I am lying in the dark at 5 AM, listening to the sounds of birds chirping and the garbage truck moving up the street, reading Joan Didion. I seem to be a person who circles slowly around various fixations, drawing ever closer; another way to put it would be that my fixations seem to circle around me. Joan Didion is so articulate, so crisp—she has taught me what the word “apologue” means, taught me how to understand that to write is to really be able to think. For the first time I understand why people have personal heroes, which before I always thought of as slightly childish: elevating a normal human to the level of a demigod in your psyche. But I see now that people become obsessed with other people because they’re convinced that they know some secret about life, have some important depth of understanding, that they themselves do not. That’s how I feel about Joan Didion: she understands some subtle but critical fact about life that I don’t quite yet, a knowing that I am approaching or approaches me slowly and steadily, waiting for the right moment to make contact. I know that thinking Joan Didion is cool is like thinking Kate Moss is cool—just the most painfully obvious thing in the world. But her writing really just as astute, as incisive, as perfectly detached as everyone claims. Almost every relationship problem that any young woman (and man, and agender person, actually) I know has faced, including myself, can be 100% resolved by reading her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect."
At 22, I firmly fall into the category of “young woman." (Didion on youth: "One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”) I am starting to understand at least a few things about myself and the world around me; more importantly I am starting to get a sense of the vastness of what I do not and cannot know. I am compelled by the desire to learn more, and not always sure of how best to do it. I have the Feynman quote about learning in the “most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible” saved in my Notes app, and open it for comfort once or twice a week. One thing that I know for about myself, possibly the most obvious feature of my life, is that I compulsively consume books and movies at kind of an unhinged and frenzied pace. Once in a while I get concerned that I read too fast and am not actually absorbing anything at all and really should slow the fuck down, sit with things more, absorb them. But mostly I read for the sheer pleasure of it, because it gives me joy—because I’m interested in facts, narratives, history, philosophy, biology and poetry—because I love to scramble madly just to get a sense of it all. Another thing I know about myself is that I like people, and like to talk and write: I’m expressive. I want to share what I’m reading today, how I feel about it, tell you what you should read next, talk about my thoughts and feelings and judgments. A couple of my close friends consistently prefer to process things wholly internally before saying or sharing anything significant, and sometimes I feel like that might be the right way to be—there was a line I really enjoyed in Taffy Brodesser-Akner's excellent Fleishman is in Trouble about how “quiet, smart people can make you feel dumb just for existing.” But to be so contained, while certainly admirable, is not the method that works for me. I’m interested in exposing my internal life, working things out in the open, sharing and documenting my path. It helps, I think, that I’m not as ashamed of my mistakes as many other people seem to be. I don’t self-castigate; I don’t beat myself up; I am mostly interesting in figuring out how to get better. Which is not to say I’m not self-critical: I worry often that I am too navel-gazey, selfish, irresponsible, callous, overly convinced of my own precociousness, that I don’t work hard enough, that I’m ineffective and willfully ignorant. But I am lucky to feel very loved and seen by the community around me, and to have had parents who have always loved me with an intensity that makes it very hard for me to not love myself. When you love yourself, it’s easy to be gentle with yourself, and focus on what to do next instead of what you’ve done wrong. And there’s so much to do next! The world is wide open. Maybe that’s the true gift of loving to read, loving to write: the ways you love most to interact with the world are accessible to you always, and so you always instinctively possess the belief that the world is within reach.
For some time now I have had this central fear that while I have a lot of promising material inside me, I haven’t quite cohered: I am not quite astute/knowledgeable/competent enough to produce the work that I really want to produce. But even as I write this I understand that while there is truth to this fear, it is ultimately hollow at the center. Because while it’s true that I am still inexperienced and naive, that’s not an excuse for shying away from trying to do what I really want to do: it's just a qualitative fact of my lived experience that I need to keep in me, that in some ways even might help my work be better, more tethered to the stage of life I am at now. It is important to acknowledge reality as it is, not as you wish it could be, in order to properly act. I’ve noticed that the people who I think are best at life are really good at noticing patterns around them and embarking upon movement and experimentation without overt fear of failure. They figure out things they want to do, get better at what they need to get better at, and move through challenges without fear. I am learning to move through things, to understand the impossible joy of being exactly where I am, even when it feels difficult and painful, even when I feel lost. The most important thing is to not get paralyzed. The most important thing is to remember that fear and doubt narrow you, constrain you, keep you sad and anxious and longing for more. Didion on living in the world: "I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment." I think she's correct. So I get on with it.
To reply you need to sign in.