(In)Constancy

in defense of changing one's mind, and submitting to the stories we tell

Of all the times I have been allowed to change my mind,
this is the first time I allow it. And by that I mean repeatedly
telling myself I am not fickle for allowing what is
only natural. You are not beholden to anyone before any
paper has been signed. Also, what paper? If your fiction rings too
closely to your life, that is laziness.
That is what I believed.

I used to believe love was decryption.
I hid behind paywalls of poetry until

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“Guess we got caught up in tellin’ a lie.”

That’s how “Thinkin’ ‘Bout Love” begins, on Wild Rivers’ 2020 EP Songs to Break Up To. “Guess we got caught up in tellin’ a lie, now you’re leavin’ me lonely.” It’s in a playlist for a novel-in-progress. I have a kind of sense of why the protagonist is drawn to those words. The truth that becomes a lie because it keeps being told, dragged on and on long after it has stopped being true, because stasis is comfortable, even if false.

“It’s about a difference of opinion,” says Khalid Yassein, “and there’s a certain acceptance in it.”

I’ve been thinking about love. Maybe what I have been reading so many books and scribbling so many thoughts about (stored for later in various notebooks, Word docs, and on various surfaces in my house like a squirrel preparing to revisit my archives during a winter of intellectual hibernation) is related to what Elif Batuman says Céline Sciamma calls “the scam”: “a set of ideas about love/ romance/ sex/ narrative, which were once considered universal and necessary… but what if they weren’t universal; what if there were many, many more possible shapes for narratives and relationships, and we were just at the beginning of discovering them?”

I was a history major in undergrad because I was interested in how stories were told. (That, and I didn’t like the English class I took in freshman year, which set a temporary course away from literary studies. I boomeranged back, evidently.) That interest evolved into a curiosity in how narratives are formed, circulated, and accepted—rituals of making the world, across space and time—which is proving to be a very religious studies question. How do humans make sense of the world, how do people make meaning, to what outside of themselves do they/we turn. Romance as the propeller of story. Desire as the motivator of everything. The things I once so acutely felt and thought were all-consumingly necessary. The things that still feel that way.

I am about to start my PhD qualifying exams—which entail reading over two hundred texts across four themed lists of my choosing and curation in the span of (less than) a year—and the two images I keep thinking of as resembling the state I will probably be in (and that I’m already in to a degree) are (1) the meme of Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia manically gesturing at his conspiracy wall of red-marked papers and (2) that scene in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women film adaptation of Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March crouched in candlelight over rows and rows of manuscript paper lined up on her attic floor. The madness of the flow. Of writing something so close to you. It’s about her sisters. It’s always been about them. At the end of Gerwig’s interpretation of Little Women, Jo March does not share an umbrella with Friedrich Bhaer. No sense of resolution through the tableau of a union—as though romance is the end and not part and parcel of the ongoing. She watches the printing press finish off bound, physical copies of her book. Beth is dead. Bhaer might or might not be there. Her eyes glimmer with everything. Joy, pride, loneliness. Grief. Persistence. It’s not over. It’s not over at all. We must keep going on.

I suppose there’s no way around it. My work has always been intertwined with my life. Maybe I have always been thinking about love.

“Faith, hope, and love,” someone once wrote in a letter to the first church in Corinth. “And the greatest of these is love.”

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Recently I’ve been remembering the version of me who might have pursued a career in STEM. The fourteen-year-old sophomore who stayed up night after night over AP Calculus worksheets, emailing her teacher at hours that were certainly too late to be explainable. (“Karis, go to sleep,” the responses would always say, along with guided replies to my questions.) I cared less then than I do now about certain things. There are certain forms of appearances teenage me cared less for. That’s what happens when your primary mode is survival. People could make fun of me for liking math, but if the exhilaration of the process, of patterns and form, of learning something in theory and learning it more and more through all the different ways you had to try it in application, was keeping me alive, then I was going to chase that all the way down. I loved problem solving. I loved discovering rules. I hated and loved how they looked different each time.

During those years in DoDEA, I went to bed most nights crying, wanting to die. I cried, too, over those problem sets. I cried when I didn’t get it, and then I bawled when I did. Maybe they gave me something to do besides fixate on dying. Maybe they were showing me what was still out there, all the things I could learn about the universe. All the things I didn’t know yet. Things I might want to experience.

(In college, I learned that I did not enjoy lab work, so that took STEM research out of the running pretty quickly.)

Someone else can read what I’ve written and make an assessment based on assumptions made on how I look, what they think my family is like, et cetera. I say this, then, because my brain is always doing the work: let me like what I like. I’m a person who likes things. Those things are embedded in pathways and networks and options that were presented to me as choices before I could know how I was being formed. But also, lots of different institutions have been trying to form me ever since I was born. Trying to monopolize control. “No wonder I feel like I’m going to explode,” I realized in relief one night. “I am being fed so many contradictory scripts. And my guilt at not being able to fulfill them all, which is a fucking impossible task, is the fuel.”

I am not beyond my context, as I said in a presentation last October. I just keep telling the story as it unfolds.

In April, my friend N and I are at a conference, telling people, after they learn that we are college friends, how we met. “We met during our second week of college at a Bible study where we both felt out of place,” N says this time, “and then we found each other and talked for like four hours,” and I realize that’s what I say to people, basically word for word, every time I introduce our connection. If religion, as I have been theorizing, is the “narrativizing of a story through repetition,” then every time I narrate the beginning of my friendship with N, I’m participating in the making of something, too. I’m agreeing to it—that this is how I want to be told.

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Sometimes I think about whether there is a timeline out there, one where I never questioned the scam, because the scam happened to work out for me at the right time. I’ve wondered whether I would be happier there.

I landed myself in this life, I suppose, because I kept asking questions. I have no regrets about that. Sometimes I cry. When the loneliness feels awful. When faith that is unrecognizable through the old rules makes it clear to me that I will never believe there are none. Life would be so much easier if the scam had worked on me. If I had been so lucky. And to also know that this is not the first time this story has been told, and it certainly will not be the last. But that doesn’t change how the story feels when it is happening to you.

In a conversation, my friend declared to me, with comedic flair, “You have no original thoughts of your own.” I shrieked with laughter. Yes, and?