Coming home on Christmas break always brings a confluence of two feelings for me: reconnection and reflection. This is a reflection on one particular area of my life: romantic love and meaning.
I am happy with my life as it is: I know that I want to finish my PhD, I have wonderful roommates, interesting friends who care about me both here at home and in the United States, and I have a family so full of love— and one that I miss dearly when I am gone. While my life as a scholar, friend, daughter, and sister satisfy me, but I don’t feel satiated. I have this clarity that I am ready for a new relationship in my life.
I feel ready for the kind of stability, continuity and very specific kind of joy that only a relationship can give. Whenever I express this I am often met with half-baked comments like: “but you’re young, have fun!” “you’ll have lots of time for a relationship!” and “what’s the rush?”
Anytime I get this kind of response, I wish I had the time to explain the following: the first year of my PhD program was in 2020. Which means I was starting a new part of my career, in a new town during the shutdowns of COVID-19. To top that off, I was going through a break up with my long term partner of 5 years AND living alone for the first time. The years of 2020-2022 were shit to say the least. But one thing that has helped me find my way through was the concept of tragic optimism. In his essay “The case for a Tragic Optimism” psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes that a tragic optimism means
that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the “tragic triad,” which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by: (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death.
In simpler words, tragic optimism is the ability to finding meaning, hope, and joy despite the presence of guilt, pain, and death in our lives. As a survivor of the holocaust, I think he more than many understands what it means to be optimistic in spite of the pain of losing one’s family; the real possibility of death that is ever present in a concentration camp; and of course, the guilt the accompanies the survival of the holocaust.
The holocaust and what I went through is of course by no means the same thing. And at the same time, in order to learn from one’s suffering, whatever it may be, one has to claim it and name it as such. Those two years were probably the hardest I’ve gone through because I went through them alone. Frankl posits that the salve for suffering, the optimism to be found in tragedy, is in the search for meaning. He writes that there are three avenues to meaning, the most important of them being:
even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.
This to me, is the part of meaning making that has to be consciously, and consistently chosen every day. I think this is the most important of the three to him, perhaps because by the time he wrote this, he had already settled the first two avenues of finding meaning: “the first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love.” By the time this essay was published, he had earned his PhD and had been married for two years.
The wisdom of contemporary culture says that your 20’s should be a time of fun and self-discovery and that relationships should only come after those things have been achieved. The solitude that COVID imposed on me helped me realize that the trouble with the advice of the contemporary moment is that, by definition, is a-historical and does not take into account a crisis like COVID. In times of crisis (both during and after), we should lean on the wisdom learnt by those of us who have experienced the most unimaginable forms of suffering. I've found meaning through the choices I have made, through the work I am doing and now, I am ready for my third avenue.
During this Christmas season, I want to take stock of all that I have, and also take note of all that I want.
I wish you the merriest Christmas!