Some thoughts after watching Everything Everywhere All at Once:
و فيك انطوى العالم الأكبر
Evelyn Wang is a woman constantly at the edge of herself, running a laundromat with her husband, exhausted and fraying. She is pulled into a multiverse war when another version of her husband tells her she is the key to stopping a nihilistic force embodied by her daughter. What that force wants is unclear at the beginning. Evelyn jumps between universes, encountering versions of herself where she is a singer, a chef, an actress, a martial artist. Each version is whole in some ways and broken in others. She sees lives she could have lived, choices she could have made, the selves she abandoned.
There is a tension in all of this, a tension between the absurdity of existence and the weight we try to place upon it. Between all the could-have-beens and the what-ifs, between the grief for the selves we never became and the paths we never took. The reasons are irrelevant. It is enough that the weight exists.
It is a story as old as time. I think of the writers I love, haunted by this same paradox. In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes that “to choose is to lose all the other selves we might have been.” Heartbreaking. And yet necessary. Each choice is a fracture, and each fracture carries a reflection of what might have been. Evelyn confronts her fractures in a way that feels almost unbearable, yet she persists.
In these countless possibilities, nihilism seeps in. The voids are wide, and it is terrifying to not be consumed by them. To look into the infinite and not dissolve is an act of courage. This is the terror of choosing, the weight of existence: knowing that every action closes doors, and that the doors themselves are infinite.
بس.. علينا أن نتخيل سيزيف سعيدا
In the throes of all of this -Evelyn and all her selves-, there is her relationship with her daughter. There is inherited guilt and shame, passed on from one generation to the next, until the veil lifts and the cycle breaks. I could write a whole story about this line.
This is a journey through the Self, both alone and in relation to the Other. Each version of Evelyn is a mirror of a life she did not live. And in these mirrors, the reflection is both familiar and foreign. It is easier, in some ways, to despair. Easier to surrender to meaninglessness than to take responsibility, cynicism over compassion, than to embrace the absurdity and still choose tenderness. It is chaos. It is everything, everywhere, all at once.
Each fractured self deepens the dissociation, reflected in Evelyn’s glassy-eyed stare. Yet through her encounters with the selves she had banished, she begins to integrate them. She becomes whole. She does not transcend the chaos; she contains it. She welcomes it. She learns to see the absurd as the canvas for compassion, to see meaning in the acts of care, even when the universe offers none sometimes. She learns to imagine her Sisyphus-self happy.
وفى ألف ليله يطلعوا ألف رحله
مع الخيال وبيسألوا الكنز فين
ما بيعرفوش الكنز بين الأيدين
Perhaps the treasure was always here. Perhaps the infinite choices are not about the lives we could have had, but the love we can give, the tenderness we can offer, the selves we can reconcile.
Do we become whole by closing doors, or by opening them, even to the selves we fear? I don’t know.
There is a radical freedom here. The freedom to hold the absurd and still act. To carry the boulder and still find joy. To love amidst chaos. To exist as both fragment and whole. Maybe the point is not to escape, not to transcend, but to live with the weight of it all, with eyes open and heart open.
