Penelope At Her Loom by Angelica Kaufman
This is the fourth instalment in a very personal series of letters about a period of transformation and growth in my life.
You can read the rest of the letters here.
We think of myths as old stories, but new myths are being created all the time. There are many books, films and plays from the last century that could qualify as mythological.
Some of them — like The Matrix, Star Wars, and The Shawkshank Redemption, to name just movies — are major parts of our culture.
It’s great that myths continue to evolve and thrive, but I take issue with one aspect of the modern myth: They make it far too easy for the hero to cross the threshold from their old life into the world of the unknown.
When Neo takes the red pill and leaves the illusion of The Matrix behind forever, what is he losing? He has no friends or family we are aware of, no sweetheart he’ll never see again. Similarly, Frodo Baggins is a child-free bachelor, his only friends actually come with him on his quest. Orphan-heroes are two-a-penny in modern myths: Evey Hammond, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker have no (likeable) family they must leave behind to undergo their great adventure…well, Luke does for a beat, until his aunt and uncle are conveniently barbecued by the empire.
If – as I described in my last letter — myths are a metaphorical map for an inward, spiritual journey, then these stories omit a crucial topographical detail: crossing that first threshold is an act of huge sacrifice and trauma — or at least, it was for me.
You’ve waited long enough, let me tell you about it.
If you have been reading The Third Something for a long time you may have seen me occasionally mention C. C and I met at a party in Paris in 2013 and fell in love hard and fast in that perfect romantic way I hope you all get to experience at least once in your lives. We were best friends and creative collaborators: you can see her in my old video essays and even some pieces for The New York Times; I would help her rehearse and tape auditions. We got engaged in 2022, but we never quite managed a wedding. We loved each other right to the end.
The moment it became clear to me that I had a journey I needed to make, it became equally clear I needed to make this journey alone. The relationship we’d built couldn’t contain the multitudes this would demand of me.
The final goodbye was one of the most devastating moments of my life. I sobbed so hard I thought I couldn’t stop. She said: “you were my dream boy”. I said: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
And the next morning I left with my life in a suitcase.
âśą
I now had to reckon with an ugly truth about myself. Faced with a choice, between C’s happiness and my own, I had chosen myself. I had chosen uncertainty over safety, self-knowledge over denial, and in doing so, I had not just broken my own heart, I had broken hers.
I had ripped a hole in the centre of my life, given up love, comfort and companionship — and for what? A future I could not even see!
Writing this letter today, the threshold a little ways behind me, I still look back with grief, regret and self-loathing. I will probably never forgive myself for making the choice I did.
And yet — in that two-contradictory-ideas-both-being-true-at-the-same-time kind of way that seems to define life — I’m certain, right down in my core, that it was the right thing to do. We must choose ourselves. If we can’t fill our own cup, how can we fill anyone else’s?
I’ve thought a lot in the months since about the idea of the price of entry. Nothing in this life is free and to become a new and better version of ourselves requires shedding parts of our old.
Ancient myths and fairytales would often personify this emotional truth in the form of a troll or an ogre, who must be outwitted or outrun. And unlike their modern counterparts, classic myths do acknowledge the sacrifice necessary to go inward. Odysseus spends an entire decade pining for his Penelope, who is equally devoted to her missing husband; when we meet Dante, he is grieving for his late wife Beatrice. In both cases, the heroes are ultimately reunited with their lovers. There will no such reunion for me, at least not in this life.
Two days later, on what should have been our 12th anniversary, I found myself checking in to a dim and sparse Airbnb in the Belgian city of Antwerp. The first thing my host, an eccentric former fashion designer called Frédéric, wanted to know was the year I was born.
“Ah the Year of the Rat” he said. “That means you are very creative, never staying still, always wandering, searching for something new.”
Until another Sunday soon,
