I first started to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in high school, at a time when I was starting to question my physical self, the nature of relationships, and whether a model existed for living that stretched beyond the typical “get a job, get married, have a couple of kids” framework.

Like many other teenagers, I was curious about love and physical relationships. I felt a constant dissatisfaction with my body and was constrained by the outlook of my typical Turkish friends and other females around me, which boiled down to “be really skinny and really selective about who you share yourself with.” (Of course, the sharing part was for after high school. Physical relationships were outside the norm for typical high school students.)

My dad’s atypically permissive attitude compared to typical Turkish fathers also made me more curious about relationships and love. I was allowed to be curious about sex and more permissive with my body—from wearing shorter skirts to having short flings.  It was not something to be ashamed of. It was something to set free in search of experience. It was a positive, a source of vibrant emotion and inspiration.

And my conversations with my dad hinted that he had a lot more unconventional thoughts in his mind about how marriage and relationships could work.

Of course, in high school, I was too devoid of experience to actually understand relationships (or myself, for that matter). I didn’t know about love, jealousy, envy, responsibility, the desire for liberation, or heartbreak (as much as I thought I knew about the latter). I didn’t know about the messy parts of entanglement, family, or the practical matters of managing a household.

So of course, as my high school self read about Tomas' dissociation of his love for Teresa (his eventual wife) from his lust for other women, it seemed neatly compartmentalized and entirely understandable.

I found the way Teresa’s mother downplayed her body entirely understandable and liberating, as well. She was rebelling against the confines of a body that had never reached its potential, that had been downtrodden by those she wanted to hold on to, whose old age and ugliness were becoming a hindrance. That was frequently how I felt about my own body in high school (and for decades to come), always X pounds too heavy. What a liberation to disregard it, to make it equal with that of all other women, to accept the imperfection and humanliness and simply to live in it!

The attitude of Teresa’s mother was the drastic opposite of what I perceived to be my mother’s perception of her own body. My mom was a perfectionist and self-critical to the innermost being of her core. Her constant desire for improvement and hiding what she deemed as “flaws” was possibly motivated by the exact same feelings as Teresa’s mother, manifest in a different way. I felt an inner rebellion towards this degree of perfectionism, this universal premise that “there is always something wrong with you that you have to fix or hide.”

At the time, I yearned to embrace and set free my imperfections. Had I read the book a few years later, and a little more deeply, I could have questioned whether this desire—and the mistakes that my older high school and college self made—were a manifestation of vertigo, or as the book posits, the desire to fall and disappear.  This being is so incurably imperfect, that you must annihilate it.

Regrettably, and perhaps thankfully, my reading at the time was shallower. It was a beautiful story with a beautiful cover of a top hat that delivered interesting questions I wanted to explore at some point. How a woman could be, by herself and in relation to her partners. How her own perceptions of herself, physical and mental, would evolve through experiences. The nature of coincidence and fate in bringing these experiences to life. And above all, our choices and how they would shape our perceptions.

It was after high school, when all the messy parts of life happened, that more things stuck out to me about the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Tomas’ relationship with Teresa, which had seemed so avant-grade at the time, suddenly seemed sad and reactionary. In high school, the earlier context about a bitter divorce and battles over child custody (where Tomas’ story begins) escaped me. In my mid-thirties, I was better equipped to contextualize the trauma of these experiences, however short of a description they had in the book.

His inability to sleep next to mistresses, which has also seemed interesting and reactionary, also seemed sad. Wouldn’t someone want to carve out a little more for themselves, I had to question. Would one not want to fill their life—at least, to some degree—-with people they could feel sufficiently content, accepted, and happy with, so that the desire to escape would elude them at least on occasion? As petit-bourgeois as it might seem, what was so wrong about having a few too many glasses of wine, finishing up a movie too late, and then waking up together to coffee and breakfast?

Not to mention the hurt implicated on others. The book has chapters about Teresa’s nightmares and inability to digest Tomas’ infidelity. I witnessed this hurt also. I won’t write more about this except to say it was painful.

I hadn’t spent too much time on the parts about coincidence and fate in the formation of a relationship, or a life. Back in high school, the possibility of “things aligning perfectly” to give way to at least one very interesting outcome was an enchanting idea. In my mid-thirties, I had to be in the camp of a much more jaded “es koennte auch anders sein.”

I met my own fiancé through a series of coincidences and fit together so perfectly that one can say, it was “so meant to be.” But it could have been different, also. I could have not met him and been a cat lady fixated on yoga and spirituality. He could have been a woodsman, more and more rigidly set in his ways. We could have had entirely different working lives. Whether we are the better or worse for it, who can say?

(And we can’t say, we can never know, is the entire point of the book—because we have only one life.)

In high school, the part about vertigo also didn’t particularly jump out at me. The desire for falling. For self-annihilation. I knew what that meant after a year filled with anxiety over my mothers illness, work, and my disagreements with my fiancé over the course we wanted our lives to take. I had horror fantasies about losing everything, my life as I knew it. And the more I thought about it, the more the darkness seemed to wink at me.

Don’t self-destruct.

Finally, I contemplated the most important question in the book for my mid-thirties self: is lightness better, or heaviness? And this question was most obviously manifest in whether my fiancé and I would have kids. I was vehemently against kids. He deeply wanted them. So we were at a crossroads.

On the one side, there was the lightness (or perhaps vertigo). The pull of nothingness. An untethered life, away from my mother, family, kids, responsibility, obligations, a life with lazy, quiet, solitary afternoons. A job, a yoga mat, perhaps a cat.

Then there was the “heaviness.” The weight and  responsibility of a fuller life, with anxiety over bills and mortgages and kids’ schooling.

Since high school, I had (I hope) matured through unexpected illness, financial instability, grinding alone in a city, practicalities of managing a household, and the inevitable entanglement with family affairs, which were a headache even at the most minimal exposure. I couldn’t be entirely sure that the lightness option would come without the headaches, or whether I would be better off for it.

I had also seen enough examples of city parents who managed things effortlessly but also unconventionally (the setting I met them being raves), I couldn’t be sure the second option would be entirely crushing. And just like Tomas and Teresa continuously found their way to each other in the book, so did my fiancé and I. Es koennte auch anders sein, perhaps, but in this lifetime every fiber of my being rebelled against being separated from him—even at the cost of a possibly heavier life, in some ways.

My mid-thirties self, re-reading the Unbearable Lightness of Being in her mid-thirties, questioned the duality of light and heavy. Life is a little more complex than my high school self pondered—things might go awry in the blink of an eye, and what might seem crushing might also be the best possible outcome. We will take a path, hope for the best, and never know whether we are the better for it.

And that perhaps, it doesn’t matter all that much—one puny life, a briefest flicker in the vastness of the universe.