The last post I made here was almost exactly two months ago, and filled with self-described "verve". As you may have noticed, I haven't posted even once since then. I was at least little self-aware, mentioning that "transition-period energy is notoriously deceptive", but I think I definitely misjudged this whole thing.
Both a lot and not much at all has happened in the meantime. Summer break tends to be not an ideal time for me because without the consistency and structure of school I fall apart a bit, but I guess that's why I need to create outlets for myself that give me consistency. It's funny to think that I've already been off school for the amount of time I've always had off for summer break in the past — this whole four months for university thing is weird.
Actually, what all of this has really been hitting home for me is the fact that what I'm living now is "the real world". I know, I hate that phrase as much as the next guy (every "world" is a real one — there's no more or less reality to the experience of high school or university than there is working a full time job), but the part of it I'm dealing with is the realization that eventually I'm not going to be in school anymore. And honestly that's pretty terrifying to me. This of course is an immensely privileged dilemma to have — for some people, work (often at a job they hate) is a constant factor in their lives from a very young age. I've been lucky enough to have just worked various part-time jobs since I was about 15, but it's a whole 'nother ballgame to think about really truly committing to a full-time position over a long term. The way of the world now seems to be that there isn't really such a thing as a single forever career, but even spending as little as a year doing one thing every weekday is a lot to consider. Oddly enough, I think the fact that I've always really loved school 1 is part of what's making this so difficult, because I spent most of my life excited to get up and go to class in the morning. I've never been much of an extroverted or overly social person, so whatever thing I spend most of the day doing (whether that's going to school or going to work) takes up all of my "being out with people" energy. So that's why it's so important for me that whatever I spend most of my day doing is something I enjoy, because I'm not really capable of coming home afterwards and using that time to do other things that expend my energy in that way. If that makes any sense? I can come home and do passive stuff like watching tv or reading, or more self-focused things like writing or journalling, but I can't really go out.
I'm really not sure how any of this will read — part of me thinks I'm just being whiny, but I know this is a legitimate discussion I've been having with myself for a while now and writing it out helps to make some sense of it, I think.
I know I keep going off on tangents here but another thing my experience of this summer so far has been making me think about is how relevant clichés are, and how learning things always seems to happen in cycles. Everything I'm going through — not knowing what I want out of my life, feeling lost and lonely, realizing how much more complicated the world is than I had been previously led to believe — is about as big a "19 year old in her first summer after university" cliché as you can get. I mean this is the shit they write indie movies about. Actually going through it is a lot less fun because unlike in an indie movie, I can't be sure it'll all work out in the end, and there aren't any nice clean plot-tropes to fall into that make sense. If anything, though, the structure I do seem to have is the way I almost always seem to learn things. First something comes up, usually as a cliché, like "do what you love". Then, after enough repetition, I think I understand it. Of course! "Do what you love"! Then I undergo some kind of real-life experience where the cliché applies, and it all falls apart. "Shit! You can't just do what you love, the world doesn't work that way!". And after rolling around in that for a while, I come out the other side with a more nuanced version of the original cliché. "You can't do what you love right away, you have to work to get to it, and even once you're there you'll have to make sacrifices and do things you don't love sometimes, but if you're doing the right thing, the sacrifices will feel justified".
The curveball comes in after that part. Because that part always feels like the end of it, but it never is, because this kind of learning never really seems to end. Inevitably, I end up internalizing whatever I've ended up with and I hold on to that until it, too, is challenged, and I have to angst about it for a while again before finding even more nuance and complication. Some kind of ouroboros of knowledge, infinitely eating its own tail.For me, at least, it's often hard to get out of the looping of it. I want, desperately, to find an ending. An answer. But the only things that stay concrete like that are clichés. That's why they're so simple, they manage to be both true and untrue at the same time.
Right now, for example, I'm as close to "doing what I love" as I can be given my current status as a 19 year old with limited experience who's going back to Montreal for university in two months. I'm working as a production and front of house assistant for a touring Shakespeare theatre company. Hell fuckin' yeah amirite?? Right now that mostly means helping build set pieces, but it's great! I definitely enjoy it more than any job I've had previously (all of which were in some kind of food service capacity, and let me tell you I much prefer being alone in a room with a good podcast and an electric sander, even if my safety goggles keep fogging up). But at the same time it's certainly not an end-goal job. It's a little summer student position, working with a company I love, and a great place to make connections. I'm immensely grateful for it. I also still have no idea what I actually want to do with my life, and I'm not very good at just enjoying things for what they are unless I can make them fit into this ongoing narrative I can't seem to shake, where everything I do is somehow vital to getting me to where I need to be in the future. I know it's more than a little ridiculous (how do you plan for the future you want when you don't know what future you want?), but nevertheless, here I am.
There's an article by Elan Mastai that I read a few months ago and really loved, and I keep thinking about this one quote because it felt so true (and the kind of True that only exists in good writing — how something about the wording of it makes it truer).
"When I was twenty-five, I thought the most dishonest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people change. At twenty-five, I was positive that nobody ever changed. When I was twenty-six, I learned the most honest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people only change if absolutely forced to by circumstances; that nobody ever wants to change, and they’ll do whatever they can to stay the same, until there is no choice. At twenty-six, I understood that you never choose to change. You are changed."
— Elan Mastai, The First Time I Got Paid to Write
This truth is a hard one to reconcile when you want, desperately, to change. As with everything, I'm sure it isn't a hard and fast rule, but there definitely is a kind of real futility in trying to orchestrate the circumstances of your own personal transformation.
I think I'm trying to find a balance between writing as a way to find answers, and writing as a way to uncover questions you didn't know you had. There's a tone to a lot of my older writing, I think, that's based in me using it as a way to justify something to myself. To further secure a cliché that I'm too afraid to allow to just exist, amorphous and unanswered.
So, going forward, I'll be trying to strike a balance. The title of this blog is "some type of journal", so I guess this should at least be getting me closer to that than I have been before. As an aid to my own need for routine, the plan is to write every day. Not necessarily something long — although it can be. This one got away from me a bit but I guess I had a lot on my mind. Either life updates or talking about things that happened over the past two months, or just whatever I'm thinking about and trying to work through. I know it's healthy for me to do that in the kind of venue where I can't spiral out and get self-destructive in my thinking, because here I'm beholden to at least some semblance of coherence and readability.
Anyway, in the service of trying to live in the middle ground, some questions I don't have answers to:
- Is it actually possible to live in the middle ground, without having answers to everything? Or is it only possible to decide on a certain set of answers with which to order your life for the moment, all the while knowing that they are incomplete and must change given new experiences or information?
- Is there a certain kind of sad that just never goes away? Like, the knowledge that things cannot and will not always be good, and even when they're good for me, they're not good for someone else.
- What does it mean to be happy? For real happy, not just-for-a-minute-because-you're-thinking-about-something-else happy. What does it look like? How do you know when you're there? I think I'm talking about the type of happiness that affords a kind of security to existing because even when you're going through a hard time you still have something solid underneath it all. How do you find that? Where is it? Does it even exist or are the people (read: certain adults) in my life who seem to have that, just pretending? And if they are, is it possible to still live a good life? Is the purpose of life happiness, or something else? Everything always seems to point to happiness (or at least eudaemonia) as the purpose of life. Are there other ways of living if that's impossible?
I don't know. Maybe I never will. In the meantime, here's to keepin' on keepin' on.
— Ella
1 And by that I mean I love attending classes. Don't get me wrong, I was exceptionally lucky in my high school experience, but there was also a lot of shit I'm glad I've left behind.
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