Mountains

Mountains

Grace can be found in a mango.

Monkeys become squirrels.

Anxiety is hiking up a volcano in the dark.

These are the three things that I know to be true this week.

You probably know by now that I find Wherever you go, there you are to be the truest truth, the core of my life. You might even be sick already of me telling you this over and over again.

But I will continue saying it to you, again and again, anyways.

Because it is still the truest truth, its truths manifest in new ways each time I get up from my bed.

Monkeys become squirrels. They really do. The most exotic, take-your-breath-away things -- the animals, the foods, the dwellings, the outfits, the rituals, the vistas -- those images you see as a child in National Geographic that later inspire you to turn your life upside down, again and again, each time promising never to do it again, but doing it again anyway. And sooner than you can ever imagine monkeys are just squirrels trying to steal your food, no different from the fat squirrels back at school that try to steal your morning muffin. And so you may be climbing a mountain in a tropical jungle in Balinese Hindu costume as monkeys stalk your ascent. But you are still just you.

I thought I already knew this. I thought I had learned it again and again, at 3, at 8, at 10, at 12, at 17, at 19, now at 21. But I seem to never really believe this lesson, forgetting each time, until the moment again when a monkey is as exciting as a squirrel. And perhaps a squirrel has now become even more exciting than a monkey. And you are you.

Despite the fact that animals are just animals, and food is just food, and people are just people, wherever in the world you are, comfort and home still constitute the gravitational forces that govern our orbits.

And our sanity.

I have eaten fried rice, nasi goreng, each day for breakfast and lunch for 8 weeks now. Sometimes I get lucky and get fried noodles instead. It is getting harder for me to eat it now. I have 12 days before I get to cook for myself and eat what I want. 12 days. And just when 12 seems like the biggest number in the world, at dinner tonight, eating noodles (thank God it wasn’t rice) with MSG, Ibu offers me a mango. She has never offered me one before. But now she does, peeling it with her miraculously slender hands. It is my salvation, the lull in the storm of my day of tires popping and ants colonizing my vitamins and anti-Semitic facebook messages from Indonesians who do not like that my religion is listed as Jewish.

God is a ripe mango offered just in the nick of time. Grace is one too. So is salvation, and redemption, and transcendence.

And it turns out that I was wrong. I thought I had explored the unfathomable depths and nooks and crannies of my lifelong struggle with anxiety. I thought no personal experience could manifest my anxiety in a new or shocking way. Stress chests, migraines, teeth crack, jaws clenching, nightmares, every insecurity or bad memory a merry-go-round for my anxiety to reincarnate itself. But climbing Mount Batur, an active volcano here in Bali, at 4 in the dark morning surprised me and proved me wrong, literally taking my breath away. Climbing in the dark, on hands and knees, falling on my butt on jagged volcanic rock and sand, up, up, up, not enough air, panting and heaving chest. Pushing yourself up and up even though you feel like your lungs will split open all the while everything around you is submerged in darkness and there is no scenery for you to engage with to justify your pain.

Anxiety is the physical experience of climbing a volcano in the dark. They are exactly the same, although one is entirely physical and one is entirely psychological. Either way, you have to go up even though there is only pain and no beauty. Either way, there is nothing beautiful to distract you from the pressure in your lungs and your inability to grasp anything. Either way, your lungs feel like an elephant is sitting on them. You do not know what you are striving towards on your cut hands and knees. You cannot see it. But somehow you still know it is better than the only alternatives: going down or being trampled by others in your refusal to move on. And so climbing Mount Batur in the middle of the night feels exactly like having acute anxiety disorder at its worst. I had to remind myself again and again mid-climb that I was in fact studying abroad in Bali, climbing a volcano in the dark, and that the pain in my chest and my inability to make out the world around me was not due to a reemergence of a former clinical disorder, but an actual physical mountain that was no longer just inside my mind.

And so I believe in monkeys, and mountains, and mangos.

I especially believe in mangos.