the people you love for failing to understand exactly what you’re feeling: that unguided anger, that very deep disappointment with the world.
Most people encouraged me to see the episode as some kind of test of character. If I could hold out and keep my sanity, I would be stronger for it. I just needed some rest, they said, some time to disconnect.
Others thought it was a moment worth recording, and they encouraged me to write about how I was feeling. How often in our lives do we get a chance to peer behind the curtain, to see power structures we’re embedded in with such clarity, to test our own abilities to resist?
But I couldn’t write. I could hardly think, so I rented a car. Colin and I turned off our computers and started driving.
We aimed North without destination and ended up in Duluth, a place that’s always felt like home. Something about water is calming for me, and that lake reminds me how small our lives are, and how brief. When I remember that, I’m overcome, and I know few things are as important as we believe them to be.
On our last day in town, after sleeping in a hotel and spending time away from our phones, we went to Park Point and walked along the beach, looking for stones that’d been tumbled smooth by waves.
Behind us were sand dunes. A sign staked in the ground told us to tread carefully, because someone was trying to reestablish a wild ecology in a place where humans had all but destroyed it.
In front of us was the lake, churning pieces of driftwood onto the beach. I thought of the tiny dioramas we’d seen earlier that day at the Lake Superior Maritime Museum, the ones depicting sunken ships, their bodies broken in half, still lying somewhere beneath the water.
That day a boat was anchored in the harbor, and not far from it, a group of surfers was making what looked like half-assed attempts to catch a wave. I watched them for a moment. They just kind of floated there. I stuck my hand in the lake to see how cold the water was, and in seconds, my fingertips went numb.
For me, that was the moment when I felt most alive: with the sand dunes, and the surfers, and with Colin beside me, our pockets full of smooth stones. Lake Superior, the threat of ice in the air, the sound of waves. The feeling of being small, and being home.
