I sat down with a diary at a point when I had stopped recognising myself in the life I was living. The work still stood. So did the status it had given me, and the way people had learned to see me. None of it had failed. I simply could not feel any of it as mine any longer.
Looking back, most of that life had arrived rather than been built by me on purpose. Opportunities appeared, I took them, and in hindsight the sequence looked like a plan I had followed all along. It had not been one. That is a hard thing to admit about years of work.
Most people who reach this point either change course or walk past it. I did neither, and stopped inside the question the way I never had before. Origin, status, the story I told about myself, even the name I answered to: I could feel all of it lift off, one layer at a time. Underneath was a single open question: what, if anything, remained.
David Whyte, the poet, has said that a person must endure that space in order to grow. My instinct ran the other way. I flung the questions onto the page rather than sit quietly inside them, because I could feel, directly, that hunting for their answers would not help me. When I read Whyte again afterwards, I saw the instinct had been sound: sitting with an unresolved question does not require searching for its resolution. Writing the questions down, one after another, was the form that sitting took.
I kept the diary through that period and wrote them as they arrived, without editing them into sense. I addressed them to myself in the second person, as if to a stranger, because the distance made them easier to face. Most of those pages do not belong here. A few lines are still worth keeping.
Who am I now. Can I only live inside the question, without an answer, without a hold, without myself.
Is anyone there for me. Does anyone hold me.
Do I have a past. Will I have a future. Does the present help at all.
What comes after, when I can no longer ask. Is the end the answer, or the beginning of one.
You ask the question alone. I give it to you, but I do not ask it for you.
None of this resolved into an answer, and it was not meant to. What the diary gave me was smaller and more useful: proof that I could sit inside a question that would not close, without needing it to. I have gone back to those pages since. I have not changed a single line.
Staying inside a question that would not close, without forcing it shut, was the work. I did that on the page, and I did not go back to the old life until I had an answer of my own.