“As I grow up and out of this time of my life, I am surprised by how un-lost I feel. I am wandering. I do not know the next steps except the one in front of me. And, I believe fiercely that I will encounter the next right thing, if only I am brave enough to try.”

Anniversary Article, April 26th 2021

 There is a girl in front of me. She is blurry - I can’t quite make out her form. She is colorful against a sea of creamy white wall, and she’s laughing. I can feel her fingers reaching out towards me. We’ve never met but I miss her somehow and it’s twisting my stomach into knots, not being able to move faster towards each other. I squint, desperate to see her more clearly, and she sharpens into focus before melting under my gaze. For the first time in my life, the distance between us is lined with stepping stones, these clear choices which pave the way towards our discovery of each other. The pathway is lined. The way forward is apparent. I am no longer wandering. I am self-assured, and my vision is clear. Who she is, indistinct and unformed, out of sight for so long, is no longer a mystery – the girl who awaits me ahead is more myself than I am. She is sure of herself, happy, whole, smart, sweet. All these years, I have been moving slowly, thoughtfully and cautiously, forward, wondering when the fog might lift so that I may see more than the step in front of me. Never lost but scared to be. Summoning bravery from a reserve which comes from nowhere, and finally, finally. I see her in the distance. I trusted I would be led here; nonetheless, I breathe a sigh of relief. 

These stepping-stone choices are not easy ones. Each one changes me, takes me away from this way of being and towards a new one. I can sense myself recoiling away from the transformation some of them promise – they will lead me away from old patterns and into new ones. But those old patterns are my favorite. They are deeply rooted perennials - comfortable, wonderful, dysfunctional, and custom-built just for me. I have broken them in, worn them well. I don’t want to leave them. But to reach this beautiful, blurry woman, I must leave them behind. My vision clear, the way forward illuminated. Herein lies a goodbye to these sweet-smelling parts of me. To move through this transition will require stamina, clear boundaries, and healthy self-esteem – three things that do not come naturally to me. I must forsake my desire to be loved so that I may become love.

I am not afraid of hard work.

The promise of becoming this swirling, joyous woman is so beautiful that I cannot help but embrace the transformation. Each step forward is a long and hard goodbye, followed by a sweet and long-awaited hello. I think she came into view in part because I have been writing a book this year. In a twist on autobiography, I am writing myself in the third person. This adds some theoretical distance between myself and me, using she and her to describe the marshy landscape I have been wandering through all my life. I write myself from outside of my body and in this way I am able to describe things as they truly are. I practice patience as I build out the world in which all of me lives, because careful description feels critical, although I know absolute articulation is impossible. This is how I am going to remember these days. So, I have been remembering carefully lately. 

The book begins with the story of a love I gave up and follows me across a world-journey taken under false pretenses. A discovery, several brutal truths. Casual sex, deep body worship, musings and frustrations over forgiveness. The lies I got lost in, the truth which forced itself to the surface. Sacrifice, redemption, salvation. All of these. The way it is coming to life feels so very sacred, as these last months have so too felt. While an autobiography usually emerges after some sort of ending, as the final story caught hardbound between two temporal panels, this is precisely the opposite. This is the narration of an unfolding, mutually constitutive experience wherein the words on the page transform me as I language them. Immaterial and transcendent, I am being made by this book which is in turn making itself. By analyzing the patterns of my existence, I find myself tracing the past as it exists presently. This kind of meta-narrative has somehow materialized into some sort of prophetic discernment about who I am becoming, and it is both bizarre and compelling. This is why I can finally see myself ahead, why the thick fog has lifted. Words can never fully capture a person, but even so, they perform miracles. This is also, funnily enough, the theme of my dissertation for my master’s degree in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. 

This month, I have been in London doing fieldwork for said dissertation. I am working with an organization called The Forgiveness Project, and I’ll be working with them throughout the summer as well.  The Forgiveness Project is an organization that shares stories from victims, survivors, and perpetrators of crime in the United Kingdom as an antidote to narratives of hate. Instead of going into prisons (which are extraordinarily slow to reopen to programs such as theirs after the pandemic), I am analyzing eleven years’ worth of narrative works, including hundreds of journals and accompanying artwork which have been produced by incarcerated men and women in British prisons. I am living among worlds constructed by their words.

The office building is nestled into a little side street in Westminster, and I use the train ride into King Cross Station each morning to prepare, the ride back home to Cambridge to process. I’m interested in how language transforms pain and suffering, how words move people through their lives, how the inner-life of a person can come to exist on a page – can it? I am investigating how people make, negotiate, and author forgiveness - forgiveness of themselves, of another who caused them intense anguish, of the people and families of those they’ve hurt, murdered, raped, harmed. An interdisciplinarian at heart, I have been spending time in phenomenological philosophy, social and medical anthropology, psychology, criminology, and linguistics. I am immersing myself in their pages and it is overwhelming, devastating, and profound.

I’m already getting a sense that it will not be useful (nor possible) to define ‘what’ forgiveness is or ‘how’ to forgive. There is already an abundance of research on those things, especially in the field of psychology, and I’m not particularly persuaded by what they have to say. I have never really been interested in making absolute claims about reality, anyways. I find anthropology so beautiful and mysterious because of its commitment to telling the story of how things are in a particular time and place – research serves to illuminate, to make a suggestion of how things could be rather than defining the truth of who, and what, things are. The literature and archival materials I’m working with are guiding me towards an exploration of how people write about forgiveness – what words they use, what resistance they encounter, which images accompany these words, how memories are languaged, what is left unsaid in the spaces between words. This is becoming an investigation into forgiveness as a process rather than a destination, and one which is specifically negotiated and narrated on a page.

My methodological approach was initially going to be primarily in discourse analysis (a type of research method where one studies how written or spoken language functions in its social context), simply because I thought that was the only way one could investigate how words work. However, I’m now seeing that studying the words themselves are only one way in which to understand what is happening in narrative expression. Color and form play monumental roles. Liminal space is also critical – the gap between things, the gray and watery space of words left unsaid, ideas implied but not spoken, struggles mutually understood yet not explicitly stated. How poetry, while it is written using words, does not form quite the same experience as a sentence and certainly has different affective impact on the reader; it too, moves the writer and the reader forward in particular ways. And even, forgiveness is more often a byproduct than an end in and of itself; stories themselves seem to function as a conduit for healing, a space for forgiveness as a small, everyday ritual which forms a heartbeat from which to live.

 If stories are a conduit and a catalyst for forgiveness, then, it seems important to ask, how do our stories represent us? A story, a paragraph, a sentence, which seemingly emerges so purely, so concretely – somehow, words come to represent a person on a page. I am already understanding that forgiveness is not coherent; subsequently, I am no longer seeking coherence, or an algorithm for the ‘real essence’ of forgiveness, pain, or suffering. Instead, I am flowing through the contour of the lands these storytellers describe, living among written language as patterns, investigating how their words pull me in and leave me behind. These words illuminate the body of the individual who is imprisoned, as they carve themselves out of the institutional body of incarceration, which has de facto refigured their body into the shape of the institution itself. Words here are soteriological, an act of redemption for an individual from what previously homogenized them. 

So much of Western philosophy assumes a singular, unified individual self. But I much prefer a philosophy which believes in how we each reside in the collective, are multiple, are part of a bigger body which cannot ever be articulated fully. I have been keeping these writers’ words company as they make themselves and are remade. They are a pinpoint on a timeline which completed itself the moment their pen touched paper yet simultaneously exists forever, extending into infinity as a moment which will never end. This contradiction would make it simple to write off any form of analysis as a mute point, an impasse; yet, I have always been fascinated with what is possible from the impossible – as is also the case with forgiveness itself.

Semiotic philosopher Jacques Derrida writes on the irresolvable contradiction of forgiveness, "From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgiveable...That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself."  If forgiveness is an impossibility, so too must be the words we use to approach it. So, both in spite of and in light of such an aporia, I cannot forsake the words we use to make ourselves coherent. Words on a page, while they cannot do everything, are certainly doing something. Who do we write for? I am writing now – what kind of self am I making on this page? And whilst I know that how a sentence arrives unto me is context-dependent – as in, I am making their words do something because of my own experiences, beliefs, and circumstances – there is also something happening beyond me that I am desperate to throw into relief. But any statement that postulates meaning is necessarily interpretive, so I must interpret with integrity, commit myself to the text and the people who create them. This is the call of an anthropologist: to live among phenomenon until you can honor its complexity and offer it up to the world. All I can do is my best. And this truly feels like the best part of me.

My mentor, Sandra (who is a program manager at The Forgiveness Project), walked me into this research with tears, patience, and love. She reminded me that this research journey is going to tie me up alongside it, and I will need to willingly walk towards that transformation in order to give it full justice. Spending time amongst the theme of forgiveness will necessarily thrust me into my own forgiveness story. Oh, man. She asks me to think about the ropes that are holding me to the people who have hurt me – the ropes which I am not willing to let go of. Where would I like to be free? What pain is it causing me not to have a look inwards? She suggests doodling as a creative practice to accompany me throughout this journey; doodling, she says, is merely taking a line for a walk. In parallel, she invites me to take forgiveness for a walk. See where it brings me. See what tension it relieves, what frustration it invites in. Follow it as I move. This will be a brilliant self-study, enabling me to ramble among the geography of human experience, if I am brave enough to submerge myself among it. Renowned writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston writes, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

Research is always personal.

I have been keeping notes in my fieldwork journal, as any good anthropologist must. A few weeks ago, I wrote, “I have been sitting in this material for two weeks now. Today my chest feels warm and wide, like I can’t breathe properly. I feel moments entering through my collarbones and settle into my ribs. This is continuing to build up pressure, and I feel as though all those moments may spill out of me. It’s like the world doesn’t really have room for me and these today.” After I clicked my pen closed, I quickly got up from my desk and went outside. It’s better to burst open in the fresh air, anyways.

I have been taking walks around London in the middle of the day and often find myself in a creaky wooden chair in the back of Westminster Cathedral during midday mass. I have also been praying and spending much of my time alone, outside of that holy space. I did a solo day-trip to Norfolk, a beautiful part of the southeast English coast, and found myself praying the rosary on my fingers. I have been disengaged from and frankly, uninterested in, religious ritual for several years but for some reason I am seeking it out everywhere these days. Before Easter, I went to confession for the first time in a little less than a decade and wept as I ached all over with the pain of repentance and undeservedness of divine salvation. Asking for forgiveness, it seems, hurts no matter who you’re asking. In those journals, I shudder when I read about the crime that brought them to prison, and I realize what the hands who wrote these words have done, who they have hurt. But they also write about hurt committed against them, and those many trespasses bring me to my knees. The words in these journals move me as they humanize the author. I anguish in their contents but I am joyful in their mystery. My dissertation is due at the end of August, and I’ll graduate in early October. I plan to stay in England afterwards, employment pending. I love this part of the world and am not ready to leave.

I suppose as this anniversary comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on the last four years and find them also replete with mystery. How did this person come to be? In some ways, I am the way I have always been. I am always, I think, going to be a sad-type, but I am learning to cauterize my wounds with determination rather than depression. I can hear myself laughing in these days and finally, blissfully, I am not melancholic in April. I suppose I want to end this day with gratitude. I came to England unsure of myself, anxious, and eager to start over. I have found so many people who I love, who have cared for me, stepped into my circle and squeezed me tight, who remind me of the kind of person I love to be: kind, thoughtful, generous, and capable. In this new adulthood, I am shedding codependence. I am almost twenty-three. I have lived here for over six months, and this time, while merely a blip, feels as though it extends into infinity.

The Olly Project has always come from my heart, and I hope at least, that much has been clear. I have grown up with her. You have grown up with me, too. I wonder often what you have witnessed in me - from your vantage point, what has changed about me, about you, about us? Four years is a long time of becoming. If you’d like to share, I’d love to listen.

In any case, I would like to wish a very happy birthday to this sweet moment of mine, a moment that has already ended but also forms a forever which never dies.

“And if time were to stall, I can never tell it all, 

Words are few, this will have to do;

I just want to thank you.”

-Excerpt from ‘Thank You’ by Maverick City Music