who you are

to be changed in ways you needed but couldn’t anticipate

Owen Gent: A Beautiful Flying Object Made of White Fabric Floating Just Above the Ground

This is bliss: fistfuls of mustard greens and chard on Sunday mornings, a room that smells like bergamot, Miyazaki and Tarkovsky movies in the Mission’s Roxie, a gnawing nostalgia for childhood. You buy paperbacks by John Berger, Greg Egan, Magda Szabó, and you desperately want a hardcover of Es Devlin’s Atlas.

You’ve been wandering for some time, trying to figure out what you could create for yourself. A pocket of reality that is yours and yours alone.

The questions you’re asking are age-old. The origin of so many reveries, agonies, yearnings, dreams. What to do with yourself? What to pursue? The decision paths narrow as time goes on. You find yourself following a trail deep into the forest, and when you turn back, the road behind has disappeared.

Nowadays you don’t fixate anymore on the pulse of what could’ve been, for the weeds you had to pull out, for the distance and space and light and time. Forward motion is comforting. It’s sorrowful too, because so many parts get reconfigured. Past selves get left behind.

The point was to be changed in ways you needed but couldn’t anticipate. All the things you begged on your knees for and wanted so badly never came true, yet all diversions yielded powerful inner revelations.

Days grow longer. You call home. You spend 3 hours with alcohol wipes and vacuum clean your apartment. You fry up tomatoes in a pan to sweeten them. Your parents say your life is full and you agree. The things you were working toward in silence start to emerge. You wear the lilac coat, ginger and musk perfume.

Lately you believe that to love someone is to be irrevocably changed by them, to carry a small piece with you forever. By extension, to love writing is to be an instrument of attention for the world. To be sensitive to the small, the intimate, the mundane. To open the door to dreams and to let them transform you.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

God, you’re frightfully stubborn. Everyone tells you so! You like problems you can’t solve. You know some feelings are inarticulable but still you keep trying and trying to convey your experience. You’re deeply romantic but wrap it in rationality. You’re soulful, headstrong. You’re mostly playful and only a little serious. What you know is what you’ve always known: who you’ve been is who you’ll never be again.

PS: Thank you for reading - if you feel inclined; please like, share and subscribe. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers!

PPS: This is a creative piece today from writing club - I didn’t edit it much as I liked the… rawness of it? Maybe organic-ness. I’m trying a few new styles over the next few weeks. Would love feedback if you have any.

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

Michel Foucault