The Empty Table

I hate to admit that I’ve been a little bit depressed. 

Like any depression, it’s nothing big—just a few major changes in my life, a few endings (which I’ve always struggled with), and a few potholes along the road. Nothing special. But I’ve found myself walking through my days, half the time, through the foggy lens of grief. I burst into sobs randomly when my mind clears up and there’s nothing to focus on or listen to (usually in the tube, when it’s too loud to even listen to music).

There was probably a time, and perhaps it is still a time, when being depressed is a bit fashionable and shows that you’re awake to the direness of the existential threats to this earth. But at my age (30), I have to admit I’m also a tad embarrassed. I always thought 30-year-old women ought to be knee-deep in demanding careers and shitty managers or literally shitty toddlers, not with enough time on their hands to look so hard at their navels that they notice the gaping hole in their souls. But I guess, as I might discuss in full in the future, none of the rulebooks of what it used to mean to be at a certain phase of life or age seem to apply anymore. Especially when you’re the generational anomaly that is the peak millennial.

Why am I writing this? Perhaps, with the small hope that it might amuse you or make you laugh, or make you feel less alone. And also because, I first began to write because of the feeling it gave me. Writing transformed me, it’s always been a sort of unburdening. I feel lighter each time.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the lastness of things.

My oldest sister got married earlier this month. Growing up, the three of us sisters always shared a room and were essentially forced to (for better and worse) play, sleep, do homework, have phone calls on top of each other. It also meant that a great constant of my life was conversations and games with my sisters, even as these constants went from reading comic books (when we were kids) to novels (when we were teens) to sending memes to each other (when we started working and our brains began its slow decay), and went from every night to every summer when we would all be home in Jakarta.

^We were 14, 12 and 10 I think. (or as they say, the sweet spot between diapers and drugs)

I remember two nights before the wedding, when we all sat around my bed on our phones. And I thought to myself, that this might be the last time we ever do this. Afraid that if I didn’t notice it, I wouldn’t be able to savour the last moments of my girlhood before it left. As you might have noticed, I’ve been constantly frustrated and obseessed that at my age I still get treated like an adolescent, probably because I’m an artist (hence financially independent, but not freakishly wealthy), and a student (even if it’s a PhD), and unmarried and childless. I’m probably even more embarrassed to admit that perhaps all I wanted was to be a girl forever—to have my own room, and cool clothes, have my hair the way I want, have girl friends, and make pretty things.

Who knows. Perhaps, unlike my mom and her sisters, who meet over lunch once every few years when they’re not preoccupied with children, work or husband, we will still be lounging on beds scrolling through memes on our phones far beyond the ‘appropriate age’. Nothing lasts but the last might not be the last after all.

I get overwhelmed by the lastness of things at the edge of friendships or relationships, when I hug and smell the shampoo or lavender detergent of a friend who might turn cold or change when we meet next.

I get overwhelmed by the lastness of things in car rides to airports, often at the golden hour to catch a red-eye flight. I notice every neon sign and restaurant and the people walking with heavy bags who will be ‘home’ while I’m strapped to a chair 2,000 feet in the air. I think about how much of it would have changed by the time I come back, if I come back. These places are always disappearing, so I feel an even bigger responsibility to hold them in my mind. What if somebody needs that world one day?

Surely this is not something only I feel?!

I think I’m a bit obsessed with memories. If you haven’t noticed, every other sentence is ‘When I was XX years old’ with me. I’m constantly thinking about how this moment stands in the grand narrative arc of our lives, how will we look back at this one day? I’ll admit it’s kept me from being in the present and being happy, and it means my focus is often pulled by things that no longer or might not exist, alternatives and anxieties I may never have to think of anyway. But, I am an artist, and our job is often to remember things even when it’s easier to forget. Or perhaps, my fear of forgetting made me an artist. 

I try to ride the wave of my emotions.

I’ve recently discovered a truly precious archive of the noughts—the show FAT FRIENDS. Starring Alison Steadman, the show essentially depicts a group of ordinary people in Leeds who meet through a slimmers programme. The characters, even in their ‘stock’ness are brilliantly acted and lived in. It depicts the experience of living in fat bodies within a thin world with compassion and at times hard-hitting realness. Although the show’s biggest crime is in its attribution of all unhappiness in these characters’ lives as their fatness. 

^I’ve stopped before the episode with James Corden in it because the ‘trailer’ they showed made me too depressed.

Alan, a kindly bus driver played by Richard Ridings,is one of the less motivated members of the slimmers club. At some point, he simply remarks ‘maybe I’m just a fat bloke’ (the science would agree with him, which is why now at 2024 we’re at least over blaming people for being fat). His episode begins with Alan at breakfast on the evening of his 20th wedding anniversary, with a daughter who is obsessed with being thin and a wife who pushes him off for smelling like bacon fat. He has a high-blood-pressure episode that causes him to be sent home from his shift. He almost catches his wife sleeping with another man on his bed, but in true comedia fashion, she manages to lure him off with a downstairs phone call (oh the days of landline!). He unwittingly undresses and changes, while singing an aria, and gloriously reveals the fullness of his body, to the horror and chagrin of his wife and her lover under the bed. Eventually, the episode climaxes at dinner with his dishevelled wife, who admits that she doesn’t love him anymore, that he’s let go of himself and that she finds him repulsive. He sobs and tells her that every remark and rebuff she makes hurts, and when it hurts he eats.

The whole thing hit me like a wall of salt water—the brilliance of course of Riding’s acting, his kindness, his desire to be loved, the cruel mercilessness and compassion in which his story is portrayed. These days, I feel grief and terror come at me like waves that almost blind me to where I am. Of course, I’m a thin-presenting young woman, what do I know about how Alan feels? But I like to say that when I was growing up, my family’s secondary religion was Christianity and their primary religion was thinness and beauty.

Yesterday, I sat at the Wroclaw Airport when a mat who looked an awful lot like Alan sat down with a plate of pierogies ruski and again, that giant wave came rising. I had had a single one of those same pierogi and it had made me feel sick (being depressed also messes with my appetite). I felt like I was sitting beside whatever deep sea creature Alan symbolised in my subconscious, and I his tragic, foolish thin-obsessed daughter(?) Maybe I was jealous seeing someone scarf down life with such an appetite. Dear reader, don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that I felt sorry for this stranger who was probably perfectly fine. I felt sorry for myself, all too sorry! Is that not the sin of depression?

When these waves come, I learn not to fight it (it’ll just come rising again), or to start my own whirlpool (and wallow low low low low low low low). Instead, I ride it and let it move me and I let. It. pass.

A little bit like if you’re floating in a riptide I guess? Not that I would know, I’m not the sort of courageous girl who swims in oceans.

The dark night of the soul

Naturally, I feel a new winter opening in my life. I’ve gone through these depressions before, when it hurt to breathe, when I felt overcome by a terror that nobody loved me and that it meant I might disappear. The last three years has been full of unexpected adventures and unordinary happinesses, I know now it’s only natural for the seasons to turn. I can only accept it with grace and gratitude.

This verse from the Song of Songs gave me great hope as I emerged from the first winter of my life (when I was 19, and just leaving New York). ‘Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love.’ That is let god bring me through the deserts and dark forests to ultimately feast on the life-giving love and decadence of this world. Sometimes I think of my life as a banquet—after all I had always wanted a full-bellied existence, I wanted to taste it all! You can’t not eat because you’re afraid of having your table empty, because the food will anyway rot and the wine will turn sour. One must eat and be drunk and eventually waken, hungover in an empty table and an empty house, and wait for the hunger and wait for the unknown.

Thank you reader, if you made it this far you’ve taken 1g of weight off my soul, I feel lighter already!