everything is relative

a journal entry, sort of

Jul 04, 2022

from this morning, unedited. happy 4th of july :)

At some points this year I felt kind of overwhelmed. When my 3 year visa got cut to 1 year, when I started dating again, when I was traveling a lot for work, when I wanted to be completely alone and not talk to anyone for weeks on end. And I felt bad for feeling overwhelmed (there are worse things! I am very lucky! I am not even working as hard as my other peers! These are basic things that normal people can handle!) which of course, made me feel it even more acutely.

I distill it down to the fact that everything is always relative. I’m relatively overwhelmed, relatively detached, relatively disciplined, relatively relaxed. The people I see around me dictate how I gauge every measure of my intelligence, wit, beauty, happiness. It always astounds me how malleable these measures are. E.g., socially: I can walk into a party in SF on a friday night and enter two entire different glowing worlds, just blocks apart. With their own structures, rules, rhythms. Understanding what causes the gap between the different worlds is where the interesting stuff begins.

The challenge is to be able to see that everything is interconnected — everyone’s individual dreams feed into a larger dream — but also maintain some sort of distance. Figure out independently how to value yourself and how to prioritize your life. No one can give you advice on something you’re close to, tethered to, intimate with because they’d only be able to give you advice from one relative state to the other. It’s the same way you can’t give truly comprehensive advice to someone about their romantic relationship because you’re not in it. They always have to trudge through it, figure it out for themselves. The same applies to literally everything.

Carl Jung said: the world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you. So I have to tell the world what I want. Recently I’ve really taken that to heart. There are too many choices weighted unequally. Too many people telling me what they think. The good part and bad part: everything is relative. It’s so hard to tell what’s real.

But here’s what’s real to me right now: When I’m overwhelmed I need to breathe deeper. When I feel love I need to trust it more. When I feel joy knocking against my ribcage I need to write it down. Things don’t have to be so complex, I don’t need to fidget or doubt or compare. I suppose it’s developing a sort of faith: that I have agency. Choice. And whatever I choose will be beautiful in its own way.

-N.

Quote of the Week

I have no advice for anybody except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside, even in places you hate — Jeff Buckley