The Temptation of the Patron Saint of Boredom
wrote this last week and waited until a moment of boredom to finish it
There’s a proverb that says “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not sure if my mother knows this proverb, but she says to me on an almost weekly basis: “Miranda, boredom is your worst enemy,” implying the same thing – boredom gets me into trouble.
During my last relationship, unstimulating as it was, I found that I had very little free time. If I wasn’t working or out with my friends, I was with him, either drinking cheap beers on St Marks or in his shoebox apartment, begrudgingly watching banal television just to reap the satisfaction of laying in his arms – the emotional reward of intimacy far outweighing the cost of wasted time. Before him, I was heartbroken, and before that, I was in an equally reclusive and time consuming relationship, and before that I was heartbroken and before that I was, again, in a mostly bedridden relationship. (The simple explanation for this is that I’ve historically dated guys who are curmudgeonly and boring and would rather watch the same show for ten hours straight than do anything that adds value to their life. No offense I guess. There’s also a more complex explanation for this pattern but that’s for another essay altogether.)
Due to the dull nature of my relationships, the following periods of heartbreak are generally more volatile than the relationship itself. With heartbreak comes an anguished verve, an energy only awakened in the throes of misery. In times of heartbreak, I am my own divine muse. I go to the park with a tall-boy of Coors Light in a brown paper bag and I lay in the damp grass and I weep and it’s beautiful. I ride the train over the bridge and I stare out the window and I watch the grey waters and the blue skyline pass by and as a single tear rolls down my cheek, I feel dreadfully alone and utterlypoetic. I write for miles in my diary about how my heart has been shattered into a million pieces and how I fear I may never recover, and I sip hot tea with honey and lemon and I eat only one meal a day and it’s usually something mild like toast because I’m too overcome with sadness to feel hunger. And in between mundanities and meltdowns, I spend my time consoling myself – what some might call self-care but what I consider a hobby of heartbrokenness. Any potential for boredom evades me when I have decided in a whirlwind of emotions to spend an hour in child’s pose, breathing in the silence and soaking one spot on my yoga mat with tears; when I spend half a day in bed, alternating between imagined scenarios of could-have-beens and reminding myself of reality; when I read an entire novel without digesting a single word because my mind is occupied with questions of what love is and whether I’m worthy of receiving it or capable of bestowing it. In these periods of heartbreak, I’m not searching for fulfillment because I’m already full – that I’m full of grief doesn’t make me any emptier.
My last breakup, unfortunately, did not leave me heartbroken. For weeks, I waited for the grief to hit me, but it never did. With no wallowing to do and no rebound relationship in sight, I’ve had significantly more free time on my hands in the last few months. I obviously have hobbies – reading, writing, filming, yoga, curating playlists, shopping, daydreaming, compulsively rearranging my room, playing guitar in my room and getting morbidly embarrassed at the thought of anyone overhearing. But, no longer being a full time student and without a full time job, and now in romantic purgatory, I struggle to fill my time in productive and fulfilling ways. Lately, when I get sick of forcing myself to write or read, I often find myself walking aimlessly for hours, even in freezing temperatures – last week I walked from Williamsburg to the Hudson River and I would’ve kept walking if there wasn’t a body of water to turn me around. I also say yes to any harmless activity offered to me (re: my Rules for Life So Far) because I decidedly have nothing better to do. Those harmless activities usually entail going to bars, drinking excessively, smoking some weed, stumbling home and occasionally vomiting. Sometimes I agree to the harmless activities proposed to me by men I meet at bars or on Hinge or at work (i.e., first and second dates and rarely one night stands), but they’ve been really unremarkable lately. The novelty of meaningless dates and wild nights out has slowly dwindled and as my free time is filled more and more by aimless wandering and writing (a hobby driven partly by passion and mostly by desperation), I find myself tethered to a concrete sense of time only by the notifications I get 30 minutes before I’m scheduled to work reminding me not to be late. Days of the week are arbitrary when you work every weekend and spend most of the weeknights inebriated; night time loses its meaning when you sleep well into the afternoon after being out until long after the sun went down.
In trying to avoid boredom and the mischief it brews, I’ve filled my days with harmless but mostly meaningless activities. This weekend, intending to do something with purpose, I booked a last minute trip home to see my family. Back in my hometown I ate well and slept a lot and drove around with the windows down, reminiscing on old spots that I’d imparted with meaning many years ago – the church where we could sit at the picnic tables and smoke weed after dark; the big tree I would climb with my skater boyfriend, feeling impossibly cool; the now-closed smoke shop where Auntie would sell us paraphernalia underage and where she’d always ask us so sincerely about our lives in her thick East African accent; the street corner where me and my best friends would get picked up in a pick-up truck when we snuck out of Katie’s house; the football field where I laid in the grass, tripping on LSD and staring at the stars for hours; the iHop where I realized I no longer loved the boy I thought was forever; the woods behind our high school where we gathered the materials for the most epic senior prank we could imagine; the bleak shopping center parking lot where me and my first love would sit in my car and smoke a blunt and make out and talk about how much we thought we knew about life. I realize, just in writing this, that the shit I was doing as a teenager wasn’t much different than the shit I’m doing now, but it seemed so much more valuable then because I was still a child (although I never would’ve admitted it). I still knew nothing about the world, and I was certain doing those drugs and kissing those boys and drinking pink lemonade Burnett’s Vodka made me more mature. Now, I do those things (substitute the cheap vodka for a 17 dollar martini) without any guarantee that I’m gaining anything valuable – insight, maturity, perspective.
Now, I’m on a plane back to the city, listening to the same sad song on repeat because I forgot to download more music. As we took off, I closed my eyes and focused on the lyrics, haunting and heartbroken. And as I listened, I wondered why I couldn’t cry. I can imagine myself at any given moment in my past listening to it and crying big, heavy tears, either of heartbreak or of unrequited love or of dissatisfaction with a boyfriend I thought was supposed to make me happy. It always feels right to cry on a plane — the catharsis of letting tears fall to nowhere, feeling that heartbreak in a vacuum, without it tainting the sanctity of my bed, without branding a park bench as the one on which I cried for you. But there is no you to cry for right now, and so I asked myself: is this in-between period where I’m not in love and I’m not heartbroken – worse than anything? Romantic purgatory might be worse than heartbreak and worse than the worst relationship I’ve had for the simple reason that it’s painfully boring. At least in high school when I partied there was the satisfaction of rebellion – I was building character, creating conflict, pissing off my parents, releasing the pent up emotions of a hormonal and undiagnosed bipolar teenager. Now, it’s at best a way to pass time and at worst a (typically unsuccessful) hunt for social fulfillment in the form of sex or romance or even just friends.
Maybe I’m a masochist in love – I’d rather miss someone than no one; I’d rather be heartbroken than bored. Boredom has always gotten me into trouble. In high school it was shoplifting and underage drinking, now it’s accidentally giving myself alcohol poisoning and maxing out my credit card just to feel something. It’s an endeavor of maturing to learn how to turn my idle heart into one that is content on its own merit, because now, apparently, it’s the devil’s workshop.