When Losing & Finding Are The Same

I wrote this at NELP, Spring of 2002. Enjoy.

I can’t find anything. Ever. My mom might say that I am the worst Looker ever because whenever she says, “Go look for _______,” I can never find it. When I return to her empty-handed she will inevitably ask, “Well, did you look for it?” No mom, I just walked around aimlessly for twenty minutes peeking behind shelved knick-knacks and rummaging through drawers because I felt like it.

Often times I will be searching for something I know, something I’ve seen, something that has a usual place that it’s not in right now when my mother needs it. Like the scissors. Or the Scotch tape. I am notorious in my family for using the scissors, losing the scissors, and then still not finding them after twenty-five minutes or serious, hard-core, concentrated searching. At that point my mom interrupts whatever she happens to be doing, walks into my room and picks up the one piece of paper I happened to not look under, and lo and behold: the fucking scissors.

Part of the reason I am perpetually trying to find things is closely related to the fact that I tend to misplace things. I am always losing my stuff because I just have too much of it. At times I honestly think that I am physically incapable of throwing things away. Somehow I manage to convince myself that I might really want that little empty box that my lipstick came in for something sometime. Maybe I’ll give Nikki some Chap Stick and wrap it up really fancy. Or how about that little rectangular tin the last 500 free hours of AOL CD came in? I will definitely use that for something!

I collect all this crap thinking it’s valuable, thinking I’ll use it, and then I completely forget that I even have it. Then when I am ripping through my closet for something I really, actually, truly, desperately need to find, I’m bombarded with a colossal amount of shit, most of which I can’t even recall the reason for having kept.

When Hayden Caruth said, “losing and finding,” were the same, I wrote it down. I thought to myself, “If I weren’t always losing my shit, maybe I wouldn’t always need to find it.” This works fine for a discussion of physical objects, but what about how I once lost all of my courage at the end of a bad relationship? What about how I once lost all respect for myself when a selfish lover’s opinion of my sex appeal made me question my beauty? What about how I lost all my motivation for law school because Mark told me he’d break up with me if I became a lawyer, since, “…all lawyers are liars,” and he couldn’t date a liar?

I once misplaced my entire self, all the things that make me feel good, smart, and strong. I lost everything, including the sense of my immeasurable worth, because I didn’t even know that I had them. I took them for granted and they left me, as even the most patient lovers will do after years of neglect. It took losing those things to even realize that they existed, and then it took work to find them again. If I hadn’t lost myself in weakness and stupidity and emotion then I wouldn’t feel the way I do now -- that I can do anything I want ,and the only person I need is me. I had to lose me to find me, and I like what I’ve got, so I’m keeping it.