i'm 23 and annoying
life as performance / time ticks forward / who’s steering this ship anyway?
In the last month or so I moved out of the east coast for good after five years; bleached my hair and dyed it pink; got my first tattoo and fourth piercing (or like seventh depending on if you count repiercings); went to Europe for two weeks; spent four days in the woods with no service or wifi.
(Would you believe me if I told you that all of those things had been planned before I left a three and a half year relationship?)
These days I feel like I’m on a precipice of some sort, like in some way I’ve been living all my life to get here. The conductor’s just raised their baton. The diver’s at the edge of the 15m platform, she’s turned around, she’s bouncing just on the balls of her feet, heels suspended over open air. The timer’s been set and I’m about to launch into a five minute speech that will determine the course of—
—well what, exactly?
And it’s in this sense that I feel like I’m on the edge of something. I’m only going to live the next six years once. We only get one show for the rest of our lives. The orchestra will perform again, the diver will get to go a few more times, and there are almost always more debate rounds to be won or lost, but this concert, this dive, this round—there’s only one, and in the next two hours/ five seconds/ five minutes, this time is all that matters. And I don’t know yet how it’s going to go.
It’s a scary thing, and maybe at another point in time I’d be terrified. In fact this is probably exactly what made me so horribly, often debilitatingly, anxious/ unhappy/ unwell/ etc in high school and college. I’m not sure what’s changed, only that something has, and this uncertainty is now liberating, delicious.
I say precipice intentionally—this mental image is recurring and very specific. I’ve climbed so far up to this cliff; all that’s left to do is launch into the unknown. Possibly to the sky, but also, given the existence of gravity, possibly also straight down into the ground. So like Icarus, maybe, at the moment of takeoff. Maybe it’s a doomed enterprise. But it’s like that one poem1 said—we mostly remember he fell, but he did also fly. I might fall; in fact I most definitely will fall; but right now I couldn’t care less about the fall, because you know that means I’ll get to fucking fly??
I’m about to start my PhD, and you all know how impossible it is for me to overstate how excited I am for that. But it’s not just about that, I think. I think about some of the responses to my announcement tweet, and I remember being surprised that some people read it as a “grit/ determination/ inspirational” thing. If anything, it was about how drastically preferences can change in short periods of time; if anything, the conclusion to draw from it is not that I got here because I refused to give up but rather—well, if five years ago I had completely different intentions, then six years from now who knows what I’ll want?
But that’s the thing, that’s what’s exhilarating, maybe that’s what’s changed. I get to decide, and recently, I’ve been feeling like anything is possible.
I suppose this should also be a love letter to New York City, and to myself, in the same way that probably hundreds if not thousands of love letters to the city have been written—but that’s an entirely separate essay. So suffice it to say for now that even though I don’t live there and never really have, and despite all the archetypical reasons to hate it—the stupid little subway rats and heaps of stinking summer garbage—the city has always, always, felt like a vessel of im/possibility, of magic. (Manhattanhenge, a tinder date explained at sunset in 2018, my first time in New York alone, and so it was, shadows stretching orange and sticky, the sun blindingly gentle as we walked west on St Marks.) Like a place where you can ask for whatever you want and a place where you might actually get it, but first you have to know that you want it, that it’s something you can want to begin with.
I have immense gratitude for the notably-unromantic reason I’ve been able to go to New York so often, which is for work. I’ve gone frequently enough that I know the city reasonably well, that when walking around or taking the subway I feel like I’m cosplaying “a real New Yorker,” whatever that means. And for whatever reason, I’ve internalized that as meaning that I’m a real person, with agency, even and especially in this anonymizing city; I’m meeting friend X for dinner, I’m going to discourse brunch in neighborhood Y, I’m going to the museum to see exhibit Z. Being in New York again for the first time since the breakup was surprisingly reassuring, because while Cambridge, a place I briefly called home, suddenly became strange and unfamiliar, in New York I was still the same me, saw the same people I loved, and in New York I remembered that this was a place where you can make anything real, as long as you’re brave enough to ask.
(Your world can shatter, and you can get up and do it again, again, and again, and again.)
My flight back to Seattle from New York (or more accurately, Newark) takes off around eight, an hour or so before sunset. I’m supposed to be using these six hours somewhat productively—finishing one of the five books I’m in the middle of, catching up on papers from the conference that just happened, editing—but I can’t stop staring outside the window.
I’m not sure why, but I have Grieg’s piano concerto playing on a loop inside my head, and I’m feeling the keys under my fingers, letting the couple of pages from the solo part I learned pass through my hands like water over pebbles. And then I remember what it’s like to accompany this concerto, to play my one line and to blend it with the other violins so that we’re one voice in conversation with the other strings, with the winds and the brass, with the solo piano. What it’s like to have this one job and to do it well, to do it with love; to trust that everyone else will pick up where you left off and to know that they’re trusting you, too.
I’m staring out the window, and I’m thinking about Kernel, and our theory of change, and my personal theories of change, about my friend groups now and in the past and in the future. There will always be people to catch me when I fall.
We’re flying west over the US, above the lower layer of cloud cover, and it almost seems like we’re going nowhere because our surroundings are so unchanged, just clouds in all directions, and yet—at the same time, it feels like even though we’re chasing the sun we might still have a chance of keeping up. The clouds can only be described as pinking, have been for over an hour now, gilded with just a touch of blush on that far side, the side that we’re following, that we’re trying to pass. I know that at some point we’ll lose this impossible race, that the inevitable can only be delayed, and over the course of the next two, three hours, I watch as this elongated golden hour slips slowly, almost imperceptibly, into dusk.
The pink is already starting to wash out of my hair, or if I’m to be more honest, it was always already washing out from the time it was first dyed. I told them not to bleach my roots so I’d have a more natural grow-out, but no matter how well-blended the dye was in the beginning, there’s no way to really preserve the way my hair looked in the first few days, fresh from the salon. I’m still trying to decide if I should get it done again in a few months, not as an attempt to return to how it looked mid June, but as another new beginning. I feel like I’m on the cusp of something but time is continuous not discrete, the precipice itself doesn’t really exist and I can’t always be on the verge of something new, and I guess all I can ask for is—well what, that I stay excited, stay hungry, that I ground myself somehow, that I fly, that I fall, that I put in the work to make it happen? What, now, can I ask for?
epilogue 1
I need to stop writing meta-commentary about what words are worth writing and why—this is my substack of letters to my friends and it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks is useful or interesting beyond me! But I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the need to justify this while drafting. Narcissus died staring at himself—a sentence I wrote years ago, languishing in an abandoned google doc.
So here is the justification. When Joan Didion passed so many people wrote in their tributes that she captured certain feelings in a certain way. I noticed this, specifically that the word capture came up over and over again, and that something about her language, her craft, was what made it possible. I’ve used the word magic in this post already but really, something about language, its ability to mean more than its literal content, is magical to me, and I feel like I know a lot of vocab words, like I could describe something as diaphanous—what a beautiful word—but I’m still grasping for how to arrange these words into what I really want to say. So here I am, one word in front of another, hoping that I’m moving ever closer to being able to do that.
If you’ve read this far thanks for indulging my insufferable early 20s god mode coming of age bildungsroman main character moment :,) I hope to be less annoying in the future
epilogue 2
I did my first ever scooter commute in SF a few weeks ago and all I have to say is that it’s incredibly fun but also that I felt on the verge of catastrophic accident almost constantly and I’m shocked there aren’t more scooter/car related deaths …. I tragically have yet to finish the strawberry sweater vest from last post. I haven’t forgotten about it but it’s just been languishing on the corner of my desk and looking at me with reproachful eyes. Most recently I finished Portrait of a Thief and A Mind at Play. Also check out the footnote I was forced asked to add to my last post.
"the amtrak from boston to ny is otherworldly" yesssss
griefbacon energy in the new york section