Existing, More and Less
On Ego, Writing, & Having Space to Be
There’s a scene in the first act of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise set in an airport terminal. The main character, Jack, is waiting near the gate for his daughter to arrive (a fun relic of pre-9/11 life) during a break from her studies at college. As he’s waiting, a different flight arrives first, the passengers deboarding one-by-one, deposited through the terminal gate, each appearing visibly dejected, staring at the ground. Jack stops a man to ask what happened. He goes on to share of a mid-flight tragedy rife with allegorical cultural commentary, how the plane’s engines failed mid-air, free-falling from the sky toward what seemed like an inevitable mass casualty event, panic ensuing from all including the pilots. Eventually, the plane regained control, people transitioned from hysteria to business as usual, and the aircraft landed safely. A crowd huddled around to hear his recounting.
Once Jack’s daughter lands from her own flight, she sees the commotion and asks why the crowd. Summarizing, he retells the event as narrated to him.
“Where’s the media?” she inquired.
“There is no media in Iron City”, Jack replied.
“So they went through all that for nothing?”
~~~
I’m haunted by an inescapable desire to simultaneously exist both more and less. This visits (at times, consumes) me roughly between 6 and 219 times per day: idling in the shower as droplets drum the nape of my neck, people watching as I move about the city, or zombie gazing at the shred of chipped paint in the ceiling, strategizing how to circumnavigate the imminent alarm clock anxiety which awaits me pre-sunrise as searing ambulance sirens and garish motorcycle engines blaze past my window all throughout the night.
When I’m at work amongst a swarm of 1,000+ spritely, screaming children for 10 hours, I want to crawl into a hibernation hole somewhere quiet and dark to disappear for days-weeks-months-etc., indulging in totalistic sensory deprivation and ceasing to exist until my nervous system says, ok bud, ~the screaming~ is over, you’re safe, which, at an Italian K-12 school populated by the litter of the ruling class, the screaming is never over, you are never safe. Adorable as the kids may be, cusp-of-pubescent prefrontal cortexes haven’t yet developed awareness of vocal volume nor the fundamental foundations for sustainable self-discipline in a culture that, for all of its beauty, values systems of control in favor of accountability.
This carries over. Once I leave the school, I spend nights pirouetting around the desire to collapse, my vocal cords nearing shock-paralysis after 3-4 hours of guiding fitness and yoga (which my regulars will tell you often includes voice cracking and disappearing). I leave the classroom and hustle across the city to the studio du jour, reciting and workshopping yoga/pilates sequences in my head as I skillfully swerve lanes evading cars who perceive my bicycle, and existence, as a nuisance, insect-like-impediment between their own desire to embark on deeper existence after temporary emancipation from their own 9-5, matriculating towards little liberties of their own personal lives, bringing to mind David Foster Wallace’s famed commencement speech, This Is Water.
Over the last several weeks, I have been having break downs. Immediately after classes end, I smile, make conversation with my students, catch up on their lives, give feedback, and enjoy the community aspects, momentary reminders that life is okay, that we’re all in this together, that my labor is a privilege and a choice; an opportunity that brings purpose and joy. I tell myself, maybe I’ll take a class off next week, at any of my jobs. I never do. The feeling of letting my students down, letting my colleagues down, letting myself down, it all lingers.
Once the space clears, I look for a place to hide, sometimes behind a curtain of a changing area. I bury my head in my hands, breathing slow, deep, long, in silence, counting the cadence of my exhalations. I leave the studio. I hear the world go quiet. Everything heavy, inside and out. Tear ducts swell. I snap in earbuds. Sometimes-which-became-often, a lyric tips me over, even in posture. Gaze lowers, gait waddles, widens, composure wilts, a tear slips, two tears slip, so forth. I ask myself between ambling limps on sidewalk cracks if I’m more exhausted emotionally or physically. It doesn’t matter. It’s the first moment of the day where I’m not being perceived, where I have space to transition from knowing what I feel to having space to feel.
I try to remember why I’m here, how I got here, which feels like a distant memory, a mirage of an oasis. I move forward skipping over puddles of dog piss and poorly parked Lime scooters. I stop at a minimarket, grab a beer, sit on a vacant bench. Open email. Close. Open Instagram. Close. Look at WhatsApp, nobody to message. Close.
Stare blankly at calendar for next day, plant seeds of planning ahead – is my lesson plan clear? Should I make a slide deck? Will I have time to grade their responses over lunch? Ok what about for sculpt and yoga later – shit, what’s the playlist, what’s the sequence, did I teach that last week, are my students progressing? Is this move too simple, too complex, too boring? Which cues worked with student XYZ and which didn’t?
Numb the feeling of missing connection, numb the appetite for more – desire bed, desire to hide for a long, long time.
~~~
Contrary to how it sounds, I actually enjoy what I do. I get to help people for a living. If I am successful, people are learning, evolving intellectually and emotionally. I get to facilitate people feeling better, stronger, and more confident in their bodies. I have space to encourage regulation, taking pause from life for self-care, igniting curiosity piqued towards further discovery. Witnessing and experiencing beauty in the labor, I have the privilege of making a direct positive contribution to society.
However, conditions are everything. If you love Italian food but you live in rural Nebraska and the only establishment offering foodstuffs vaguely reminiscent of Italian food is a monotonous-red-roofed-Pizza Hut-turned-family-pizzeria owned and operated by a semi-retired tax accountant named Dale who travelled to Napoli 38 years ago, and for whatever reason he also sells soggy kebabs on stale pita because it reminds him of a Turkish whirlwind romance he had while stationed abroad in the Navy, you’ll probably lose your appetite for Italian food. Or, you might love American football but you’re a New York Jets fan. Sundays, which should in theory be a gathering of joy and celebration, become requisite hell, masochism.
When I see Maybachs and BMWs and Porsches pull up to retrieve students on Fridays before their bi-weekly family trips to one of their multiple vacation houses, while my compensation is so measly that I need a second and third job just to reach the threshold for a living wage, I lose my desire to teach. (The TikTok famous “No Broke Boys” song came on shuffle while teaching a sculpt class last week and I felt deeply called out.) Teaching is noble, sure, but the luster of nobility only goes so far when salaries could reasonably be described as disrespectful within our current hell-stage of capitalism. I use correlations to draw conclusions about my employer’s perspective: you do not deserve to eat, you do not deserve a vacation, you do not deserve to be able to support a family someday.
I consider line density between servant and educator.
In both of my jobs, to some degree, I–Michael in ways that make me feel most Michael–exist little. This can be a great thing. Boundaries are more-or-less clearly defined and I have separation between personal and professional identities. However, as an immigrant in a new country, starting over, my whole life committed to work, now 18 months straight without a week off, I wonder when and where I do get to be wholly, unapologetically Michael. The pie can’t just be crust.
This isn’t to say I don’t get to “be myself” while teaching all the things I teach. It’s the opposite, being myself is a hugely important part of what I do. I recognize that in the classroom my unique experiences (and traumas), ethical-social-emotional lens, and distaste for my own education as a whole allows me to flip the script in a meaningful way. In studios I express my personality to the best of my abilities within the given confines, and if anything, my retention rates are probably more related to ~vibes~ and authentic care as much as acumen and expertise. I’ve always hoped that while I may not be the best teacher, I can leverage my understanding of emotions and relationships in ways that encourage connection, to be the person I always wish I had: as a teacher, coach, mentor, friend, etc. – hopefully, one day, even a father.
The wanting to exist more has become a yearning, to feel feelings that can be shared without shame, having freedom to bare a deeper self with those I emphatically choose; efforts extending outwards with an energy resembling more than sandlike flakes of smoldered peppery ash thinly cha-cha sliding real smooth underneath cracks of deadlocked doors in cramped rooms, compressed remnants of who I might be if the viscera of my core character was in the right place at the right time with the right people and hadn’t been sacrificed in perpetuity to ensure rent-paid-mouth-fed-neurons-lubricated-with-caffeine-to-ensure-labor-efficacy-on-4-hours-sleep-so-rent-paid-mouth-fed-neurons-lubri–, etc..
There is something profoundly lonely about standing in front of groups of people effectively performing and giving presentations for 14 hours per day without ever being known, which, at the end of the day, is what many of us crave most.
~~~
I downloaded the Co-Star app on New Year’s Day, told myself I’ll start checking my horoscope in 2026 because why not, maybe it’s time for a horoscope girly story-arc.
Yesterday’s byline: “It isn’t petty to want to feel heard”.
Today’s: “Running at maximum capacity for long periods of time isn’t sustainable”. My body of work proves evidence on the contrary, but at what cost?
I often negotiate my feelings with philosophy, yogic teachings, internal arguments about capitalism and living in an internet era, etc.; whether all abstract edges of desire are connected to ego.
I wade through phases in ego negotiation:
- Ego Death: I don’t need validation for existing, I don’t need relationships, I don’t need to engage with needs or wants. I don’t need to write, especially not memoirs. Expressing my experiences and perspectives only serves the ego. Am I that vain to think others will care about my life? I’m okay, I’ll hold the space. Everything is to be observed, everything needed for sustainability is already within.
- Totalitarian-Almost-Nihilistic Ego Minimizing: there’s already too much content. My additions would create a net negative on society. There’s so much noise on social media, in entertainment, with lazy writing pop lit. I’ll wait until I have something of undeniable value. The last thing I want to do is be part of the oversaturated universe of adult versions of children shouting “look at me!” I respect attention too much to give into this iteration of the attention economy.
- Ego Confusion: everything I need is from within, or maybe that’s what people who think they’re better than everyone else, people who’ve been fortunate enough to live a life without the kind of struggle that makes one wonder do I need out, where is the line before flipping the off switch, while they shill a grift on social media in attempt to get famous, which, so ironically stated in Lauren Oyler’s No Judgments, is the real meaning of life. Milan is maybe the most vain city on earth, and I don’t know if not wanting to broaden my ego is hurting me. I don’t need more, or a support system, or to be know, but I also want those things and feel guilty for wanting. Yet I got this far without any of it. This is cope, we’re all just coping.
Negotiating the negotiations, I realize I’m sidestepping asking myself the more poignant questions:
Is the fear of my vulnerable self being rejected stronger than the yearning to be understood? It is worth the risk?
Am I seeable? Will others see fractions of themselves within me, and if so, will it help them see themselves?
Can I convince myself that if I write, someone will give a shit, and if nobody does, can I navigate that insecurity internally?
If I am to truly be known, will I not be accepted? If not, how will I make peace?
Ego says I worked too hard on improving myself to not indulge the basic human need for connection in existing more, to avoid difficult conclusions about failure from conceding my voice doesn’t matter, a holistically-wrong self-defacing premise that’s been unfortunately reinforced by how little my voice actually has mattered when it needed to matter most, left felt beaten down, confidence demolished, yet still always, without option, moving forward.
~~~
I think about the person who made me a human almost every day. In her final days, she took pencil to paper in a little red journal from her hospital bed. I wasn’t old enough to read at the time, so she left it to my father, which he eventually gave me in my early 20’s after going years without seeing him.
I lived in my car on and off over several periods of my life and after losing a friend in a car accident, I decided to keep the notebook in the bottom console of the driver’s side door of my Toyota. I hoped it would protect me through nights of sleeping in parking lots and on side streets. I know it did, especially after an accident at 85 mph that should have, without hesitation of doubt, killed me. I never read the whole thing, always feeling like the moment wasn’t right. Though after years of having it in my possession, I read the first few pages and broke into tears, shaking viscerally. I could feel her love, fear, sadness, her not wanting me to blame her, the distress of knowing she’d be leaving her child to exist a lifetime without a mother and a father she knew would do harm.
When my car was stolen, the overnight between my first day at a new job, the thief(s) left $1,000+ in baseball gear in the trunk untouched. The vehicle was returned one city block from a police department, so conspicuously so that the police were certain I was drunk the night before and forgot where I parked. They took the full contents of my glove compartment, center console, and side consoles. This included the notebook.
(When I was rear-ended by a distracted driver, which led to brain damage and an inability to walk for several months, needing neuro and physical rehabilitation, the notebook was not there to protect me. Although, that turned out to be the first domino towards my eventually becoming a yoga teacher.)
She cared about writing. She lefts hundreds of books in her wake, numerous floor-to ceiling-bookshelves. She was a teacher, too. English. Also, eventually, to Italians.
I taught creative writing for the first time when I was still in college back in 2012. I was working with high schoolers and I had a kid who had no problem sharing deep and vulnerable stories when chopping it up: a drive-by through the windows at his little brother’s birthday party clipped his dog, a freak knee injury that ended his basketball career, a trip to DC that made him realize there’s life outside of Chicago’s south side. But when it came time to write, he would say, “I have nothing to write about.” I told him the problem wasn’t that he didn’t know what to write, it was that he needed to have the courage to be unapologetically original in taking ownership of his story and let whatever else comes of it fall into place. He needed to realize nobody else could tell his story but him. 14 years later, and I still haven’t shared my own story.
I used my mother’s entire life savings on a college degree to theoretically learn how to suck less at writing. Maybe you’ll think I suck at writing, maybe I think I suck at writing, but at least in performing the act I’ll be protecting the investment, protecting the sacrifice, and protecting what holds together the slim threads of meaning I’ve made in my life in hopes that someday, just maybe, it gets better.
If nowhere else: here, I will exist.