To Be or To Be

Lessons in impermanence

A few nights ago I woke in the small hours with verbs dissolving on my tongue. I had been dreaming in Portuguese, metabolizing language lessons in my sleep.

In waking life the pieces don’t come together so effortlessly. I’ve been wrestling with ser and estar. To be and to be. My mother tongue has no equivalent of this disparity. In English we just are or we are not. In Portuguese, as in Spanish and Italian and who knows how many other languages, there are different ways to be.

Ser is a permanent state of being, something that cannot be changed—or cannot be changed easily. Sou a LaDonna. Sou americana. Sou escritora. Sou alta. I am LaDonna. I am American. I am a writer. I am tall.

Estar implies a transitory state. Estou bem. Estou com fome. Está um dia bonita. O ceu está azul. A Filha está na escola. O Marido está em espanha. I am good. I am hungry. It’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue. Filha is at school. Marido is in Spain.

Some things are forever. Some things are ever-changing.

Of course, it’s more nuanced than that. Marriage uses the unchanging ser but is not necessarily a permanent state. Death—which I always assumed to be immutable except in the case of Jesus and zombies—uses the temporary estar like ela está morta—she is dead.

However, if someone has been dead a long time, you use ser. You also use ser in the case of murder, like: She was killed by a hit man.

When I questioned my Portuguese teacher about this anomaly she just laughed and said, Não sei—o português é estranho. I don’t know—Portuguese is weird. (Is like a permanent state.)

I found a person in the online archives who explained the temporarily dead enigma like this: “When we use the verb estar it indicates that a person who once lived is now dead. The point is we show a change of state from alive to dead.”

While going down that particular internet rabbit hole, I found a Spanish speaker who applied the same change of state rule to body weight. Like this: Soy gordo says “I am fat” in a forever and always sense of the verb. Estoy gordo, though, is a temporary physical state. Like eating dozens of cookies at Christmas or tacos in California. You are fat/ter, yes, but only for a little while. As a person currently experiencing a state of fatter-than-I-used-to-be, I appreciate the optimism.

Long before I got stranded at the gulf between ser and estar, I heard poet

Pádraig Ó Tuama

talk about the Irishness of emotions. He said: In Irish when you talk about an emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad.” You’d say, “sadness is on me”—ta’ bron orm. I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while.

I was sad a lot in my 20s. I was tearing apart the religion of my youth and it was a confusing and devastating time. Perhaps the 20s are always a confusing and devastating time, even if you are not lying awake in the dead of night reckoning with all the fallacies you’ve been force fed, all the Scriptures you swallowed whole and without question.

I was angry and I was lost and I was terrified but mostly I was sad. The kind of sad that found Sylvia Plath fascinating not because she wrote so many beautiful words but because she put her head inside an oven, and the fact that she did that made me think she was braver than me.

So I was sad, and sometimes I thought sad was all I ever would be. I made sadness my identity for a very long time. I thought that was how it worked.

When Filha was little and Marido and I took parenting classes down at our local oceanside hippie preschool, we learned about emotional understanding. We learned that children, especially the small ones, don’t understand that this huge emotion they are feeling is a temporary state of being. It is estar. It will pass.

In the moment, a child’s hurt or fear or rage is all they can feel. It feeds fire through every vessel and vein, obliterating all thoughts of safety and comfort. The feeling is the only thing. The feeling is forever. They are not sure they will survive it.

Our job was to be a sanctuary. To hold Filha close and whisper comfort into her hair. To give that body-swallowing feeling a name. “This is anger.” “This is what it means to be sad.”

Names have power. This is what every myth of fae and foreboding teaches us. If you know the name of a thing, you have a key. If you have a key you can find your way home.

Learning the way of words in another language is finding new keys to unlock old truths.

I was sad in my 20s, but I was not made of sadness.
Sadness was on me, for a time.

Sou LaDonna. Estou triste.
I am (always) LaDonna. I am (sometimes) sad.

I think this is how we get up and go on—in the darkest of nights and the brightest of days. By knowing what is fixed and what is moveable. Knowing what we are made of and what we can change.

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