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This past weekend, I made a moodboard based on my Tumblr from 2011 to 2012. I remember that period as one where I was so completely myself – I was far enough out of high school that the people I’d known then were just ghosts in my mind, and although I was in university, I spent no time talking to anyone and wandered in and out of campus to take notes on my lectures while hardly looking up from my notebook. The result was that I was my own biggest influence – the books I read and media I consumed and where those things made my mind go, with no one else’s expectations or assumptions factoring in. This is who I consider to be the person I was before the world got its hands on me, in Emily McDowell’s words. But it was a unique time in another way, that I was on the precipice between childhood and adulthood. I was not independent, I didn’t have a job, and I dreamed of having my own apartment and disposable income. I didn’t have the agency to do a lot of the things I wanted to do, so I needed to spend my time imagining them instead.
Now I’m 35, writing this from my one bedroom apartment in a 1920s walk-up full of beautiful things I bought for myself, my cat sleeping on my lap as I write and my dog snoring nearby. I have many of the things I wished for then, and a comparatively huge amount of people and potential influences in my life, but I find myself going back to the same mental landscape I had then. I think in a lot of ways, at some point between my late 20s and now, I managed to detach from being excessively impacted by the views of other people in part because I became more accepting of others and myself.
“We’re all just walking each other home” – what this has always meant to me is that we are all marching toward the same end, together but parallel. No person is inherently above or below anyone else, and no one is exempt from the same end we walk toward with each passing day. This weekend I listened to Anna Howard’s latest podcast episode, Expecting the Worst From People is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and she put into words something that’s been kicking around in my mind for a while now:
“I think we have to talk about how normal it's become to express the sentiment that you're losing faith in humanity lately. Even if it's not expressed that explicitly, it seems to be like that current is flowing under so much of what I'm seeing being made online. Like so many posts that echo some version of like no one wants to X anymore, you know, with the original being no one wants to work anymore, but there are so many different variations of that now. Or like everyone is X and no one is Y. And I'm intentionally leaving these fields blank because they're just these templates of like negative generalizations. You can scroll on YouTube for about 2 seconds before you will stumble across a post that's saying some variation of like all of us are lazy, stupid idiots. Everyone is dumb now. Everyone is lazy now. This whole generation is stupid. Like there are these sweeping claims about other people, how they're conducting their lives, the things that they're thinking, the things that they're capable of. And it all really rubs me the wrong way. Like every time I log on, I'm seeing the message that no one is trying. Everyone is apathetic. We should all just give up on humanity because it's a lost cause. And it's very often being projected out by a person who claims to be above it all. I think these are tempting things to believe even though they fill you with this like distinct sense of dread because they either allow you to sit above it and say, "Well, no, not me, though." Like, it's the classic us versus them thing. Or it allows you to say, "Well, I might as well stop trying." Because it gives you this sense of a problem with no hint at how to solve it. And it's just this thing of like, "Not that, that's wrong, that's wrong." And it's like, "Okay, then what are you suggesting?" And look, people that don't care and aren't trying do exist. In fact, a lot of the times they're like unfairly successful. But I fear that we're spending entirely too much time like pointing the finger at other people and saying they're the problem. And I've started to think of faith as a lens that we see the world through. So, I can't help but wonder what happens when we so relentlessly train ourselves to see the ways in which other people are not trying instead of looking for the ways in which they are and deciding to believe in that and reinforce that. I've been thinking a lot about the power of belief lately. I'm interested in what it takes to continue to see like hope and potential and empathy in the face of monstrosity and apathy. It's kind of what Tony Morrison says about evil just not being very interesting. It feels right in time for Halloween that the things that I'm thinking about the most right now and intaking lately are all kind of grappling with ideas of like good versus bad, monstrosity versus morality. And I'm kind of struck by the dehumanization that's inherent in those binaries.” [link to the episode]
I read Franny & Zooey sometime in that 2011-2012 period, and I remember underlining, highlighting, and writing this quote in my journal: “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
I’ve always loved my solitude, but I don’t think I ever considered that the reason why might go beyond introversion and personal preferences and toward a rejection of the desire to influence others and be influenced by them. If everything about our circumstances, community and environment shapes who we are – and we all know how inevitably it does – part of enjoying being alone was me trying to figure out what I loved and wanted when no imaginary audience was critiquing my choices. Another thing Anna said during her podcast episode was, “if we feel that someone is watching us and that someone has beliefs about who we are and what we will become, that someone, whether they’re the audience or the filmmaker, has some level of power over us.” Which makes it all the more beautiful when I look back on the past versions of myself at 6, 17, 21, and realising I still love the same things, listen to the same songs, save the same images, dream the same dreams. I am still using the same blog and Tumblr account with the belief that no one who sees them will know who’s behind them, since the only person I ever shared them with was my mother and she’s no longer here. She loved them, though, because she loved me and knew me thoroughly. And that’s all that really matters to me in the end. If anyone else has ever read this who somehow knows who I am, I will never know about it, and I love that, because I know that everything that has gone into this blog since 2011 is truly and authentically me.
