Times Like These
On conveyer belts, cosmic catastrophes, and throwing spaghetti at walls.
I wrote this back mid-July, and therefore is out of date. It’s also less organized as I would like it to be, given that I have not extensively edited it Nonetheless, I believe there may be something of value here, and am publishing it as-is (save for changing glaring grammatical issues).
Dear Addison Rae,
I’m only 21 years old and sometimes it feels like I’ve done everything.
In June, I saw a very harrowing pseudo-scientific tweet (many such cases) that said something like most of our lives start to feel more boring at around 21 because we’ve already done a lot of things for the first time. Which is, to any discerning reader, fake news. For a second, though, I thought, “Thank God.”
I don’t think I need to tell anyone in my life that, up to and continuing to this point, my life has been anything except boring. While other people are praying for something to happen, I just want somethings to stop happening. As Addison Rae says, my life moves faster than me.1 I can’t count how many times I wake up feeling like I’m perpetually being whiplashed by people, places, predicaments. Before I even know what’s going on, it feels like something’s already happened. I’m constantly playing catch-up, and by the time I feel caught up, sometimes I wish I could have done everything entirely differently.
I feel like my life moves faster than me in a literal sense, too: I’ve been on six flights since the start of June, and I am about to go on my seventh, not before going on another two flights before I go to school, and, of course, there are two other flights on top of that are also pending.2 I’m grateful that the concept of “jet lag” is this black box boogeyman in my world of experiences, but it takes a toll anyway to have a sense of displacement even if my sleep schedule is relatively stable.
When I went to the Tower of London to see the crown jewels, they placed me on a conveyer belt, or, moving walkway, to view perhaps the most dazzling and breathtaking collection of diamonds and precious gemstones in the entire world. I never really understood why everyone cared so much about diamonds, to the point where some people even die for them, but suddenly I understood. I really, really understood. I had the privilege to witness something so devastatingly rare and unreachable, but at least I had the privilege to witness it, for however long they’d let me. After what felt like only a moment, and without even moving, I was gone. When I’m in these places, I’m constantly neglecting myself a sense of presence because I’m so aware of how temporary my position is. Even when I’d give anything not to be.
Diamond gazing aside, I’m still trying to take control of my life, which means measuring my conveyer belts. You can’t control how fast conveyer belts move, but you can control which ones you step on. I pretty clearly outlined some of the ways in which I was trying to create more agency in my life in my previous post, Everything is Embarrassing, but there’s more to doing something than just doing “some” “thing.” Throwing spaghetti at walls endlessly when you already know what won’t stick is a waste of spaghetti.
Not getting what you want out of life isn’t just about a lack of agency, but also making the same choices when you know the results. Over. And over. And over. I’m proudly a creature of habit and I’ve never thought of that as being a bad trait, because, for the most part, it’s manifestly innocuous. I like watching the same movies and eating the same food. I wear much of the same outfits day-to-day, and I enjoy listening to the same song for hours on end. But, letting this trait seep into the parts of my life where building negative habits at my age will reverberate throughout my lifetime could enter the tragic-hero territory, whereby it could very well become a fatal flaw that bites me in the ass over, and over, and over. As adventurous as I am and endlessly willing to try new things, I still create routines that may be to my own detriment. For example, eating canned soup every day for every meal is not a nutritionally, nor calorically, complete diet.3
Returning to the same conveyer belts will show you the same things as you move by. You’re the one moving, not what you’re looking at, after all. If a measure of insanity really is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results, then I could have made a solid non compos mentis case in any court.
I also came to the conclusion that I don’t really want things to stop happening, even if my life is, at times, extremely chaotic to be in the eye of. I like the fact that my life is interesting, and really, the things that are most frustrating about my life is watching the same patterns unfold and feeling as if I was powerless to change them, when the truth was that I was just doing the same thing. That’s the point of a pattern: it doesn’t change. It echoes back into itself over and over again, like a myth, the movements of the narrative itself unchanging even through new circumstance. At the same time I was becoming more cognizant of this fact,4 I started becoming really strangely obsessed with Orpheus. I was reading any poem with Orpheus or Eurydice in the name, listened to countless operas, rewatched the same opera over and over (and stopped logging it on Letterboxd for that reason. Soz.), and read endless ancient stories and even the Platonic dialogue sections about Orpheus, for good measure.
In March, my computer was totaled. The computer repair tech called it an “act of God.” No water damage, no malware, no system malfunction. Total detonation and a $1,000 bill to fix it, if I wanted to, of course. I lost almost everything I’d written in the past five years of my life. When I tried to transfer the backups over, for whatever reason, the files wouldn’t open. Some of them I had to do all sorts of fancy maneuvering into folders and renaming files et cetera to salvage them, but a good chunk of them were gone. Forever. Like, forever forever.
I was exceptionally disparaged by this, although I didn’t talk much about it, tell really anyone, or seem upset at all on any observable level. I find that my first instinct when something bothers me in a real, earth-shattering, and psyche-twisting way, is that I act like everything is completely okay. Usually, it looks a whole lot like I don’t give a fuck, or that I think I’m better off anyway, or am having so much fun, or whatever it is. This was no different. For months, I didn’t write much outside of schoolwork. I didn’t even write a poem, which, sometimes is my usual creative process, but this time it was rooted in something entirely different. I just didn’t want to.
I started thinking it was a cosmic sign that I shouldn’t write. There were a lot of good reasons I could come up with for that, namely I don’t feel intellectually mature enough to, even though I’ve always felt that any act of creation, even if it doesn’t see the light of day, holds value. It takes a long time to find a voice that is natural as a writer, a voice that actually sounds like you, and not just is a reflection of whoever you’re reading lately, and I don’t think I’ve found that entirely. I don’t think I should expect to at my age, either.
Ever since I could remember, though, I wanted to write very specifically a novel. A 300-or-whatever-page-something-or-another with a clear beginning, middle, end: a traditional narrative. More than anything else, I wanted to be brilliant in the way that I saw others were brilliant. I wanted to be like my favorite writers, not like myself. I thought to be brilliant required a demonstration that you could be brilliant in the same way someone else was lauded for theirs. I wanted to write something people would be able to compare directly to another work, to enter into a specific tradition. In some ways, I wasn’t entirely interested in being original because I didn’t know that I could be brilliant if I was original. I am still not sure if I could ever reach brilliance, but I started working on something entirely different anyway and took a chance.
I was thinking to myself that I could spend all day thinking about the mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice, so why don’t I? I have all this time, anyway. I wanted to let my passion for that narrative guide me to ask interesting questions about life, death, love, and bravery. It is difficult to invent new instances of brilliance, brilliance which stems from our own gifts, and not by the imitation of others’. I don’t know if what I write will be brilliant, but at least it will be mine. Of course, there are works I’m inspired by. I love the more literary, aphoristic style of essay, and have been reading a lot of it to help me along. In some parts, it resembles prose poetry, or resembles exegesis. Its form feels more reflective of my natural process than anything else I had written, and I felt I was actually using the skills I’ve learned in college to write it.5 I started to let go of thinking about what other people have written or even would want to read, and just wrote something that I would love to read. And, I love reading it. At the end of it, I might even have something publishable. I don’t know if it’ll stick, but it’s worth the throw.
This summer I’ve done a lot, and by a lot I mean probably a mind-numbing and nearly unhealthy, amount of reflecting on what I want to do after college. The first thoughts I had were along the lines of, of course, I want to go get a Ph.D. On the other hand, Ph.D.s are insanely competitive. I like to be realistic about myself and my abilities. I’m not a shoe-in by any means, even if I’m a dedicated and good student who would work her ass off wherever she went. After all, that’s what I have done for the past three years. But, I’ll also be competing with a lot of even better students than I am for the same spots, and I can acknowledge that while still being proud of myself and my accomplishments during college. I’m proud to have come as far as I have as a former high school dropout, and that to have a bachelor’s degree will mean that I can mostly put that blemish on my academic record behind me, which is itself a relief.
In a lot of ways, I don’t feel ready to leave college. I think, for the most part, there are people I’m really, really not ready to leave, and life is about to put me far, far away from them in less than a year, even if I don’t know where that is yet. That’s a gut wrenching feeling. Maybe it’s shameful to admit, but in pretty much all of places I’ve been, leaving the people I met behind wasn’t all that hard. Sometimes it was harder to leave the place itself. I certainly don’t feel that way now. Even in writing this, I couldn’t help but cry. I feel that being aware gives me an advantage to try to take advantage of the relationships that are most important to me, but for some people, no measure of time would feel like enough.
Leaving college isn’t a conveyer belt I can get off of. I’ll be at the end of it as quickly as I chose to get on it. And, sometimes I feel like I haven’t learned anything, which is ridiculous, but mostly it’s because learning so much means I am far more aware of what I don’t know. Reed will surely offer hundreds of classes I would love to take, but my opportunity to take them is soon over.
I feel, in other words, just a little lost, even though I’m not yet leaving and I do have tangible steps in my plan to make life after graduation, no matter what happens, purposeful.6 Writing always helps, producing and creating things that I can actually continue to work on and feel passionate about are always good uses of time. In that way, I feel like I am making good use of my time this summer, and I have ideas about what I’m going to do to make the next year of my life as fulfilling as possible. And, at the end of the day, I still have somewhere to go back to, and time to figure out the next steps, even if I don’t know where exactly I will go from here. That’s a scary feeling.
When you don’t know where to go, return to what you know. There are things I want out of my life and it can be difficult to know exactly how I’m going to get them. Unfortunately for me, returning to what I know means listening to really godawful self-help books or non-fiction7 to replace whatever’s spinning around in my head and putting myself on the treadmill for an hour, then the bike for another thirty minutes to an hour, and sheepishly waving around fifteen pound dumbbells hoping for some muscle tone.
There are a lot of things I need to fix with my life, admittedly. There are a whole lot of different conveyer belts I need to stop getting on. As it turns out, binge-drinking three nights a week is like, really, really bad for you, even if your friends want you to go out.8 I could also use a better sleep schedule. I could use less time scrolling Twitter or Pinterest or Tumblr or Instagram Reels or whatever it is, and more time reading. I could also probably stop ghosting my friends for days on end, especially if I want to keep my friends. Especially if I’m actively ghosting them and still tweeting. Soz.
Overall, I’ve tried a lot of things in my life, and that’s not a bad thing. My life moves fast and that’s not something I can control, but there are a lot of things in my control nonetheless (see above). My experience could even guide me to make better decisions because I have a wider range of consequences that I’ve watched play out. Although my life has been far from quiet by itself, I can also learn from the lives of others. I don’t have to make the same mistakes as those around me as I can internalize the outcomes others have had and apply them in my own life and relationships. My family life lately has been a rocky watch, but learning from it has allowed me to find purpose in the places where it’s painful by creating meaning and messages that I can carry with me throughout my life.
Though undoubtably there are so many life experiences I have yet to have, there are some places and situations in which I really have simply tried everything I could. In situations where you’ve already tried everything, sometimes it’s best to start trying nothing. So, recognizing where to do nothing, no matter how searingly painful that can be, is an integral part of doing something.
My life is going to move even faster than it ever has in the past year as I look to move onto the next chapter of my life, and it’s time to buckle up. Setting yourself up for success seems to be an exercise in throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. A lot of spaghetti is going to fall. But, eventually, something will stick. So I’ll just keep throwing.
Sincerely,
Piper S.M.
Addison Rae is probably one of my favorite people on the planet at the moment. I love that woman. Listen to Headphones On and tell me she’s not a philosopher. Listen to Times Like These and tell me she’s not a philosopher. You can’t, because she is. Plus, just look at her. She’s the princess of the world. Or my world, at least.
Pack it up, Taylor Swift.
Running the math on an average can of soup, even if I ate six cans of soup a day does not meet my BMR, aka, what you need to sustain life. So, I started eating solid food on like, a regular basis. Turns out that I actually really, really enjoy cooking. Pack it up, Anthony Bourdain.
I say “cognizant” instead of learning because, for the most part, I think most of these sorts of general life lessons are fairly obvious and, consequently, avoidable. I believe a lot of people find themselves in situations where we already understand the general principles, but as curious creatures, we like to watch them play out for ourselves before actually doing something differently. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either, I believe that purposefully repeating unhealthy patterns of any sort as a form of self-harm or emotional terrorism to the self is traitorous. I do believe being willfully ignorant (if there is such a thing) or straight-up unaware is also bad, albeit for different reasons.
Coming from a definitively analytical school and training background means that if I were to turn in anything I’ve written so far to any of my professors, they’d probably hand me an F and also a gun to shoot myself with. Still, I’ve definitely used some of those same skills in writing, and when I write outside of college, I like expanding myself by exploring and engaging with different schools and approaches to similar topics even if it’s not what I would find in class. What I’m writing is distinctly literary, rather than academic. However, I think I can still write something true, interesting, and thought-provoking. I feel grateful that I chose Reed because, when you’re looking to break or subvert rules, it’s a good idea to have a clear idea of what they are, where they came from, and why. I chose to study analytic philosophy, if anything, because I my torrid affair with continental philosophy was inevitable… because sometimes the side chick ain’t even a chick. Sometimes it’s Baudrillard, or whoever.
AKA I’m telling you now, I have plans that I cannot share with you right now because the haters will sabotage me. I have plans that I cannot share with you right now because the haters will sabotage me. I have plans that I will share with you right now because the haters will sabotage me. But I got some stuff in the works.
Like, usually of the Robert Greene variety. I’ve listened to Murakami too, though, so I’m not completely unhinged. It’s nice because it’s so engulfing that it shuts off my brain enough where I can just mindlessly walk without the demon voices or whatever getting me. It’s time-tested and has yet to give me brain worms.
It also turns out you can go out without drinking and still dance and make a complete idiot out of yourself if you so desire because everyone else will be too drunk to notice that you’re sober anyway. It’s also way cheaper.