I owe Jacques Lacan a thank you.
Not because he made me happy. He would probably have found the proposition suspicious.
And not because I have finally understood Lacan. Nobody who says that should be trusted. That’s what my spidery senses tell me anyway.
He helped because, over the last year, I slowly stopped asking some very bad questions. Well, most of the time.
Why doesn’t she love me in the way I want?
Why doesn’t Poland recognise what I have done here?
Why doesn’t the professional world understand what I can do?
Why, after all this work, do I still feel outside?
For years I treated these as problems awaiting solutions. Explain myself better. Work harder. Write another book. Send another email. Love more intelligently. Become easier to love.
There was always one more push.
Lacan introduced an unpleasant possibility: perhaps the problem was not that I had failed to obtain the answer.
Perhaps I was organised around needing the question.
Desire does not disappear when we acquire its object. The gaze of the Other cannot be controlled. Recognition never finally arrives. Fantasy is not simply daydreaming; it is the little architecture through which we arrange the world so that something always appears just beyond reach.
The missing piece.
The person.
The job.
The country.
The answer that will finally make the picture complete.
This proved irritatingly useful.
Because perhaps there isn’t a missing piece.
Perhaps there are simply pieces.
A mother who wishes she could help but cannot undo what happened.
An ex-wife with whom a marriage ended but with whom a conversation can still be warm, intelligent and useful.
The mistake is not wanting more.
The mistake is believing that because I want more, reality is somehow defective.
There are limits.
Other people’s limits.
My limits.
And boundaries are not barricades. They do not require guns, guards and twenty-four-hour surveillance. A boundary can be very simple:
This is what you can give. Is it something I can live with?
If yes, value it.
If not, leave it alone.
Do not push the other person further.
Do not push yourself smaller.
Patience becomes important here, but not patience as waiting. I do not need to sit outside somebody else’s life hoping the gates will eventually open.
Patience means allowing reality enough time to reveal what it actually is.
The book I wrote was part of this. Important, painful, funny, occasionally brutal. But it wasn’t the destination. It was another object produced during the journey.
The useful change has been much smaller:
Reality is beginning to compete successfully with fantasy.
A bicycle tyre bursts. It costs 65 złotys to fix.
A story is rejected.
A son calls to talk about Aston Villa.
My mother makes a slightly wonky Kurt Cobain doll. I give it to somebody. She loves it.
Somebody likes something I wrote.
Somebody else thinks it is shit.
I sit alone beside the Vistula watching people dance and discover that I don’t have to join them to enjoy being there.
None of these events needs to become a theory of my existence.
And perhaps the glass was never half empty.
There was simply a glass with something in it, while I was staring at the space above the water wondering why it wasn’t full.
There is quite a lot here already.
Children.
Friends.
Work with words.
Books.
A bicycle.
A city I can love and hate on the same afternoon.
People who sometimes understand me and sometimes don’t.
Women I can find beautiful without requiring them to repair my sadness.
Money, hopefully soon, sufficient to create some margin rather than living permanently at the edge of catastrophe.
And a life that has actually happened.
That may be what Lacan gave me: not freedom, transcendence or inner peace.
A little suspicion towards my own stories.
A respect for limits.
A recognition that other people’s gaze belongs to them.
The knowledge that the Other does not possess the missing answer either.
And perhaps permission to stop pushing quite so hard.
I still want things.
I still love.
I still get angry.
I still want to be seen.
But wanting no longer has to issue orders.
There may be nothing missing.
There may simply be what is here.
So thank you, Jacques.
You didn’t solve anything.
I’m alright.
That was the point.
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