How to get to the top bun of your metaphysical life sandwich (yes, really)
universe jumping, wild confidence, and a collective consciousness that is conspiring for you to win
Well, my friends, I’ve somehow come down with some terrible illness. My throat hurts unbearably, my mind is mush, and they are doing construction on the complex where I’m staying in Mexico City, so to accompany my pounding headache is the thwack, thwack, thwack of a hammer hitting drywall. Men are yelling on the street down below. I can’t stop coughing and sneezing, and I’m isolating — so I don’t infect anyone else.
All of this is to say, that the conditions for writing today are so far from ideal that it’s laughable. But I was so moved and inspired by Sandra Voyter, the female protagonist of Anatomy of a Fall, whose passing remark in the film, “I always find time to write, regardless of the conditions,” inspired me in a way I cannot place.
To be able to sit down and write novels, as she does in the world of the film, while dealing with the responsibilities of work, caretaking, an unsupportive and sometimes awful husband who blares music horribly loud and is constantly and erratically doing construction, the fact that through all of this, she still finds time to do translations and write novels, it was so inspiring to me.
Now, I am definitely not one of those girlboss, suffer through it, no pain no gain type of girlies. In fact, if you are reading this and you yourself are currently sick or going through some unbearable circumstance, please take care of yourself, please rest, please love, and nurture yourself gently and to the best of your ability.
However, I think, that being said, for me — for me being the key words here — pushing through is a form of self-love. Daily dedication to my craft, even if I do it shoddily, even if I do it while sick and in a state of brain mush, makes me so damn proud of myself.
That despite the conditions, I would show up to the blank page and make something of my thoughts, that I would follow through so assiduously on my goals and ambitions — even when the conditions are against me — this, to me, is one of the absolute most loving ways I could treat myself, especially in a time of vulnerability and healing.
So, I will press on, holding my sickness in my chest, imploring my mind to make whatever magic I can despite the circumstances.
After all, the birds in the trees outside still sing. Do we ever ask if they still sing when they’re ill? I’m not sure, but I imagine they do. Singing is for a bird, I would imagine, a connection to its divine life force.
To ever be unable to sing as a bird, I imagine (I’m saying this word a lot) would, I think, be unthinkable — untenable, unbearable.
So I, just another animal, will sing. Why the hell not?
Today is February 13th. It’s hard to believe I’ve only been in Mexico for 11 days; it feels like I’ve lived here for ages.
Time is kind of like this for me; sometimes, very short periods can feel like entire seasons. I suppose that is the nature of time, which is cyclical or more properly attributable to a coil-like structure that winds in loops on top of itself, like a slinky.
Interestingly enough, this type of image, the slinky of time, has been something my roommate and I have been discussing frequently on our long walks around town in the pre-sick days of last week, when we weren’t deathly ill and bedridden and felt a profound sense of energy and vitality.
How quickly the body can crumble, how strangely fast everything can disappear from one’s life — especially one’s health.
The slinky metaphor, or perhaps a wire coil is more apt, came into play when thinking about the multiverse.
She and I both like to believe that the universe, or the multiverse, is a trillion little discs stacked one on top of the other, and through our decisions, intentions, mindsets, etc. — we are constantly stepping in and out of different discs, into higher selves or lower selves.
If the image of a slinky or a coiled wire doesn’t do it for you, perhaps think of a hamburger or a tall sandwich, with slices of different variety.
On the bottom bit of the sandwich is your lowest reality, where you are deeply unhappy, miserable perhaps, just tolerating life.
But you step up a notch or two, and you reach the ham or the tomato or the lettuce, a life or existence where you love yourself, where you pursue your dreams.
And then you reach the topmost bun, and you are — well, in a state of nirvana — or perhaps nirvana is when you leave the sandwich altogether.
This metaphor has been resonant for us for a number of reasons, but I think partly because we both feel how, in certain seasons of our lives, things, when we were aligned and integrated with our intentions, things sort of happened in a way, as if the universe was looking out for us, as if we’d stepped into different lives entirely.
I paused here for a moment because the roommate in question just walked into the living room, and we began commiserating on our miserable state of illness, how odd to be alive, where plague can befall you, steal your faculties, numb you to your life so severely and harshly.
Anywho, this coil metaphor (or sandwich), depending on your vantage point or what feels most accessible to you, has shown up in our lives a number of different ways.
For me, when I was 24, I remember quite clearly feeling a sense that I’d stepped into my highest vibrational energy. I began to see life and the universe as something that wanted me to win, a mindset I have since sadly lost.
However, during that time, I feel that I briefly stepped into the highest plane of the sandwich. I had just graduated college, I was a literature major, and had spent much of my life overweight and not confident.
Even though now I am a fat liberationist and buck at expressions like “overweight,” there was no denying that I had not been taking care of my health.
Oh wow, speaking of unreal conditions, now my roommate is taking a call in the other room, and between the echo from the call, the shouts on the street, and the thwack thwack thwack of the hammers into drywall, this writing session just went from medium-hard to hard-hard. What an interesting challenge — and so I press on.
So there I was, 24, on the tail end of a childhood and young adulthood spent in a state of un-confidence, if such a word exists, and all of it changed after a brief internship at the United Nations in Italy.
There, I shed layers of myself. I began to imagine my life as something possible — travel can sometimes induce such a euphoric state of dreaming.
I had no money, and what I did have from my university stipend had dried up like a well in a drought. I was living off spoonfuls of Nutella, one euro bottles of wine, and an earnest and indefinite state of yearning and dreaming.
But during that time, I began to transition from a state of unconsciousness or self-consciousness, to universal consciousness. It first started with my job, which I began to realize was a construct that, while well-intentioned, didn’t actually sway the world either way. Yes, we were publishing important research, and maybe I’m just speaking more to my specific team, but I felt this unique sense that I didn’t need to let the responsibilities of my work torment me. I could give the best of my ability, and there was no need to stress; that was it.
Then it was the sex, first with a recent uni graduate my age, who talked to me about his desire to leave his magical city of Rome for a real-life — it was then I realized that so many people spend their entire lives dreaming of other places and fail to recognize the wonder of where they are.
I began to inhabit a more present consciousness. I began to walk around the Villa Borghese gardens at all hours of the day and marvel at the veins of the leaves, the little processes of nutrients constantly flowing in ways we could not see or hear, a whole world of life existing forever around us in ways we could not taste or touch or fully know.
And then Chris came for a visit — Chris is my British journalist friend, we met when we were sixteen and I’ve always loved him like an older brother. He’s always been a bit wiser than me, and had a more casual and relaxed attitude towards life that was much needed for an overthinking, overly anxious person like me.
Chris came and we just talked endlessly for weeks as we walked around Italy, before and after work we’d walk and eat and talk about life and philosophy and art and what is considered art?
And does free will exist? And what constitutes a life worth living?
And if you were to lock yourself in your room, would your Schopenhauerian will try to free you?
And what is depression? And what are the origins of anxiety? and on and on and on
He would read passages of Herman Hesse and I would read passages of Marcus Aurelius and we would consider the cosmos and our place among them.
Around this time, I reconnected with a friend who also was working for the UN named Phoebe. She was working in the fisheries division and had an affinity for fish that was quite endearing, at night she’d often paint them.
When we learned that her landlord was cheating her out of money and making her perform duties that weren’t in line with the rental agreement, we laid the groundwork to have Phoebe move in with me.
It was a welcome change, I don’t do well when I’m too often alone. Phoebe added something beautiful to the dynamic of the apartment, and cooking together in the evenings, and painting fish side by side, became something that I looked forward to each day.
And then Jordan came.
Jordan was a visual artist who was set to work on a farm; she’d known my roommate from school and had come to stay with us.
She was beautiful and she did everything she could to hide her beauty, as if she was ashamed of it — we had long dinners where we talked about why we were alive, and what we were looking for. She seemed very interested in the art and clothing that adorns our bodies and I believe she’s made quite a successful career premiering and selling her work in upscale art galleries.
It was Jordan that made me fall in love with the replenishing powers of the earth, of food. She made me fall in love with raw veganism specifically and when I made the shift it was like my body became one with the earth.
The only inconvenience was that I was going to the bathroom much more frequently, but apart from that I remember the following year of feeling my mind and thoughts and body so clear, so healthy.
I was still a large man, but I no longer felt weighed down. Filled with cheap healthy vegetables from local farmers’ markets, I began to feel finally full and whole in a way I can’t explain.
When I came back to New Hampshire, the transformation came with me. I stopped thinking of my life in a sense of scarcity and began to believe anything was possible. Was I on the top of my hamburger bun?
I started taking risks. I asked out a beautiful man on the cross-country team who I’d been quietly lusting after for years, sure that someone as beautiful and brilliant as he wouldn’t be interested in the likes of me.
Almost as if he’d been waiting, he excitedly agreed and we spent passion-filled nights together — had a reality in which what I desire desiring me in return been available to me all along?
I started to wonder about my career path. While I’d just lived and worked in Italy, making shit wages, 600 euros a month if you can believe it, I’d had this fear that if I didn’t take a corporate job I’d be destitute forever.
The scarcity that nobody would pay for my writing or art, so I began laying the groundwork for a backup life in finance I did not want.
That summer, following Italy, I was set to move to Scotland to work for Morgan Stanley. I was dreading it. I’m sure Scotland is lovely, but I knew that I would not see it, that I would spend hundred-hour weeks chained to a cubicle desk making macros and spreadsheets to ensure our world’s rich remained so, an absolute waste of one’s precious time on earth, I earnestly thought.
I knew I had to get out.
As the internship grew closer I could feel my wisdom from Italy wearing off, I was becoming anxious and afraid again.
And then one day at work, I worked at this center on campus advising students on how to get scholarships for work abroad.
I was a bit of an expert on the subject since I’d done fully-funded internships and study abroad three times to India, Italy, and South Africa — I also had a second job as a sewer in the costume shop, and a third job wiping vomit-covered floors in the dining halls.
But at this first job, I was sitting in the back of the Loo Lounge waiting for my 2 pm appointment, an eager girl who was very set on working in the CIA, when my boss, well, one of them, came in and frankly told me that she was worried I was deeply unhappy and didn’t like that someone with my artistic gifts was going the “safe” route of Morgan Stanley.
Now I should note, that there is nothing wrong with working in finance. I know many people who do so to better the lives of themselves and their families, and in this hellscape capitalist world, if you can carve out safety and security for you and your loved ones, more power to you!
But Jessica, I believe it was Jessica, who was one of my four bosses, lovingly felt and expressed that I was making a dreadful mistake, and I agreed.
“If you do this it will become your life. I’ve seen it time and time again, wide-eyed creative people getting enticed by those big numbers and then they sign their lives away, and suddenly it’s impossible to leave and you wake up at 40 totally depressed and standing at the subway platform wanting to throw yourself over the edge to avoid another day of unbearably dull spreadsheets.”
I liked how frank she was.
“Well, what can I do? I have no money, I have no trust fund, I have nothing to fall back on?”
Right around this time, I was listening to Anna Faris’ podcast each day as I took the bus to job #1.
I remember she had an interview with Rosie O’Donnell in which Rosie advised against safety nets. She said that if you build a backup life, you will without a doubt always fall into it, because chasing your dreams is unbearably hard, and that she recommended, you must be all in.
I didn’t know what to believe; that seemed like the sentiment that already privileged people got to believe, because structural protections existed for them at every level to ensure that even if they failed at their dreams, they would always still have safe, affordable housing, access to healthy food, and drinking water, etc.
Jessica asked me what I really wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to write.
“Okay, well where’s the best school for writing?”
“It’s the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” I’d said.
She and I googled the page, and it turned out they had a summer residency program, as an offshoot of their graduate MFA school.
“Apply to it,” Jessica said.
“But the deadline is tomorrow? I won’t get in, and besides, you have to mail the application.”
“You are applying, call them right now and tell them that you just learned of it.”
I did as she said; the woman on the other line in Iowa seemed shocked that I would’ve just found out about the program but agreed that if I overnighted my application by Tuesday morning at the latest, she would consider it with the rest.
That weekend I locked myself in a cubicle in the stacks of the library and wrote.
I wanted to write a novel about a woman who traveled the world in search of her dead husband’s memory. I don’t know why that was the story in my mind, but it plagued me; I dreamed about it. I kept seeing this woman, traveling to all the places her husband, who died tragically, had always wanted to go.
Maybe it was a subconscious reaction to my mother’s disability, I’m not sure, but I wrote it, twenty pages, then thirty, then forty, all weekend I survived on espresso beans and Monster energy drinks.
On Monday, I overnighted the application and tried not to get my hopes up.
When I got accepted a month later, I didn’t believe it.
I thought it was some elaborate prank. I thought of the energy of the universe and how strange it was that I could’ve been accepted into something so incredible.
Why me? I’m nothing special.
And then I heard the voice, the same one from those conversations with Chris, the same one who watched the nutrients flow through the leaves, and he said, yes you are, you matter.
I was approaching the top level of my sandwich.
When I got to Iowa, it was nothing like I expected, cornfields everywhere. In bookshops, like Prairie Lights, I overheard conversations that sounded so intellectual, so impressive, I felt like a failure.
I tried to keep the words of my highest self in my head. You belong here.
The summer was brilliant and difficult. I had an instructor, who is now a dear friend, who did not fuck around. She didn’t want to raise lazy writers; she wanted to mold us into champions, the best we could be. I could tell within her there was a tenacity and fire that I wanted deeply for myself.
I remember one class in which she proudly walked into our workshop room and stated plainly, “None of you is better than Charlotte’s Web; cut any ego out of your writing. You will become great with practice, but practice takes concentrated and sustained effort.”
I liked how direct she was; she felt like a mother, and a coach, and an older brother, and an older sister rolled into one. She reminded me of Mel Robins.
She was very interested in rare books, and two of her best friends would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; she was friends with movie stars, and spent her time penning award-winning essays. I was in awe of her; she was a force, like a hurricane that is as beautiful as it is terrifying.
I should note — this story doesn’t end with me becoming rich or famous; in fact, the beauty is this story doesn’t end.
After Iowa, I am still writing every day, in blogs, in essays, in books, all over the place.
I have had some wonderful successees: my work has won prizes, and placed in fancy contests, big agents in New York have requested to read my novel, I’ve been in anthologies and taught at the collegiate level, I’ve had poetry and prose published in magazines I admire. I’m still not famous or rich, and I don’t know if I want to be; I’m a working writer, a writer working. I’m making things every day, I’m in a constant state of becoming.
In the years that followed Iowa, I went on to get a proper full-length 2-year MFA from NC State University, I became an editor of a big literary magazine, and taught playwriting and screenwriting, fiction, and poetry to wide-eyed young writers, similar to me in those days when I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I think of that time in Iowa often, how I just decided that I belonged and as a consequence, I did, how universe jumping is really nothing more than allowing yourself to believe you matter, that your works matter, that what you have to say is just as important and valuable as anyone else’s.
It is one of the times in my life when I bet on myself, when I decided to stop playing small, where I allowed the universe to give me what it wanted and where I showed up and put in the work.
Those months in Iowa City were painful and glorious, I spent hours a day writing and reading literary journals and lovingly forcing myself through a hundred years of Paris Review interviews and New Yorker Fiction stories. I wanted desperately to know about every author that had achieved the heights of success and acclaim and what their lives were like, what their lives outside of writing became.
I was interested primarily in evidence that a life that is spent in constant unfolding, with no set endpoint, as the life of an artist is, that there is happiness in it, love, joy, and I found story after story of happily married writers, who achieved all their goals professionally while also finding love, raising children, organizing, and making an impact in their communities, being true to themselves, and making enough money to live a life of soft abundance.
I saw stories of writers who were truly happy, truly fulfilled, both because they never gave up on their art and their dreams and continued to create things all of their lives, but also because they equally valued their families, their friendships, their communities, having lasting loving, and fruitful bonds with those they loved so dearly.
I realized that this life is possible, however hard it may be, and there is no end state. There is no award or publication or status that indicates the end of the race, because no matter how famous you get, no matter how many readers fall in love with you and your work, this work is a daily (or weekly, no judgment) practice that is forever, it’s a ritual, a prayer, a constant offering, an alchemizing of your experiences and your life into something beautiful, into something that only you can give, something that nourishes you for having made it and nourishes the collective for having received it.
There is no end, because there is no limit to how much we can create, give, and build together, and that is something that is so beautiful.
The man stopped hammering the drywall, there are no longer shouts on the street below, my roommate finished her call, the birds are still singing and so am I.
There is much more to say, on so many things, but I leave you with this, I love you, you matter, please never forget to bet on yourself, and know that the universe, the collective, all of us, we want you to win.
We want you to be happy and full, to have a long fruitful life, full of art, and creation, and family, and love, and great sex, and travels, and enough money to eat yummy nourishing foods, we want it all for you, and when you can begin to believe in your bones that you deserve it, sometimes, opportunities will present themselves as if by magic.
More to say, but I think I’m going to step outside for a while and watch the leaves.
With love,
Alex
PS: Here are some photos from those days in Rome & Iowa — It seems like I took a lot of photos the night of my Halloween party at my apartment in Porta Maggiore ❤
Also, for some reason the only photo I can find of Iowa is me and Connor and Alexa kayaking, the day my kayak broke and sank to the bottom of the lake, and the coast guard had to rescue me LMAO:
Thanks for sharing your story, Alex. I hope you're feeling better soon.
also the photos are adorable 🥰