I bought a car-- my first real adult purchase, with my own car insurance (that I pay an arm and a leg for, because I am a young twenty-something with no credit history or really any real work experience)-- and all I do in it is sit. While the bank technically owns it until I pay off my loan, I still consider her mine: the place I take calls, take a nap, how steal a drive at 4 in the morning to some trail over an hour away when I could be using the weekends to sleep in instead.
I sit behind the wheel, my head barely peeking above the dashboard, though the seat is as leveraged as it can be, and it feels like I am not in Illinois, I’m not a grad student, I’m not who I am right now, and instead I can be the girl who drove away. I sit in an escapist reality where I get to decide when to start the car, what songs to play, who gets to ride shotgun. Whether I stop or go is completely in my control.
Granted, this could all just be a metaphor about how I feel like nothing is left up to me: that things suck, I’m stuck here and have no agency over what the next few days, much less the next few years, look like, and that the best I can do is stumble around in the darkness until daylight rises. But where’s the fun in that? Where’s the honesty?
The fact of the matter is that at any moment, I have full autonomy in deciding what I do next, and unlike the Markovian Chains that have been taking up far too much CPU on my laptop, I do not have any memoryless properties, and all my present and future decisions are indeed governed, or at least dependent upon, the lessons I have learned in the past. As a result, I measure risks and redefine my Pareto efficient frontier with each decision to make my model all the more precise.
The Econ Bro in me is far too willing to minimize my decision making process to some utility function, and the reductionism and the infatuating quantitativeness is enough to titillate and convince me that decision making should be easy. I clearly define my objective function, I subject it to some feasibility and probabilistic constraints, and badabing badaboom, my future is spelled out in clear letters, and I can box my answer and publish it in my next paper for any suspecting or curious eyes to read.
What my equations fail to include, however, is the elephant in the room: the past several decisions I have made feel like complete failures. And is it the science that was wrong, or the scientist?
Many of the past articles I’ve written have waxed in metaphors and waned about the struggles of young adulthood, and this has quintessentially the same meandering sentences and poor syntax, but I expect with fewer metaphors and more haphazardly drawn conclusions. Without mincing my words: I don’t know why I am here, and it feels silly that there has been what feels like an incredible amount of build up for what I can only summarize now as an anticlimactic disappointment.
For quite a few months (longer than I will probably admit), I have wrestled with this concept of who, with whom, and where I want to be, and asked that all too cliched question, “what matters to me and why”.
Stripping it down to its simplest, albeit very abstract, answers: I want to be happy. I want to be safe. I want to be healthy.
Yup, the bar is on the floor, and yet, somehow right now it feels like I am limboing right underneath it.
But how does one satisfy these three necessities for basic well being with the rhetoric of always trying to be the better version of yourself? That there is only growth through pain? That you have to work hard and earn the ability to even begin pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, because after all, there’s no such thing as a free meal?
So I guess to all the people who say that to grow we have to push against resistance and that we need to constantly challenge ourselves if we want to get anywhere in life: fuck you.
I am sorry that my comfort makes you uncomfortable, that my safety threatens you, that my happiness disarms you.
I want to be learning and discovering and having so much flipping fun along the way, and I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but I sure as heck know that it doesn’t look like grinding day in and day out for some arbitrary idea that I have to relentlessly pursue “being better”.
I don’t want to “be better”! I want to drink life by the gallon and show up every day to see the sun and feel the wind and be around the people I love. I want to feel safe and to have my muscles relax and the tightness in my chest and the soreness in my jaw to go away. I want to sit quietly to eat my breakfast and spend the evening with my friends without feeling overwhelmingly insufficient.
I am tired, and I don’t want to be the friend that always seems to be going through something, or the one that’s understandably dramatic. I want to sit in the beauty of silence, in the stillness. Not waiting for something. Not resting just to get up and move again. A full and complete sabbath that isn’t the weekend reward for six days of work or a pit stop to refuel-- but rest for the sake of rest, no strings attached.