Evil Eye

by Etaf Rum

Time softened, too, when she put the camera to her eye. The world went still and silent as she focused on the present: a single moment. Much like being in the sunroom painting, she felt for a short while that the world was not such a terrible place, that perhaps everything in her life had happened to bring her to this instant.

College and master’s degrees, she scoffed internally. Ha! She thought she’d been empowered. She thought she’d found the path, done all the right things. She thought she would be free.

Not to mention how we’re all running around with our faces in our phones, constantly searching for something more, something better, something new.

Words simplified situations and emotions, robbed them of their complexity.

All these years she thought she’d carved her own path, but now she wondered if she’d just taken the easy way out by marrying a man who was only less conventional on the surface. She had once believed she would break the curse of generations of women before her and start anew. Maybe in a way she had. There was no denying her progress. And yet she couldn’t help but feel that she hadn’t truly changed anything.

“I know it seems counterintuitive,” William said. “But repressing undesirable thoughts and feelings can give them more power over us. Once you’re able to identify and work through them, you may find that you’re better able to regulate your emotions when those memories come up, or even when current events resemble those memories. You’ll be able to separate the feelings more easily.”

“I’ve had a fair share of unenjoyable jobs in my life, and I’ve learned that nothing is more important than loving what you do. It’s when all the magic happens.”

All these years she’d convinced herself that she was in control of her own life. Yet was she? She’d thought she’d find freedom once she left her parents’ home, but she’d been following the prescribed path of all the women before her. Steered by the same fears, confined by the same shame. Except she’d deluded herself into thinking that her life was somehow better than theirs. But it wasn’t, and why would it be? She didn’t deserve to be happy.

She didn’t know, except that she wanted to do work that made a significant difference, that left the world a better place. The thought sounded too foolish and naive to articulate aloud, but Yara was clear that she didn’t want to waste her limited years on this earth in an endless, self-defeating pursuit of money and status, that what she wanted wasn’t only work but a meaningful existence. To live a life that was inspired, creative, free. Maybe that was why she felt a need to travel, to find out what she was supposed to be doing, to discover what else was out there.

That’s why I held on to the past so strongly. I want our identity—who we are—to live on. It’s already enough that our people are homeless and nameless. But our history runs through our veins. We can’t let them take that away from us, too. And they won’t. As long as we continue to share our stories, our history will be remembered.”

Yara painted. She wrote. She sorted through her memories as if she’d been seeing them all wrong, looking through a contorted lens, as if she’d been an unreliable narrator of her own life.

She wrote about how her ancestral trauma had trickled down to her, leaking from her body to her marriage to her motherhood.

“There is no hierarchy of pain when it comes to traumatic experiences,” Esther said. “I know it’s hard to accept that your suffering is legitimate, too, but I promise you it is.”

“Don’t you see?” Silas said when he finished. “You had so many obstacles in your way and look what you’ve done.” He gestured at the painting, then looked at her. “That takes so much courage and strength, you know that? I’m in awe of you.”

In the real world, recovery from mental illness could be a lifelong struggle, like pushing through a revolving door. Progress would be made and lost, setbacks were inevitable, and there was no finish line or picture-perfect ending. Yara had come to accept this now. To stop resisting the uncertainty.

“Our emotions are energy,” Yara continued. “Energy in motion. The point is to move the emotions through and out of your body. When you don’t express your emotions, when you keep your feelings inside, the energy gets trapped. So it’s important to feel emotions and talk about them, because when you keep them bottled in, you start to feel sad and down and heavy.”

Her notebook was an anchor keeping her from shifting off course.

To surrender to the vulnerability of love and allow ourselves to be loved by others—isn’t that the most courageous act of all?

“I’m afraid I can’t teach you the things you need because I haven’t learned them myself. My mother couldn’t teach me because she’d never learned either and . . .” You pause, your face crumpling. “That will always be my biggest regret. Not knowing how to protect you. Instead, I only know what it is to be cursed.”