Sisyphus

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I’m in Italy because my heart always feels heavy.

I think that wandering around aimlessly and enrolling in art school will take some of the heaviness away. Maybe as I’m walking around familiar cobbled streets, the weight in my heart will move down to my stomach to my legs to my toes into the stones below me and it will stay there. Maybe as I’m painting the weight in my heart will move out to my arms to my fingers to the paintbrush into the canvas and it will stay there. The weight needs to leave me, so I’ve come to Italy to leave it here.

I have an appointment in two weeks with my therapist. I’m going to sit across from her in a warm, strangely decorated clinic and tell her that I’m Sisyphus.¹ Not because that’s objective truth, but because that’s how I feel.

I don’t know what life feels like without all this heaviness inside me. Without the boulder I’m pushing up the mountain, futile because I push and it falls down and I push and it falls I push it falls again and again and again.

There have been brief moments where I don’t push and nothing falls. With the girls on the floor of my ex-West London apartment. At midnight by the Thames a hand squeezes mine and we’re smiling. A life-altering email sent from oceans away reaches me and I pack my bags again.

Those moments is how I want my life to feel all the time, but feeling like that requires me to prioritise my own happiness and let that boulder fall down the mountain, potentially injuring a lot of people in the process. It requires me to give myself permission to be free.

Here, in Italy, I wonder what would actually happen to me, what would happen to the identity I’ve built around this giant geological nightmare, if the boulder truly disappeared. Would I just sit there on the mountain in bewilderment? Would I run after it, sprinting and gasping for air, unable to deal with the discomfort of life without it?

One sunny morning, I run into my tutor Giovanni in a coffee shop ten minutes from the studio. He sees me and his eyes light up, which is sweet and lovely in and of itself. He asks me how I am, how my afternoon painting session was yesterday. I tell him my grapes are getting uglier, I’ve spent hours on them and I still think I’m getting nowhere. He laughs, espresso in hand, and tells me to relax, trust the process, it’ll all fall into place soon. I laugh with him, and secretly question if he’s been in cahoots with my therapist.

Everyday from the hours of nine to five, my only purpose is to put paint on canvas. I change the colours of the muscles I’m working on because I’ve figured out how to make my reds warmer. My tutors and I agree that tomorrow I should paint over the background in lighter tones, because the purples are currently invisible. When my first block of training is over I stare at my finished piece for thirty more minutes and decide it needs more white because fuck it, why not.

The studio smells of liquin and oil and solvent. Mildly toxic. But apparently not toxic enough to warrant opening the windows. The semi-poisonous fumes aren’t completely evil though, because they’ve stirred up a thought in my brain: I always let other people change their minds but I never give myself the same grace.

I start projects in one phase of my life and allow them to stagnate, because I’ve committed to it being one thing so it now must be exactly that one thing forever. I cling onto bad friendships and bad romances way past their expiration dates, because something is better than nothing.

I vouch for people and feel ashamed when they aren’t who I initially thought they were, because vouching for them and being proven wrong means that I’m a bad person: I’ve done something terrible because I’ve misjudged them, and I must never do it again. I must refine my spidey senses even more. I must be better next time, as if it’s possible for any human being to be an oracle, as if it’s possible for me to know how, or if, someone will betray me when I first meet them.

What if my life can mirror how I’ve been putting paint to canvas? What if it’s all just a process of doing and undoing until something finally feels right? Until it all finally clicks, finally falls into place? Nothing is set in stone, not my ugly grapes or even my fate as Sisyphus.

I hope to leave Italy with permission, with trust. To allow myself to become, and un-become, at my own pace. To welcome the inevitability of outgrowing people. To make room for the right people to find me. To finally drop that fucking boulder, for real this time, and let whatever comes next unfold as it should.

With all the above in mind, I’m re-arranging my projects, and toying with a future in which this Substack is no longer about television.² There’s some stigma on this platform about one’s writing portfolio consisting of only personal essays, but I’ve come to accept that I just really fucking like writing personal essays. Maybe because I’m always the listener, rarely the listened-to, and this feels very close to uninterrupted speaking. Or maybe because I truly believe I’m writing at my best when I’m honest, and personal essays are where my honesty can make a home. Either way, I hope you choose to stick around for the evolution of As Seen on TV. If you’d prefer to leave, that’s okay, too, and I wish you a safe journey wherever you’re headed.

1. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is cursed by Zeus to endure eternal punishment in the underworld. He’s tasked with rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down every time it nears the top. Rumour has it he’s still down there, pushing that fucking boulder up that fucking hill. Futile.

2. I’m trying to break out of the boxes I’ve put myself in, you see. It’s taken me almost thirty years to realise that when you’re an adult, the boxes do not exist!