post 13: the quadrennial cycle

[Originally published on Substack: Jan 31, 2025]

Related post: “divesting from high achievement” (May 2024)

June 11th 2008. My mother was crossing the road with grocery bags in each hand, some suburban woman sped through the green light, and at least four lives were changed for the foreseeable future. The woman, my mother, and my mother’s two children. I tried to find patterns that could make sense of my life, and it became apparent that major shifts were emerging in my life every four years. This four-year cycle was so consistent that I began to brace myself for impact whenever my age was divisible by four.

At the age of four, my stepfather (my sister’s father) died, leaving my mother und********* in a terribly xenophobic country.

At the age of eight I became fed up with the city we left New York for; the people were mean in a senseless way I couldn’t understand, in an American way that seemed to persist for no reason but to eat up people’s time. Why did people who seemed to have more power than me often look at me with wet pleading eyes? Forgive me, their eyes seemed to say, I need to hurt you in order to survive. But they didn’t hurt me to survive. Surviving was what people like me were doing because of people like them. They hurt me in order to get a share of the social belonging that was needlessly scarce. We could have all belonged, if that’s what they’d wanted.

At the age of twelve my mother was hit by a car, driven by a woman who was distracted. I felt like a character in a feverish stage tragedy. I didn’t trust my friends enough to talk to them about it. I resented them when they were absent and I had no one to sit with. It emptied me out, not knowing what each day would bring.

Life wasn’t all bad, if that comfort’s worth anything in the face of unnecessary suffering. In the middle of my four year cycles, there were always short periods of renewal. There were windows of time, about two years in length, when my beauty was vibrant and my personality was infectious. But when that renewal ended, a melodrama would befall me that alienated me from the people I’d grown fond of. Birth and decay, birth and decay.

By the age of sixteen I’d been thriving for about two years. We moved to Atlanta. I was surprised that people were kind to me. They might even have believed in me — my talents, my ability to love. Even though I was probably stiff as hell from keeping up the charade I now understand as masking. This filled me with both joy and dread, but I embraced this change, hopeful to be proven wrong about all things falling to shit.

But soon my life soured again. My short-lived boyfriend whose personality changed after we claimed each other betrayed me. I don’t know exactly how he went about it, but he must have told people about my body, including parts he’d never seen. Some people looked at me differently, lost respect for me, validated their feelings that I didn’t deserve happiness or appreciation. This same year also marked the transformation of the high school I attended — beloved teachers were sent or went to different schools, class offerings dwindled, close friends transferred or began to view each other as competition, adults with hardened hearts dismissed our potential. Maybe I was cursed. Maybe this was hell. Newly embittered, I looked at everyone differently. I filled my college applications with out-of-state schools. Surely there was somewhere better to be, and I’d just had a run of misfortune that would dissipate in a new state on a college campus, right? I would come back to Atlanta in a shiny whole-body veneer, wouldn’t I?

By the age of twenty I was at the end of another boom-bust cycle. The Good Place tv show came out around this time, and I nodded knowingly at every parallel between their Bad Place and mine. I experienced my first (second? how long does it have to last to count?) emotionally abusive romance. And a close-minded man moved into my mother’s two-bedroom apartment, expelling the fresh air. And the love I’d found through writing and performance spiraled into a storm of resentment. My feral honesty became a source of ire. My self-confidence became hubris. I faced assumptions that I only believed in myself, despite all evidence to the contrary. Support was withdrawn and I had to make my own way. I lost all sense of stability, all sense that the world as it was could provide stability. Okay. Better to see things clearly. And if I survived this compounding heartbreak, any love I managed to cultivate would be pure. If I didn’t survive, well, good riddance to the love-me, love-me-not bullshit that was my life.

I survived. At the age of twenty two I reached a renewal that differed from the ones that came before it. The stakes were higher. I was outside of school systems that structured life into clusters of years, and my life was now more capable of looking different from one year to another. I also decided, privately, that if life somehow became more unforgiving than it already was I was going to [redacted]. One way or another I was going to free myself. My life was in my hands.

I’ve always wanted to live. I love briskness and heat, I love to dance, I love humor, I’ve known many pleasures. But back then it was more and more difficult to bear how much people didn’t hear me when I spoke. Person to person. The gulf between the empathy I was expected to give and the empathy I received. Classism, colorism, ableism, queerphobia, all the ego tripping bullshit. People aren’t built to meet resistance with every step, are we?

By the age of twenty four I wrapped my head around my traumas, and the psychologies of people I would hopefully never meet again. I don’t know if I’ve broken out of the quadrennial cycle. The only real difference this time is that I’m not alone, and the people who believed in me two to four years ago have continued to believe in me. There is some love that is enduring, and it keeps people alive.