I spent some of today watching this ASMR Youtube channel, it's a young Korean housewife who makes really high-quality videos detailing her daily life, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and highlighting the small joys in her everyday routine. Apart from the fact that aesthetically it's really pleasing, I also think I really connect to it because (at least based on the English translations of her subtitles) it's clear that she's deeply depressed and using these videos to try so, so, so hard to find something that will make her feel happy, or at least good, something to live for, like the sizzling of oil in a pan, her son's little feet standing on a stool, an ant crawling across a tree root, a folded towel. And while that's all and good, it's also pretty depressing, still, to me. I've been following this poet on Instagram and Twitter who is totally awesome, half-Sino, in her twenties, MFA, doing a lot of great creative stuff, loves nature, posts a lot about the tomatoes she grows on her windowsill. And she's friends with Jessica, who's just turned 33 and whose social media is basically the same stuff. Cooking with friends. Swimming. You'd think looking at these posts is really calming and nice, but there's something about it that makes me lose all hope... This life is probably a pretty accurate picture of what my life is going to look like in the coming years, my twenties, my thirties, maybe even after that. Just going to work, doing something creative whether that's for my job or just on the side, coming back and watering the plants by the window and taking a photo of something nice. And that's... just as good as it gets. I mean, it's nice, but that's just it, for the rest of my life, tomatoes on the windowsill. A trip to Italy every once in a while. And I mean it's good, it's good to love the little things, but is that really just going to be how I live, waiting for that next little fleeting thing that will make me feel like not-shit for 2 fucking seconds and grabbing onto that for dear life, until I die?
Thinking now about this quote from Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Rachel recommended the essay after I posted about the poem she'd had in the New Yorker, one of the only TNY poems I ever read when I had my subscription. That poem was called "hammond b3 organ cistern" and the quote from a different essay is this, specifically the bolded part:
Why did my mother kill herself and I didn’t that year and have not? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday, though never during moments of despair. The thought never comes to me then. I ask myself at the farmer’s market when David shows me the black radishes that I use in risotto or when Sarah takes me to the ranch and the horses press in on me so I’m nothing but warmth and breath and their snot on my hair. Is it this? Is this the reason? I ask myself at the rodeo and the rowdy square dance when the rain starts to fall. I don’t mean for it to sound romantic. I have questions about what keeps us alive. I don’t believe it’s a phone call or trying harder. I don’t believe it’s an act of cowardice to take your life. Or that it’s brave. I think it’s the most natural unnatural thing in the world. My analyst said, You have to decide her story is not your story. Even if it’s the last place you know to find her and you really have to say goodbye.
Every time I pass by a pretty flower or smell tapioca when I walk past a boba shop or witness golden hour I'm like is this why I'm alive? Is this why? Is this just what I have to keep waiting for? And this is supposed to be worth it? This is supposed to make it all ok just in this one moment?
I didn't really mean to make this post be about death again. It's pretty embarrassing to be so earnest and vulnerable and sincere, and not just because this is the Internet and anyone that I know could read this even though nobody reads this someone could see it, someone who usually knows me by a Cool Girl reputation I've tried hard to build up so that boys in high school would be scared of me. (I wonder if they still are. Probably not.) I probably couldn't even write it down in private. This is especially true when it comes to talking about other people, my friends, people I think are cool, because god is it not the worst thing ever to want, to feel, to take oneself seriously? Thinking about the part in The Idiot where Selin is mortified to read her story at the magazine event even though it won first prize because "I didn't want anyone to think I thought it was good." (150)
Like how I used to have a mild I'd-be-down-if-you-were-but-otherwise-I-don't-really-care crush on M when we'd banter over Messenger, both measuring our intellectual dicks, and continued to think he was hot even after I was no longer single, but when I saw him again for the first time in over a year after we'd both spent 4 terms at Oxbridge I immediately, suddenly, and irrevocably lost all interest in him. Emily (not abbreviating because I think Emily actually does still read this so it would be weird to act like she needs anonymity due to me writing without her knowledge or whatever, plus, there are like a billion people named Emily just in my life) and I met up with him briefly and when he came to pick us up because we were lost in Downing College I didn't recognise him at first, in that oversized black cardigan, those tight black jeans, those black Dr Martens, that comically posh accent, God, who had he become, I mean really? The point wasn't that he was now a total softboy, since I happen to be quite attracted to that kind of man (I know, I know), but that he'd become this kind of person overnight after having spent years as some nondescript, cerebral, slightly nerdy dude who hadn't seemed to care what others thought about him at all. It turned out that he really, really did, because clearly he'd felt some desperate need to remodel himself based on the latest trends, to change who he was (at least externally, which of course is the most immediate and important facet) in order to please others' standards. Emily and I had very different views on this: she thought that it would be vindicative to come back changed, new, suddenly Cool, and to see the looks on the faces to those who had scorned or ostracised you before. I think that's the worst thing, to give in, because doesn't it show that they, whoever they are, were right all along, that you were wrong and all you had to do was change to be accepted? That what they'd done had indeed hurt you, struck some deeply buried internal chord? I would much rather they realise that I was the one who was right all along, that the things I'd liked were suddenly cool. And I still don't really know what that means, specifically in what ways Emily's and my stances differ and what that says about us. I do know that it means I think showing you care is really, really fucking lame.
All this is to say, again, that I find it so hard to be personal in part because I'm constantly assuming that I have an audience. In a way, I can't really exist without an audience: all of my thoughts only really get crafted when I imagine in my head that I'm saying them to someone, writing them down somewhere, posting it on my blog... otherwise they kind of just float around as concepts, some weird fog with no substance.
Back to California, which is the reason why I was makin this post that has just turned out to be a collection of some of my recent concerns (ie better-phrased versions of my panicked Tumblr posts). I was feeling so listless in part because my experience there was so liminal: a vacation but not; work but not; alone but not; far away but not; my own boss but not... One Monday, after a weekend of allowing myself to do nothing productive since it was "the weekend", I found myself unable to decide precisely what I was going to do for lunch: every option seemed to entail some kind of loss, cost, or reveal some kind of failure, and deciding precisely what to do after lunch was also absolutely paralysing -- I had become Chidi from the Good Place, unable to even move, unable to do anything -- I ended up missing appropriate lunch times and missing the movie that my boyfriend was trying to get me to go watch even though it was a Monday -- it was one of those awful depranxiety attacks where I really just could not do anything at all -- eventually I calmed down enough (after crying in front of the cleaning ladies) to go back down to my room with a bowl of plain tortillas and gear myself up for dinner -- which turned out to be poké, a huge portion of it because this was America, I felt suddenly dizzy and ill and light-headed so I picked out the rest of the fish and threw the bowl away in a trash can outside so the employees wouldn't see what I'd done -- I passed by Trader Joe's to pick up some groceries and try to turn the rest of my week around -- I ran into my only friend and housemate O who was boycotting Whole Foods because of the Prime Day strikes. Later that evening after watching Love Island, O, who was in much of the same situation as me except he really did have a boss who assigned him tasks and expected him to complete them at a reasonable time, had been there for a month already, and also wasn't a crazy dumb bitch who hated being alive, told me that ever since I'd arrived it had thrown him off his groove, because seeing me drift from coffeeshop to coffeeshop had made him realise that he could kind of just dally around too. I was like, "Um, okay, well I had a breakdown today because I'd run out of food in the pantry but also didn't think I deserved to spend money on a lunch. I have way too much freedom." And indeed every morning I woke up filled with emptiness and unhappiness and dread because there was basically nothing stopping me from just lying around in bed all day watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews. Who cared what I did with my time, I was spending half my stipend on this Airbnb and flown halfway across the world just to sit around and do the same shit I'd do back home for free, which is be depressed and scroll on social media. I needed to be working and that had a lot of other complications. For the second time in my life (the first time being September 2018 when I briefly broke up with my boyfriend) I had heart palpitations, or maybe my heartbeat was normal and I was just overly aware of it, but basically, even after I'd cut caffeine, I would just feel my heartbeat all the time and it would drive me crazy and I would just wish it would stop once and for all. This is just to provide a bit more context. I tried to express this jitteriness over poetry but mostly failed.
So anyway, I was increasingly, 'ow you say, losing it, and increasingly crawling into O's room after Love Island to just sit and stare and talk because I could not stand being alone, just really really needed some other human being to be there and absorb all of this energy I had, which was difficult because I had only 1 friend whom I did not know super well and needed to constantly limit myself so that I would not come off as an absolute psychopath. I had to set myself a quota on Depressed Anxious Bitch Hours With O and it was hard because I felt like that all of the time. (I put O through a lot, I felt awful about it but I also just really needed to. But there's a lot there.) One night we were talking and I made a comment about how I'm either emotionally numb or having a breakdown -- but that I doubt the authenticity of my breakdowns because it feels like I'm doing it for attention, but not someone else's, my own. His insight (and thank you God for a male friend with EQ, finally) was: "Do you feel like your feelings don't matter unless it's a disaster?" And I was like, wow, yeah, probably. He asked if there are moments when I do think about myself or prioritise myself, and I said I talk about myself quite a lot when I'm with others, and maybe that's because being-yourself and making conversation is an inherent part of being friends with someone. When I'm hanging out with someone I identify these moments as worthy because I'm socialising, and anything I do within that framework is productive and net-positive because I'm contributing to the strengthening of my relationship with this person. So that brings us back to me existing only really in terms of others, or allowing myself to do so. I don't really know what to do about it though, because I tried "spending time with myself" and "focusing on myself" -- California was basically an experiment of this -- and it fucking sucked, because there isn't really a me, again, without all the stuff I'm doing all the time, so what does spending time with myself even mean, apart from hearing my own heartbeat at night and getting really freaked out and crying?
Going back to the start again. I had a terrible and confusing and highly liminal time in California and I feel like the only way I can make sense of it, and also the best way to feel like it was all worth it, is to write about it and then profit from that, in every way possible. Jia Tolentino says she hasn't got that much to say about her year in Kyrgyzstan because she really didn't take that many notes, and now I'm like, shit, do I have to take notes while it's still fresh in my memory? Or can I just get away with posts and Instagram story archives and stuff? Because I feel like it's much too fresh to start writing about it now, I certainly don't feel comfortable writing about the friendship I formed with O because it feels a bit like a betrayal and also is way too much vulnerability for me. What parts am I meant to fictionalise and what parts am I meant to add and.... I don't know. I guess I was gonna try to take notes but I really just can't, not just because it's traumatic, not just because to put it into words out loud or written down, whether in private or online, feels dirty and crass, but because it's just, god it's just so embarrassing to have feelings, real feelings, about myself and about others, and to write about them, as if every thought that came tumbling through my head was so important that it would be a crime not to publish (loose paraphrase of Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which I saw both on the plane to and from San Francisco), as if I thought it was good. And it's 4:40, the rain has stopped, and I'm still not tired.
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