The Most Painful State of Being
There is a quote that comes across my social media at times, a paraphrase of Kierkegaard, that I think about all the time. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future – particularly the one you’ll never have.” It’s an idea that is never far from my mind, coming to me at the slightest provocation. I am obsessed with the accuracy of it, and with the way that it is such a seemingly universal experience. All of us can easily slip into reminiscence of the futures that could have been; what if we had married this person, what if we had gone to this school instead, what if we hadn’t taken that job? We can drift easily into these multiversal musings before experiencing that pain as we snap back to our reality, a pain that can be constantly shifting as we move through the different times of our lives.
As I write this in mid-November 2024 I am acutely aware of the potential collectivism here. There are many of us painfully remembering a future that could have been for the county if the election had gone another way. I suppose every election produces such a collective future for the side that loses – a lost vision of what could have been. Obsessing about these macro level alternatives can cause division amongst us as we argue about what caused that future to die. You see it now as everybody asks “what happened with this election?” The pain there, for all of us, comes in reconciling the hypothetical with the things that happened and cannot be changed. This tends to result in wasted energy that could be spent on dealing with what’s coming.
It is the micro level that interests me most though; the painfully remembered futures in our individual lives. It strikes me that we live with these memories of what could have been just as long as we live with the memories of what was. I suppose we probably even have a sharper picture of the memories that are never allowed to happen than we do the real ones. Memory can be incredibly unreliable, as studies have shown. But with our evolutionary tendency to focus on things that keep us living, we can focus too much on the unlived futures, because they cause us pain, and learning to avoid that type of pain again is hardwired into us. So we live alongside these futures we never had, essentially developing a relationship with them over the years. As our planned futures drift into the present and then solidify into the past they can bring perspective, perhaps making those unlived futures less painful. Sometimes with the benefit of hindsight we see just how lucky we were to not get that thing we thought we wanted in those times. Then again, time can just reinforce the pain. We can get stuck dwelling, even romanticizing those futures we never got. It can move beyond an odd nostalgia and into escapism. In order to not deal with whatever pain we might be feeling in the present, we focus on the happiness we think we could have had, with no way of being able to prove we aren’t wrong about whatever we might be longing for in that idealized world.
One of my oldest and most often remembered unlived futures is one of the most poignant, and one that will never not be painful. It’s the future that could have been if I had been able to come out earlier. If things had been different, if I had been able to be who I was fully in high school. I just… wonder how different I would be, how much more confident I would be. How would I be as a person without steeping in silence and shame and fear during those later teen years? What would my relationship with my parents be like if it hadn’t been frozen in many ways with that seventeen year old afraid to reveal this truth to them? What would my love life look like if I had been able to make more of the silly mistakes when one begins to date that most straight people experience in their teens?
I wonder about all of that and more, but of course there is no way to come up with any clear answers. There are just the questions really. I suppose that’s really all that an unremembered future is; a question brought fully to term and then expelled into our psyche, where it grows along with us. When it comes to this particular child of my questioning mind, I see glimpses of possibility when I see the openness with which some (and it is important to emphasize, not all) queer youth can be themselves today. I look at them as they embrace themselves so much earlier than I was able to and I am equally proud and jealous. The pride comes with an immense gratitude for the forces in society that moved things to a place where they can feel safer than I was. When I graduated high school in 2008 I never thought I would see same-sex marriage recognized on a federal level. Then in 2015 it happened. The pride and gratitude in the people in the community who came before, makes me think back to a macro level, to the unlived futures that were not my own. When I think of the lives lost to the AIDS crisis alone… I often wonder how many works of art, how many scientific breakthroughs, how many caring moments, were lost with those unlived futures that died along with so many of my predecessors.
That easily circles back to the jealousy I feel toward the successors, along with the gratitude; a jealousy colored with anger about what a younger me didn’t get to experience. It’s one reason I can’t experience some media that brings other queer people joy. Just the idea of watching something like Heartstopper – of seeing an inkling of what could have been – is too painful for me. I feel angry that some of these kids don’t understand the pain that many of their peers in different parts of the world still feel, and I think of how mad I am at my own bitterness because I don’t want anyone to experience the shame and pain that can come with being made to feel different. Which of course brings me back to the context of the time I am writing this. As 2024 comes to a close we are in the midst of a huge wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, with much more to come I’m afraid, given the results of the election. And I sit here with immense privilege within that community as a white cisgender man, fully aware of the sad reality that it gives me many advantages over other members of my community. I can only imagine what trans folks are feeling. I worry that there will be many more unlived futures that cause people more pain than what this unremembered one causes me.
A younger future I will never have is one that is less amorphous, and one I visit much more often these days than the previous one. It’s a future where I did not move to Los Angeles in 2017. I know the jobs I could have gotten, the ensembles I could be performing with, even who I might be in a relationship with if I had stayed in that lovely Colorado town that I genuinely love so much. I will sometimes visit that life in a harshly masochistic way, going onto websites to see who is teaching in the positions I could have gotten, or what the symphony and choirs I used to belong to are performing this season. The contemplation of this particular unlived future often comes with a mild panic that I took the wrong fork in the road. The pain that accompanies that panic and the memories of this future are much sharper than the one where I come out earlier. That one is a dull ache due to its lack of specificity. But this future, with the clear definition of it, is needle-like in its jabs. The panic calms and the pain dulls a little when I think about how miserable that life would have made me. I have said that I might not have survived the depression that would have hit me later if I had stayed for that life. While I usually conclude my visits to this future knowing it wouldn’t have been good for me, I rarely had the thought that I probably need to mourn it.
It is exactly because of the specificity, the concrete nature of this unlived future, that I use the word mourn. That future died when I moved to California. Like the death of a family member who was a complicated mix of abusive and caring, my thoughts and feelings toward that life are complex. And like such a death there needs to be a recognition of the genuine grief that come with the demise while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that I may be better off. It is complicated by the fact that the life I left for, that I know in my bones is attainable, is taking longer than I anticipated. It doesn’t help that I don’t know exactly what success in that potential life looks like. So I find myself in an unknown and static present, stuck between an amorphous potential future, and a very defined one that I will never have now. The lack of going through the mourning process for the latter is arguably one of the things holding me back the most.
But how exactly is one supposed to mourn something like this? Do the five stages of grief apply to a concept? Can you hold a funeral for an idea? In this society where men are told it is weakness to show any emotion besides anger, is that all we’re allowed to show in this process? If we aren’t supposed to cry at lost loved ones, how are we supposed to even begin to wrap ourselves around mourning our lost futures? Like so much else about modern adulthood there is no good and easy answer. We just have to figure our way through it.
I don’t think mourning is the proper response to every instance of this most painful state of being. The future where I stayed in Colorado is an instance because there is a metaphorical body; clear parameters the future would have taken. The one where I come out earlier is more like the disappearance of a person; there is no body because there was no definitive death, even with the presumption of one. Then there are other futures that are simply a waste of time and energy to remember.
That is where the future that was born in 2018 lies. The future where the depression lurking in my DNA did not explode in a new and unexpected way. A future where I wasn’t dragged down for months, crucial months when I began to work on my creative ventures in a focused way for the first time in my life. The pain here always begins with the same thought; “I would be where I wanted to be if I hadn’t fallen.” An unprovable claim that aims to what? Justify my lack of progress to myself and others? The problem is that I have spent more time berating myself and complaining about lost time than I have allowing myself the permission and space to accept that I was ill and that the lack of productivity in these moments was not my fault. In essence I have once again tossed myself fully into that painful state of remembering a future I will never have.
I have said that I have an addiction to identity, meaning I feel completely untethered whenever I am without a solid foundation. The times depression has hit the hardest are the moments after the loss of what I felt was a firmly held identity; after I came out to myself, losing the identity of a straight person, after graduating from college, losing the identity of a student, and after moving to Los Angeles, forsaking just about every identity I had until then. That is what has been most difficult about these past seven years. With no identity to feel grounded in I am self-sabotaging more than normal. Yes I claim writer and musician, but imposter syndrome keeps me from fully being able to embrace that the way that I might have identities in other timelines. So my addicted side looks back and wants to grieve, but the part that knows we’re better off fights it.
Thinking about these three unlived futures has made me realize that I have drifted into a holding pattern of sorts – stalled on my current ventures, working at a job I care very little about, simply a means to fund myself. And I don’t really know who I am. I know who I could be, but I don’t yet feel justified in claiming that I am that person. Which is the problem. These past couple years have been a great deal about what I am not and not enough about what I am. It’s more of me doing something that I have done since I became aware on some level of my queerness, and absorbed that as something wrong with me; running from myself. I wrap myself up in the who I was and who I could be to avoid looking at who I am… because I am not sure that person is good enough. I have essentially allowed my fear to weaponize that most painful state of being, using the unlived memories as a distraction. Rather than confront the unknown and potentially changeable discomfort of the present, I wallow in pasts that can’t be changed and futures that can’t be lived. It’s easier to think about the life that could have been instead of worrying about failing now. But as such, am I not just dooming myself to more painful, unlived futures? They will happen anyway, because that is the nature of life. The difference comes in allowing ourselves to really be in the moment, focusing on what is in front of us, instead of those moments that could have been.
The thing to do is what meditation teaches, and return to the now. This is why I have a hard time with meditation, because on some level I am much more comfortable sitting in the oddly known pain of these remembered futures, than I am sitting in the whole of me in this moment. That is the thing to remember. Here. Now.