the real work takes time
each endeavor is meaningful in its own way
A bit of a different essay this week coming to you in the form of a few unedited notes and snippets: meditations on putting in the work & watching Past Lives
Part of the frustration with life in your 20s is that it is highly unstructured. Feedback loops are really long and sometimes non-existent. You’re the only one accountable for yourself. How much effort you pour into everything, how measured you are, how moderate, how extreme.
Effort is hard to measure. It’s become obvious to me that real, meaningful, effort takes a really long time to bear fruit. This can refer to all sorts of work: e.g., internal: confidence-building, developing taste, skill-based: coding, writing, researching. When you’re in the thick haze of hacking away at a goal with no clear reward, incremental improvement is extremely opaque and tedious.
For me this materializes in a couple of ways. Writing, for one. It’s really hard to tell if I’m getting better. Some pieces feel better than others. Sometimes nothing sings. Sometimes I get a glimpse of beauty and hope that I don’t lose it.
Writing has been my constant reminder that you cannot escape the really excruciating part where you train yourself in the art of repetition. The long periods of feeling out-of-depth are necessary. But the craft gets easier, more fluid, and it begins to feel really light and magical at certain points. It’s like when you bike up a steep incline and finally coast down. There’s always another hill, but you’ll never forget the first moment it felt like flying.
Another example. I’ve put effort toward building my confidence a lot over the past few years and it finally feels emergent and… organic. For a while it felt like I was pretending, masquerading, and now it just feels natural to be me. I’m not scared of speaking to new people. And I actually really like who I’ve become (this realization is novel and wonderful! Even with my flaws). Full acceptance continues to be this active, dynamic thing that I reach towards.
I remind myself often: I am very close to the canvas. So close sometimes it’s hard to tell if the individual brush strokes add up to anything beautiful.
But then I step back, and it’s a whole complete picture — maybe messy, but also vibrant and alive. I don’t think anything is wasted: all the failures, the recklessness, the rituals, the persistence. Each endeavor is meaningful in its own way. The small things accumulate. An invisible thread runs through everything.
Some other things: I watched the nostalgic, beautiful movie Past Lives the other weekend and was struck by its simple premise — sometimes we make our choices and live with what we leave behind, moving restlessly with the current.
Your choices can haunt you or they can liberate you. I’ve always wanted to live like the latter.
My life is not a moving memory, it is being written at this very moment. I’m just finding the right language, the right container, for its essence. I hope it keeps transforming, evolving in mysterious ways. I wrote down an observation my coach mentioned this week, sometimes you can’t plan for the long term future, all you can do is make the best decision right in front of you.
There will always be a deep longing for more information, more time. But that information never comes packaged perfectly. Most times you’ll make a decision, a trust fall, and it’ll be years before you can look back with equanimity. I hope when you think back to this time in your life you’ll say oh yes if I could do it again I would do it just the same.
PS: Thank you for reading - if you feel inclined; please like and subscribe. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers :)
PPS: I’m learning procreate very slowly - am experimenting with some placeholders for my sections instead of text (These might change. Please bear with my evolving skill level) and will be starting to digitally paint soon
If you liked this essay, you might like maintenance is hard and things that take time
📚Omens of Exceptional Talent (essay) - “keep doing what they believe is the right thing in the absence of any positive feedback or only negative (even if only perceived) feedback from others”
📚The Eros Monster (essay)
📚 In This Essay I Will: On Distraction (essay)
📚Picasso’s War on Art (book) - wow this is so good so far (I’m about halfway through), highly recommend this if you love art history/learning about mavericks of the art scene
📚 The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 (book) - I love reading about game development/world-building, I think it’s relevant to almost everything
You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Rilke
As a voracious reader and writer, it took me a long time to understand that although to some extent we are writing our story forwards, for the most part, we actually don't really see or understand the story until later looking back. Even then sometimes we're forcing a linear narrative where there isn't necessarily one. The invisible thread does run through everything.
It helps me to think of all of my work as a body of work so that I don't focus too much on any one piece. True for writing and also true for the rest of my life. I am adding to that body of work and it will all make sense from some future vantage point, imagining it all collected in an archive or retrospective, and so each piece matters but also each piece isn't the be all end all.
approaching my mid-twenties, also hacking away at my personal projects: writing, coding, breathing, moving cities. right now i'm daunted by the possibility that my words will not be enough, that i cannot curate my reality no matter how hard i try—so i cross my words out before they even land on the page. but i open this newsletter and it seems as if you always have the words that i need to hear at this very moment. maybe it's time for me to allow my words to exist and my dreams to take space. thank you.