Time

Feeling good about the fact that I've actually kept up with writing every day for 3 days in a row now. Apparently it takes 66 days to fully integrate a habit though so I make no guarantees.

This isn't meant to be a diary so I'm not gonna do "day summaries" unless I don't have time or can't think of anything else to write about, but today was the end of my first official week at my new job, so that's cool! Next week things really ramp up and then we have our first show on Friday, so looking forward to all of that.

Not too much on my mind today — or, I guess, lots on my mind but nothing coherent enough to write about. Also I procrastinated writing this for so long I'm too tired now to be interesting or intelligent.

Trying to take small steps to move myself forward instead of trying to force myself into big changes that just end up overwhelming me. Committing to writing every day is one step. There's a lot I want to get to but I know I can't get to all of it right away. Everything takes time.

Time time time, I'm never sure what to do with it. Half of me is terrified of wasting it or losing it or it passing by too quickly, and the other half wants to do away with it entirely. I guess the things you want to be over right away always seem to take forever, and the things you want to last forever seem to be over right away.

Hopefully learning to be ok with where I am in whatever moment I'm in, no matter what (or when) the moment is.

— Ella

Burritos and Friendship

Requisite low-quality snapchat photo

A quick post today, cause I should go to bed soon.

Spent the day with a friend of mine from university. We got burritos, went to see a fringe show (a silly sketch comedy revue, all good fun), and then spent like 4 hours in a board game cafe playing scrabble, ghost blitz, and concept. A++ recommended.

Talking over our burrito lunch, we decided that doing pretty much anything in life is ridiculous and unreasonable for one reason or another, but nonetheless we all find things that we think are justifiable. The task, it seems, is to find other people for whom those things are also not ridiculous.

Friendship is essentially about finding the people whose specific brand of crazy is compatible with yours.

Work Work Work Work Work

So, it's been a while...

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. 

Back Again?

This blog seems to get consistently sidelined while I'm at school — which, I mean, let's be honest isn't that surprising, I've got a lot of shit to get done.

It's my first summer break after starting university, though, and the combination of now having four months off instead of two, and the verve for getting things done that always seems to be a part of the start of any transition period, has brought me back here ready as ever.

I'm not going to pretend that it's any more likely than usual that I'll actually keep up with any of the things I'm planning on doing this summer (transition-period energy is notoriously deceptive), but I'm sure at least some of it will happen... Maybe the good thing about planning 9 billion things to do is that just mathematically you'll get more done — doing half of 50 is much more than doing half of 5.

Who knows what'll happen, but nonetheless I hope to be on here more often so keep an eye out for that!

- Ella

Where? Here. When? Now.

Prompted, of course, by the result of the United States’ election, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to make art that is of value. If I’m making politically-motivated art, aren’t I stuck between either preaching to the choir or trying to change the minds of people who will steadfastly refuse to listen to me? If I’m making entertainment, aren’t I contributing to the mass apathy that got us into this mess in the first place? Well, to a certain extent, yes. But there’s another part of me that knows that’s not all of it, that there is a way to find a middle ground, and that it’s worth trying to find.

I’ve been lucky enough to have found myself in a place right now where I feel incredibly safe and accepted, but the world is so much larger than whatever tiny part of it I’m standing on. As wonderful as it is to be here at this point in my life, it also means that if I am too lazy or apathetic or afraid to stand up and fight, I can get away with it. And that is not okay. I’d like to say I haven’t been getting away with it, that I’ve been fighting publicly for the things I believe in, but mostly I’ve been making vague statements about my supposed vales, and feeling totally swamped by all the things I don’t understand or know how to deal with. In the past I’ve often found myself romanticizing the notion of having some kind of clear-cut cause to fight for, as if historical movements weren’t just as full of difficulty and misunderstanding and grey areas as the ones we’re facing today. Everything is way cleaner in retrospect. I can look back on things people have done in the past and say I totally would have been a part of this or that had I been alive then — but that’s the thing, I’m alive now. I’m alive during this time, facing these issues, in this world as it is, and nobody is going to tell me what I’m supposed to do about it.

What I do know is that there is so much more I can be trying to learn, to educate myself about, so I can at least engage on some level with the world outside my front door. It is so so so so so easy to do nothing, to keep myself misinformed, disengaged, to pretend that everything is fine. The trick is to accept that there are no sides. It’s not “us” versus “them” because it’s way more complicated than that, and it doesn’t help anyone to turn your so-called enemies into monsters. They’re human beings just like me and we’re all just trying to figure it out. I have to remember that as difficult as it may be it is not in my best interests to close myself off to the people who will challenge me and my beliefs. It’s hard, but I’m trying.

As for the role of art in all of this, well, I’m still working on that, but I think I’m getting closer. I had the privilege of being able to volunteer with Bread and Puppet Theatre and be a part of their performance of Faust 3 for the past few days, and it was an awesome experience. It was like nothing I’ve ever done before and, things being as they are, it felt exceptionally relevant. Although their theatre is very activist/political, it’s rooted in a place of hope and belief in the redemptive power of art — cheap art, specifically, the kind that is taken off its pedestal and given back to the people.
Of course I don’t know whether or not that’s the answer, and I don’t know if that specifically is the kind of art I want to make, but I know for sure that trying anything is better than sitting here twiddling my thumbs and hoping that everything will turn out alright. I believe in rational faith: the balance between critical thinking and hope. I believe in community and love and trying your best to connect with everyone you come in contact with, even the people who disagree with you. I believe in good friends and good food and not taking everything so seriously all the time, but also knowing that sometimes things are incredibly serious, and that it’s important to make that distinction. I believe that deep down, as shitty as the world may be, people are good.

To quote WH Auden (and you can substitute poetry for whatever art you like):

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”

Art can remind us of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. It can take us out of our isolation, our apathy, and open us up to the people around us. Art doesn’t make things happen, but it brings us to the places where they can. And now as much as ever, we need it.

Six Weeks in Montreal

“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

 I moved in on August 27.

Classes started on September 6.

I didn't go home for Thanksgiving weekend — not because I didn't want to see my family, I do! But because I knew it'd throw me off. I'm just now finding my footing here. Things are starting to seem more real, solid.

For a long time when I first got here I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just visiting, that this was some kind of trip I was going on. Finding yourself in a new place takes time, but I think I'm finally starting to grow roots here (or at least heavier shoes). Thinking about it, I think I've officially passed the point where I could go home and have it feel the same way.

It's partly terrific and partly terrifying but I don't really have a place I can definitively say is my home anymore. I switched my saved "Home" location on google maps to my residence here because it makes it easier to navigate, but also in part because this is my home now. Or at least it's where I'm living for the time being.

Home in my head is how I refer to the house I moved out of in August. To the province I was born in. To the city I went to elementary and high school in.

But I know that things have shifted in a solid kind of way because now, when I go home (home back in Ontario) for Christmas, or for summer break once school's over, it'll be a transitory space, impermanent in a way it never was before. My bedroom will be the same as it was when I left, but I'll be different.

This summer, my home in Ontario will be the place I'm staying while I wait to go back to school. When school starts again, home will be whatever house or apartment I end up living in that year. Home is a point of reference — when I say I'm going home after class I mean I'm going back to my dorm room. When I talk about what it was like "back home" I mean the city I grew up in. When I say I miss home, I don't mean I miss a place at all. I miss that time in my life, the people I knew, the person I was.

Soon enough, I won't be able to say that my parent's house is my home anymore at all. I'll have my own place to spend the summers in, and my parent's house will be the place I'm simply visiting, a stop on my way to somewhere else.

I've never really had any desire to settle down and start a family, but the idea of home is something that's just kind of always been a given for me. I know where it is, that single point of reference. Now that I'm starting to realize that it won't exist for me for much longer I find myself trying to redefine what home is. It's not whatever place you're staying, and I don't think it's that Garden State quote about people creating a collective idea around a place together either. I don't think home is a place at all — or at least I don't think it should be. Home should be yourself. If you can become a full person, if you know yourself and are comfortable and proud of who you are, you can be at home within yourself, and you never have to be tied to one place because you are your point of reference. You are your home.

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
 

An Open Letter To The Class Of 2016

I graduated from high school on June 26th, and in the weeks since I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that means. Mostly this comes in alternating waves of excitement and abject terror; a special kind of butterflies in the stomach that has resulted from the realization that most of the things I once held on to as stable and consistent in my life are no longer in place. The roof, all four walls, and the floor of the safe little house I’ve built for myself here have been removed in one fell swoop. To say I don’t feel ready would be an understatement. But I also know that if I only ever did things I felt ready for I probably wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

The scariest part about this whole thing, though, has been my all-pervading worry that I should, by now, be far better at being a person than I currently am. There are so many things I feel like I should have gotten over — my perfectionism, my fear of taking risks, my socially awkward tendency to somehow be simultaneously both overbearing and shy — and as much as I’ve been working on it, it’s hard to tell if I’m making any kind of progress. My growth as a human being isn’t something that can be easily quantified, so as long as I continue to be obsessed with being able to control and understand everything in my life, I won’t be able to shake the feeling that I must somehow be failing.

It’s not that I think I’m supposed to be flawless, but with University right around the corner, I’m terrified that where I am right now isn’t good enough, and even more terrified that I’m never going to change. That there’s some kind of inherent problem with who I am as a person, and regardless of what I try to do I’ll always, deep down, be left with myself.

So, confused and concerned and close to the end of my tether, I did what I always do in this kind of situation: I started to write.

What resulted is kind of my unofficial graduation speech — one last nod to high school before I step out into the “real world”, and a way to reassure myself in attempting to reassure others. I hope it can be of some use to anyone who reads it no matter what stage of your life you’re graduating from, even if it’s just the step between today and tomorrow.

Without further ado:

An open letter to the Class of 2016,

One thing that’s become increasingly apparent to me over the past little while is that high school just kind of… ends. You go to your last few classes, take your exams, get your grades, and waltz out of graduation with a diploma that supposedly signifies some kind of meaningful achievement, and then, well — then it’s the whole rest of your life.

With graduating from high school, as with pretty much every so-called milestone in our lives, we spend so much time thinking about what it’s going to be like that by the time we actually get there it really doesn’t feel as special as we might have hoped. I turned 18 in January, officially making me an adult in the eyes of the Canadian government, but I certainly didn’t wake up that morning feeling any different than I usually do. It was just another day, like every other day, and every other big and little moment in my life that never seem like very much at all while they’re happening to me. The thing is though, all those big and little moments add up to something.

Think about who you were when you started high school compared to who you are now. You’re still the same person, but you’re also someone entirely different. You look a little different — a little older — you like different things, you have different friends, you’re better at some things now (and worse at others). You’re still you. But you’re different.

Growing up doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t hit you over the head in some transcendent moment of clarity and change. It happens day by day, moment by moment, ploddingly, painfully, s l o w l y. But it happens. It’s just almost impossible to notice. Simultaneously never-ending and over in the blink of an eye, we are hedged in at all sides by the inexorable passage of time.

This can be sad. You can be nostalgic about all the good moments you’ll never be able to relive. You can worry about the wasted time you won’t get back, the decisions you won’t be able to change, the things you said, did, were.

You can hate yourself for not growing up fast enough, not learning the lessons you feel like you keep on being hit with over and over, you can wish with all of your heart for things to get better right away, for things to stop hurting, for you to finally find the perfect life you know you’re meant to have.

But we all know it doesn’t work like that.

How it does work is the way it always has, and how it has over these past few years. Think back again to who you were when you started high school. In another four years you’ll probably feel the way you feel about yourself back then, about yourself right now. The things you’re scared of won’t seem so bad anymore, the views you hold will feel outdated, you’ll say things like “I was so stupid back then!”, and “what was I thinking!”. You’ll probably be embarrassed. That haircut! Those shoes!

But I want you to give yourself some credit. Everything looks much easier in retrospect. Right now it’s hard. Right now it’s scary. Right now it hurts like hell. But one day, maybe in four years, maybe in fourteen, maybe in forty; one day it won’t anymore. You’ll have new problems then — don’t get me wrong, it never just ends — but these problems, these fears, they’ll be gone.

I’m never going to be able to find all of the answers. I know that. I know I’m never going to be able to completely understand myself. I know there are always going to be parts of me that will never change completely. But I also know that I am who I am because of all the unique ways I’m messed up. Maybe I’ll always be a bit of a perfectionist, but maybe I’ll also always love socks with funky patterns on them, and use quotes in casual conversation, and skip down stairs, and cry at the happy parts of movies. Those things are as much a part of me as anything else is. We can choose what we allow to define ourselves, and there are so many things that I think define me right now that one day I’ll barely remember. And that’s good too.

Who you are right now is only one small point on a path that goes so far away you can’t even imagine what’s on the other end of it. The trick is knowing that the path doesn’t stop. There’s no big end goal, no glowing mountain for you to reach and know that now, finally, you’ve grown up, you’re all better, all done. What there is, is you. Right here, right now. And the will to keep on going anyway.

I would wish you good luck, but you don’t need it.

Things will change, that’s part of being alive. Whether you like it or not, they always do.And I hope that you are always, always, always growing up.

Love,

Ella