Lost & Found

Preface

It’s always been my natural inclination to make sense of myself and the world through writing. The process of writing nonfiction and fiction has offered a way to examine my inner life, a method for exploring ideas that have captured my imagination, a means for understanding the human condition, and a way to discover the truth. Fundamentally, writing has allowed me to ask important questions. Who am I? What do I want? How should I live?

While experimenting with different genres—including travel and science writing, memoir, literary journalism, and fiction—I fell in love with the personal essay a decade ago. The verb essay means to try or attempt. Likewise, the personal essay genre allows writers to contemplate, experiment, and discover. It’s an exhilarating, versatile genre that provides a space for writers to interrogate the world and reflect on themselves. Through personal essays, I have arrived at insights about myself and my life that have led to a better understanding of why certain events might have happened. I have been able to make sense of childhood traumas and reframe painful events into personally meaningful stories. In doing so, I have loosened the grip these events hold on my psyche.

According to sociological research, people are better at coping with difficult circumstances if they can explain how and why they occurred. In the 1990s, American psychologist James Pennebaker revealed this through a study on the effects of expressive writing. Volunteers who had experienced traumatic events were asked to journal about their painful experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for four days.

A year later, Pennebaker compared their health records with the records of the volunteers in the control group, each of whom had experienced a traumatic event but hadn’t written it down. The results showed that those who wrote about their experiences had fewer health issues than those who didn’t. Likewise, many issues in our lives become endurable once we know ←xi | xii→what they represent. As psychologist Carl Jung noted, neurotic symptoms are “the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”

In Part I, the essay, “A Sudden Stab of Murky Suspicion,” explores how knowing when to trust my intuition can be difficult, especially in a foreign land. “Up Fever Slope” captures my trek up Mount Kilimanjaro in my mid-twenties and touches on how I sometimes ignored messages from reality, like altitude sickness. “The Dizziness of Freedom” covers my travels in New Zealand and narrates the birth of bungee jumping. In it, I explore the notion of “the dizziness of freedom,” a phrase coined by the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that refers to the anxiety that can arise when we’re overcome by too many choices.

The next essay, “A Taste of Glory,” explores my running of the Newport Marathon, in which I was determined to break the four-hour mark, a demonstration of my perpetual need to manufacture a goal worth striving for. Likewise, in “Missing Paris,” I wrote about being so absorbed in the goal to break the four-hour mark at the Paris Marathon, I almost missed the chance to admire the city. Meanwhile, “A Lesson in Safety” is about living a safe city life and realizing that a fully risk-averse existence presents its own danger. To combat this, I placed myself in a risky situation by riding my motorcycle from Cambridge, MA, to Walden Pond the day I learned how to ride it.

In “The Hate Game,” I examine the disintegration of a relationship and provide an interpretation of my first encounter with psychotherapy, where I began to confront myself—my early life, in particular. In the final essay in Part I, “Departing Down the Middle,” I wrote about dropping my girlfriend off at the airport before she moved to the West Coast. The essay evokes Buddhism to take the sting out of the event, but this spiritual theory denies the pain of a failing relationship.

Part II, “Departed,” captures the beginning of my search for more meaning in my life. I was 33 years old and needed time for exploration, ←xii | xiii→so I submitted an application for a Fulbright–National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship. When it didn’t make the cut, I decided to quit my job and carry out the proposal on my own by traveling to China to learn about the country’s traditional medicine. “Finding My Sleep in China” and “Backed Up in China” are about arriving at my host institution in Beijing to learn about Chinese medicine. After leaving the city, I traveled another three thousand miles through the enormous country. I intended to travel alone, still grieving my failed relationship, until I met a young Chinese woman while waiting to take a boat down the Li River. “Walkabout Love” discusses how enjoyable it was to make a genuine connection so far from home.

Part III, “Found,” begins with “The Gift of Pain.” I had returned from my journey with various psychosomatic maladies that doctors couldn’t explain. A quest to uncover the causes with doctors led me into the depths of my psychology, where I learned that sadness and anger have infinitely creative ways of seeking attention. The essay is about how I healed my physical problems by addressing emotional pain.

The essays in Part III concern my constant search for identity. “A Morning Dose of Awe” examines how the TV show Sunrise Earth gave me a much-needed break from the morning news. “The Language of My Father” is a humorous look at my father’s written communication style. “The Stick” explores how I worked to replace an idealized version of my father with a more realistic view of him. “How to Fix a Bluey Heart” explores my interactions with a woman who helped me get over a previous relationship and taught me how to love again. “Corporate Disobedience” ←xiii | xiv→delves into my attempt to find a new way of seeing myself in the workplace, as someone who challenges and resists illegitimate authorities. And “Forest Medicine” covers a walk I took in the forest as a respite from the stresses of living in the city. “Learning to Love My Fate,” the last essay, works through my struggle to come to terms with outgrowing my decade of writing marketing content for business. It also includes the realization that having a day job supports my creative life and the fact that perhaps I already have everything I need.