holding onto spring

i’m back and as existential as ever

San Pancho (San Francisco), Mexico

I’m back after a much-needed extended holiday from real (hello, 13-year-old Lil, painting in art class, listening to Jack’s Mannequin on my silver and blue walkman).

While walking along the ocean with two friends, I listened to them discuss their future — the things they’re working toward and the lives they imagined for themselves, next year, in two years, in ten. The house they plan to buy. The children they plan to have. They have ambitious desires, involving attaining a certain net worth, certain material acquisitions, certain beauty standards. Their lives are predicated upon the belief that satisfaction, perhaps even happiness, is found through these pursuits, this climbing of ladders, and getting to the very top. And that, to them, is the very meaning of life.

They know, it seemed, what they want in life, and they’re well on their way to achieving those things. In the words of my favorite coach, “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” Of course, there is always the possibility that they’ll have the house in Santa Barbara (and in New York and in Marin), the time-share in Vail, the beautiful children, the private jet, the vacations in Italy, the yacht life in Greece, the .1% life, and still find it wanting. But they’re willing to find out. In fact, their entire lives are devoted to finding out — to reaching the good life — their definition of the good life — and then taking in the view.

While these aspirations didn’t resonate with me, they spoke of these goals with such certainty that I couldn’t help but feel admiration — and envy. They just know. Somehow, for as long as they can remember, they’ve known what the good life, to them, is. They’ve always had conviction that their definition of a good life was the right definition. They’ve always known the “correct” choices that would take them there. They know themselves — they know what they value, what they care about, what makes life fulfilling for them, and because of that, they have purpose, and they have agency in their lives.

My life, so far, has been pure, dumb luck. I came to the career I have by chance circumstances (my parents moved to Silicon Valley when I was in high school); a process of elimination (I didn’t enjoy the other tech industry roles I’d tried); maybe a modicum of intuition (I’ve always been drawn to aesthetics and art). But I could have easily had an entirely different career — in journalism (I almost attended Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School); in law (I took the LSATs), in non-profits (I interned at the ACLU), in government (the CIA recruited me while I was in college), in humanitarianism or international development (I worked for several social enterprises and considered moving to Nairobi to work for a payments startup); in academia. I had a fling with designing leather purses; I write in my down time because I don’t know any other way to live. And that’s just my career. My life is littered with ghost ships, with broken sails and missing floorboards, fallen to the wayside.

As Cheryl Strayed writes in a Dear Sugar column,

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

I’ll never know of the life I didn’t have — but it’s imprecise to suggest that these are lives that I didn’t choose. Rather, they became ghost ships more from neglect than from intentional abandonment — though I have hope that Mark Manson is right in his “fuck yes or fuck no” philosophy that that is a choice, in and of itself.

Once upon a time, I was religious, and I believed that God had a plan for me.  In another era, the “everything happens for a reason” narrative would have saved me from myself. The older I get, the less I believe in fate, whether from the gods or in the stars. Now, in looking back, the course of my life might be personified by Timothée Chalamet’s listless, yearning character in Call Me By Your Name — floating in a lake, stone fruit in one hand, dazzled by the light on the water, by laughter that’s both distant and near, lines of conversations, music, books running through my mind, waiting to grow up.

I wonder if my lack of plan — and seemingly, of purpose, is related to my detachment from my emotions. In the past year, I’ve become alarmingly aware that, while my inner world has always been rich and full, my emotional life has been quiet, muted. I’m able to think about, even talk about objectively traumatic childhood experiences — being held at gunpoint in Disney World, being hit by a car walking alone to school in the 4th grade — with passivity, even peacefulness. In an emotionally-suppressed and inexpressive family, I never learned how to show emotion appropriately. Instead, I learned, from a young age, to suffer silently, to turn inward whenever something hurt. When we were long-distance, my college boyfriend complained that I was never excited to see him, when I felt like I spent my days pining for the next time I did. My first boyfriend in San Francisco took me to multi-course Michelin-star meals and remarked that I never seemed impressed, when, at 21, I felt pure awe at the world he had introduced me to. Without a timely, or a decipherable emotional reaction to an event, it’s been impossible to know what I like or don’t like, what makes me happy or unhappy. Instead, I intellectualized life and how I chose to live it; I’m justice-oriented, passionate about matters of morality, reliant on the musings of long-gone philosophers. Now, I’m trying to pay attention not only to how I feel, but to where that feeling is coming from — back to basics.

Or maybe it’s because I’m overwhelmed by all that the world offers. How can I choose? How can anyone choose? As Charlie Kaufman says in Adaptation, “There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go.” I want to believe that, if it one day struck my fancy, I could revisit and revive a ghost ship or two. I want to hold onto possibilities, and by virtue, I want to hold onto not knowing, onto uncertainty, onto ambiguity. “I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.” But what if I’m desperately afraid of whittling the world down at all?

In a zero-sum reality in which we can only have one-at-a-time of everything that matters, saying yes to something is saying no to something else. New beginnings necessitate endings; the act of choosing is also the act of destroying. Marriage is a reminder of the passage of time; birth is a reminder of mortality. I’ve been resistant to “settling down,” to checking off the default milestones, because each chapter is closer to the inevitable end and this is a story I’m rather enjoying, despite its meanders and non-sequiturs. For so long, I conflated contentment with complacency and complacency with decay. Contentment signaled the end of striving — a kind of giving up.

As with my career, I realized my values through a process of elimination. It was easier to discover what I didn’t like than what I did. I felt it first in my body: discomfort, even repulsion — to people who seemed manipulative, exploitative, untrustworthy; to people who showed up as inauthentic; to people who seemed flat or hollow. In response, I began to seek generosity, integrity, authenticity, curiosity, and dynamism.

And yet, these values, in their nebulousness, continue to prolong the ambiguity, to delay making a choice. What does it mean to live a kind and authentic life? What does it look like? How do these values translate into something tangible, something real — into an actual lived life? I can’t critique the lives my friends have envisioned for themselves when I haven’t had the courage to even put a stake in the ground, set a destination, point toward my own north star — never mind chart a course.

Maybe our society is more amenable to the pursuit of certain values over others. Maybe power, status, wealth, physical beauty have an unfair advantage because their pursuit has been normalized, their paths more taken. The shape that a life that honors wealth and beauty is a distinct one — each and everyone of us can imagine what such a life looks like. We’ve been surrounded by their physical representations, indoctrinated into their cult. And for good reason. In a capitalist society, all signs point to wealth — power, status, and physical beauty are direct and indirect routes, often pursued in service of achieving wealth. In our culture, these values have been mythologized; in our society, they’ve been internalized as virtuous. Wouldn’t life be easier if I believed that too?

Reinhard’s home

As I write this, I’m reminded of a very different way of living. Years ago, on the edge of a breakup, I went on a solo trip to Austria and Germany. In Berlin, I stayed at a communal space, owned by an architect named Reinhard. Traveling artists of different stripes came and went, for gigs, for galleries, for wandering. There were always students and beautiful young girls drinking tea and drawing in pastels. One day, I came home after a full day of visiting museums and eating cake in cafés. I ran into two of Reinhard’s roommates in the kitchen. One of them commented that I really liked to be on the go. The other told me about her day: “I woke up and I really wanted to take a bath, but there was no hot water! So I took a big pot and boiled water over and over and poured it into the bathtub until it was full. Then I had a bath. Then I went to the supermarket and got bread and this bio-chocolate,” gesturing toward a block of dark chocolate. She sliced off a piece with a butcher knife and offered it to me. “Isn’t it heavenly?” she sighed. “Isn’t this the good life?”

I’ll leave you with this:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

- Henry David Thoreau