To Be Whole

Image by Gemini AI

 

We live in a world that constantly asks us to earn our keep: not just financially, but emotionally and socially. From a young age, many of us learn that to be loved, we have to be something or do something. We become the high achiever, the reliable caretaker, the funny one… We put on a performance to justify taking up space.

In David Grossman’s poignant novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar*, the narrator arrives at a startlingly quiet realisation: “To be whole, it is enough to exist.”

The story follows a washed-up comedian, Dovaleh, who uses self-deprecation, jokes, and hostility as armour. As a little boy, Dovaleh faced much hostility from companions at school and his own father at home. He learnt to walk on his hands in order to escape the punches from his peers. As an adult, he turns his deepest wounds into comedy: he is a stand-up comic by profession. The validation that comes from the audiences in the form of laughter is enough to please him, to give him a sense of fulfilment in life.

Dovaleh is not unlike people who turn their anxiety into witty banter and pretend to be happy. Or those who overwork to prove they deserve their seat at the table. Or curate their lives on social media, presenting a version of themselves that earns approval.

When performance becomes a survival mechanism, baseline existence starts to feel like failure. Unless we earn others’ attention or respect or applause, we feel we are inherently incomplete or unlovable.

The tragedy of the ‘performer mindset’ is that it rests on a conditional promise: If I give you what you want, you will let me stay.

But do you really have to keep paying instalments of achievement or entertainment or whatever in order to keep your license to exist? We don’t have to turn our grief into a lesson, our pain into a joke, or our life into a series of ‘likable’ social media reels.

The narrator of the novel is Avishai Lazar, a retired judge, invited specially to the show by Dovaleh himself. They were classmates. Lazar never harassed or bullied Dovaleh, but he did nothing to stop the ordeal either. Now, having listened to Dovaleh, Lazar understands the man behind the comic. A man who spends his entire life making jokes carries deep within him a truth that is too painful to tell. It is easy to be a judge; it is hard to understand people.

Most people are broken inside. That’s how life is. It fragments your soul into pieces right in your childhood. Parents, teachers, and friends – they all do it, the breaking. Perhaps, that’s how life is designed to be.

But we can be whole without too much effort. Just exist. That’s one of the things that the novel is trying to show us.

Just exist. Here and now. Drop the defence mechanisms. You don’t have to be the very ‘likable’ face on the reel all the time. Let yourself be sad, tired, angry – if that’s how you feel now. Every sorrow doesn’t have to appear like a hearty joke.

Accept the unfinished business. Healing doesn’t require anyone to neatly tie up every trauma with a moral lesson like: I suffered, I learned a lesson, I grew, and now I am whole.

Being whole can mean just sitting with a friend, walking outside, or breathing through a quiet moment without feeling the itch to produce, document, or prove something.

Towards the end of Grossman’s novel, two broken people – Dovaleh and Lazar (whose wife died recently) – sit together in the aftermath of a total breakdown. Nothing grand is solved. The past isn’t undone. But for the first time, there is no stage, no joke, and no audience. There is only presence. And the present.

They learn that they don’t need to perform their way into worthiness. To be whole, it is enough to exist.

 

* I reviewed this novel in 2020: Fragmented People