Dear Ali,
Back home in Oregon, I run the hills that I trained for races on as a teenager. I’m slower now, but the air in my throat has the same, sweet burn. Plums rot on the ground. Clouds burn off. There are houses where some fields used to be, and yet, so much is the same.
The hills around my parents’ house
I’m the same too. Even though I’m older. Supposedly wiser. I’m coming to see that this isn’t disappointing, a failure to develop or improve. Instead, it’s freeing. Being the same gives me permission to stop being so self-obsessed and neurotic. If I stop looking inward, I can look outward, at other people and places.
I move through the summer at age twenty-six like I did when I was six, and sixteen. Here I am in old sweatshirts. Here’s my toe polish, chipped. I’ve never been good at letting it dry long enough to set. You always leave your jewelry around. My mom finds earrings on the kitchen table. It’s true. I take off bracelets and rings, leave them in-between couch cushions. It’s a bad habit. I’ve lost things this way.
Suddenly I’m greeting strangers on the street (in New York, I’d gotten out of the habit). “Good morning!” I’ve always been pretty friendly. Though I’m already full, I go up for seconds of dinner and dessert. I’ve always had an appetite. I want to stay up late, playing games and watching movies. I can’t, have never been able to. I get grumpy and sad, and fall asleep on the couch.
I had seconds of these *plump* Oregon blackberries.
Oregon makes me more myself. I fall into old patterns, remember old traits, and resume my original way of thinking, my default mode of seeing the world. In his book Being Human, Rowan Williams writes that we mistakenly think of consciousness as packaged and discrete, something we can adjust and improve like a machine. In fact, it’s always shaped by our environments, and our bodies. Over the lake, Mt. Hood reigns like a queen. Blue dragonflies, thin as needles, skim the water’s surface. This scene changes my mind, making it more capacious. Would I have loved to read so much if I didn’t have lovely, quiet places to do it? (That sun-warmed boulder, feet in the river.) Would I have started to write if the stars, thick as paint, didn’t make me so sad?
A recent kayaking trip on Trillium Lake
I’ve been away from home a long time. Many Augusts ago, I left for college. My grandfather, who’s now passed away, picked us up from the airport. I walk out to the driveway this morning; the air smells like dew and new tomatoes. There he is, I can almost see him, in the SUV, smelling of cigarettes, handing me crumpled money. Here I am, in the car, off to change myself. That’s the other thing about places: they hold all the people who used to be there, and remind you of them, and that makes you more yourself too, those thoughts of people you loved.
There are those people: washing dishes in a kitchen, pedaling the bike up ahead of yours. People with their own frustrations and desires and interior lives. Am I observing them? Am I thinking of them as consciousnesses, too, observing what’s wonderfully the same about them?
I’m back West for good, after living on the East Coast for eight years. You’d think I’d be counting the ways I’ve changed, the improvements and education, the sophistication and mindfulness. Of course, I’ve grown up. Of course, I’ve changed.
And yet: those changes aren’t what I’m confronted with. Instead, I am struck by my own constancy. The boundaries of myself. My inescapable history. I get lost on the same roads. My skin swells, still allergic to mosquito bites. In the yard, playing badminton, I want to win. I retreat to read books and write in a journal, rubbing the pages between my fingers. I’ll always be a little absent-minded, and silly, and I’ll never be indifferent to competition, or obsessed with appearance. I’ll always get jealous. I’ll always need to fight it. This combination of nature and nurture—this place, these people—has already done its work on me.
Talk of limitation (I’ll always be this, I’ll never be this) may strike some as defeatist. Of course you can change! Meditate, change your habits, keep a journal, set goals.
Or...give it a break.
In her essay about female optimization, Jia Tolentino writes:
Everything about this [optimizing] woman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it – having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree. The ideal woman can be whatever she wants to be – as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure, or, in other words, of “lifestyle.” The ideal woman steps into a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skincare routines and vacations, and there she happily remains.
What a gift, to reject efforts at superficial improvement, and instead, just to be.
But pure rejection can’t be the end of it. Permission to stop thinking about myself means that I can start thinking of other things instead. This humility—I am who I am; places and people made me this way—is an acceptance of things that cannot change. It’s also a call to focus on all the things that can, the work to be done not on myself, but on the world.
I honestly don’t know how I stumbled upon this Substack series, but I’m glad I did! This essay resonated with me, and it reminded me of two ideas I think about often, and that I always thought were in conflict.
One, I’m 26 and I also spend lots & lots of time on the optimization front. With all the extra time during the pandemic my thinking’s been “I’ll never have this much free time again so I need to use this time wisely.” I feel I have a responsibility to myself to be the best version of me, and that if I live this way I’ll be “fulfilled”. I find myself constantly getting down on myself for wasting time, and I recognize this isn’t too healthy. We should be more accepting of ourselves, like you say in this piece.
Two, though, it reminds me of the idea that all of us have a default setting where we believe we are the center of the universe and that everything revolves around us. We are inherently selfish people, and therefore we have to challenge this type of thinking! Otherwise we’re going to be jerks to both strangers and the people we love.
That’s the battle I have in my head often: I should be more accepting of myself while simultaneously challenging that default setting at every turn. It’s exhausting.
Reading your piece helped me re-frame that thinking.
“What a gift, to reject efforts at superficial improvement, and instead, just to be. But pure rejection can’t be the end of it. Permission to stop thinking about myself means that I can start thinking of other things instead.”
This helped me realize that “challenging my default setting” is actually still really self-centered. The way I’m framing it still comes from a personal perspective: saying things like, “I’m being a jerk right now” or “that was really arrogant of me” when I catch myself stuck in that default setting. Nowhere in that mode of thinking is there room for other people to enter the equation. Your essay helped me realize that there actually is a framing that solves this problem: more kindness. Both to ourselves and others.
Thanks! Also, that photo of the hills around your parent’s house is amazing!