Dearest friend,
Unless you’re in the same time zone as I am or farther out west, I tend to imagine that you receive these letters from what is, to me, the future, and that in receiving this, you are already in what I like to think of as the second beginning of the year, when the Lunar New Year comes around and I feel a little more awake jolting into the start of a new month than I was into the start of a new year. When I was in school, January was a return back to busy routine, to picking up where I left off before the holidays, but now, as an adult working from home, it feels a lot like crawling to waking after hibernation, where email replies come a little late than they would have otherwise and everyone’s still shaking off a little bit of the moody daze that the new year brought in.
That said, how did January go for you? I spent most of mine trying my best to read A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter — which I bought years ago from a flea market and only thought to dig out after I encountered his Paris Review interview — but I say trying my best because even my best wasn’t capable of much in the face of a novel I found impossible to like, much less love. It’s not as if I don’t understand why Salter was popular at the time that he was, though, and why his prose is still considered so singular. I wasn’t entirely immune to his writing style, even if I remain sure, at the end of the day, that I’m not the biggest fan of sparseness in prose. I know I like endless rhythm, not short, precise, staccato sentences. I like flow that sings so much and so well that it feels like it’s drowning you in its current. I think Hemingway is overrated because I think that daring to be different from the majority doesn’t necessarily equate to daring to be better than the majority. And to me, even though I found nothing in this book that was worth finishing it for, James Salter is every bit the all-American writer that Hemingway angered me in high school for being, except lovelier, kinder, gentler in his imagery, in his transitions and his descriptions of human beings. So, to use Salter’s metaphor for the scenery whizzing past in an intercity train ride: has January been like a huge deck of images being shuffled for you, my friend, or has it — as it has been for me — crawling by with startling leisure just short of discomfiting, if only because I might have gotten used to the weeks in 2021 flying before I could even remind myself to keep track of what date it was?
For most of January, I found myself constantly surprised each time I checked my lock screen and realized it wasn’t even anywhere close to the 30th, let alone February. I might have kind of waddled through the middle weeks of the month baffled at how much time I still had, shocked for once that sure, time as we know it is a human construct, but wrestling something intangible into a form that will serve us won’t necessarily make it predictable, either. It can be fun, though, sometimes, to play a little game with life and the world and things such as luck and time, things for which there can never be tangible form except in the ways their results affect our very real lives. Because I think that maybe, as someone whose everyday is defined by a bottomless and unwavering state of anxiety, I am all the more vulnerable to the ways surprises can come without also proving my fears and concerns right — that maybe, as someone so paranoid and overthinking, so cognizant of all the multiple avenues a single detail can domino effect onto, I am also left, at my core, a person who finds immense pleasure in the good sort of surprises. There’s a degree of conceit there, in this game, not unlike how my high school friends used to make it a year-long mission to plan a birthday event for me that I won’t clue into ahead of time. In being so vigilant in how I live my life, maybe I am also telling the world, Hey, I’m watching you. I see every step I make and every step you’ll want to make in response. So when it gives me something I never would have expected because the data and the statistics simply don’t allow for it, such as the first month of the new year being quieter and slower than it has ever been my whole life, I am stunned, even offended, that something so small and inconsequential hadn’t even occurred to me, even though I am, in the grand scheme of things, just some random fallible guy who can’t poker face my way through not knowing what cards the other players have.
That’s very much not a sane thought process to have, is it? I realize that as I type this. Like, it’s not that serious, Sha, just be pleasantly surprised to be pleasantly surprised. And I am. I really am, even though I have done virtually nothing all month except enjoy a complimentary pass to a local podcast festival and contemplate if my cognitive behavioral therapy three years ago worked so well that I am suddenly equipped to suddenly start a YouTube career. And pleasantly surprised is better than being caught off-guard by calamity you could have seen coming, so — something on that about how it’s good to keep expectations low so that the world has the opportunity to rise above them. Only — I don’t know. It feels like I’m getting the short end of the stick here by having to keep my expectations of the world low while I consistently subject myself to ridiculously high ones, but therein is the paradox of living, right? The only way to truly live is to embrace all the contradictions that come part and parcel with having multitudes. Though I’m mostly saying this right now to justify the necessity of holding onto high-functioning anxiety in living a high-functioning life. Sorry.
But speaking of paradoxes and contradictions, I’ve started work on a new season of a Real Life, Professional Working Adult project — which is unbelievable for me to be able to say, because I still don’t know how I managed to get myself to that first season, let alone finish it, celebrate it, take a break from production and tackle a follow-up one altogether. It’s thrilling, because I think so much of my early creative life has been trying to get to a point where I can trust my own foundations to stay steady even as I try every position possible atop it, experiment with pretzel contortions, jump in varying heights all while trusting I’ll land on solid ground somehow. Where working on the previous season of this project was a whirlwind of faking it until I make it and getting as resourceful as possible when I don’t end up making it at all, I feel as if this time I’m getting to experience the high of starting a creative project from complete scratch, from brainstorm to tentative outline to This Is What My Vision Is And The Final Product Will Look Nothing Like It But It’s Good To Have The Vibes Down At Least, without all the stress of also figuring out the logistics and the tiny, frustrating details that take all the fun out of creatively freewheeling. There’s nothing to prove from zero this time, or if there is, it’s only to me and the people working with me. In that, I get to hold onto a lot more fun and a lot less frustration, which also means I can give myself more room to be impulsive, maybe even ambitious, a little insane — and that feels truer to who I am than I have often felt in my professional creative life otherwise. It’s not a bad metaphor for some life milestones and relationships, too, I think, for better or for worse; sometimes, it really does take giving the exact same thing you failed at a second chance to realize how fun it could have been, how much more suited you are for it now that you are on the way to being a different version of yourself around it altogether.
But I bring up this project because one of the themes we are working with this season is the concept of distance. Distance over time, distance within the different selves that you are, distance over physical space, distance between you and another person for whatever reasons. And it’s occurred to me recently that just like how my own hypervigilance has made me vulnerable to good surprises, so has my tendency to only keep a few people close made me susceptible to perhaps not putting distance between myself and the people close to me when I should or could have. In our initial brainstorming session, I remember talking to my editor-in-chief about navigating differences in relationships, particularly ones that, while not anywhere close to being a deal-breaker, still make it more fraught than it can be. At the time, all I could offer was a thought on how, for people who find themselves riddled with anxiety over their relationships, whether acquaintance or Twitter mutual or family, it can at times feel isolating to have to talk about the problems you have with another person, especially if you’re not even sure the problems exist, and the temptation falls on extreme ends of the same spectrum: either you repress the problems so you won’t have to confront someone about it, or you reach such a point of no return with someone that you have no choice but to cut them off completely, with no room for conversation whatsoever.
And I offered it because I’ve been on both sides myself, have been both people multiple times, from good friends to toxic friends to even immediate family. Gradually, though, my patience for this dynamic — by which I mean my capacity for emotional labor in navigating this dynamic — has dwindled, and these days, I tend to refuse to wrestle with my own anxiety alone whenever I have the option to reach out to someone who might be causing me grief, inadvertently or deliberately. I don’t know what that reflects, necessarily, if my social anxiety has simply ebbed over the years or whether this means I am learning to trust my own capacity for conversation a lot more. But if there is one thing I know for certain, it is that I value the relationships that survive difficult (but not deal-breaking, mind you) conversations. It’s interesting because I know I’ve always loved writing dialogue in my fiction, but now that I am older and less prone to replaying everything I say long after anyone else will even remember it, I am also learning to be more accommodating of my own lack of moderation in thinking and speaking, learning to explore my own opinions in conversation with others without needing to perfect or complete them ahead of time, because what good thought, and what good relationship, is so easily perfected? In that brainstorming conversation with my co-worker, I also remember saying at one point that sometimes, though certainly not always, a loved one trying to have a conversation with you, trying to set boundaries with you, is also them trying to continue a relationship with you.
I say that fully as someone who is more than willing to cut someone off if their presence in my life is doing more harm than good, which is its own can of worms, and I am certainly not faultless in the feeding of those worms. But while I am not proud of my own pettiness, I also don’t regret ending the relationships that I did, only perhaps how I ended them. I’m trying to be better, these days, and better means evaluating as much as I can of both ends of a relationship and pursuing a conversation wherever possible, because I know I wouldn’t want to have a clear delineation of both of our feelings and motivations if it didn’t matter to me either way. As a fringe member of a generation who might want so badly to be loved that we compromise on how so much of being loved is also being known, I think that we don’t give enough credit to how the most we can offer to our own relationships is in fact the ways we are most prepared to be ourselves in it. Yes, it’s what we deserve, to be fully human in our relationships, but also — is it not, do you think, also what other people deserve from us? Is the beauty of relationships having someone who accepts you from the first moment, or is the beauty of relationships having someone who will learn alongside you as they learn you and you learn them? Because sure, it’s easy to acknowledge that relationships are as fickle and unpredictable as the worst of life and people can be, but isn’t it the most elementary proposition in logic to remember that for something to be proven as truth, its opposite must first also be equally true? So if you’ll forgive me for bastardizing the law of contraposition in service of this argument, doesn’t it also go to say that for fickle and unpredictable to lead to the possibility of bad, it must also lead to the possibility of good, maybe even best?
I don’t know. There are so many caveats there about how some relationships really are too broken to be recognizable even when we try our best to put the shards back together, or how some relationships come with pain built in even when we are our best selves in it. But all I mean is that if there is a relationship worth trying for, and if it is worth as much for all the good, life-fulfilling reasons, then what excuse do we have to not try? It will sting, in those moments we realize we are not infallible, impervious creatures, that there are people out there with entire lives and entire thought processes who can only do so much with what we give them, because of course they cannot read our minds and of course it is not at all the same as any of us giving each other omniscient narrations on what we are doing, thinking and why. It will sting, because I think even the best people don’t like to be reminded there’s no such thing as being a best person, that those two are perhaps by definition oxymoronic. For me, to be a person is to be constantly changing, and so to be in a relationship with another, whether romantic or platonic or all business, is to constantly change those definitions with and for each other, such that there is no best, because there is no final achievable stage in some life hierarchy.
But maybe that’s to overcomplicate it. It’s only that I think “good” is hard enough, and “person” alone even harder, so the real complexity of being with other people is, to me, in keeping those definitions intact. Sometimes, that might mean acknowledging what someone needs from you to feel like a person; other times, it’s accepting that you have to tell someone what you need because for all that they love you, they have no way of telling otherwise. We are only people, and consistently trying to be good is the best we can be, and that starts with examining our own limits and boundaries, examining where they are adjacent to other people’s, so that distance doesn’t have to mean complete separation. It’s tricky, but you know that. I do, too. It’s not the difficulty of anything we’re afraid of, really, I don’t think. It’s the trickiness of things, the tediousness, the intricacy. But I would argue that often, once we get past our fear of things that might require effort, once something clicks into feeling right if not perfect, very few things in life are difficult at all.
Unless it’s trying to get through a novel that’s really giving you nothing. If you like James Salter, by the way, or Hemingway — then I’m so sorry. I am steadfast in my love, but I also tend to be steadfast in my hatred. Of Hemingway, at least. James Salter is still up in the air, and I’m not opposed to checking out his other work, but — We’ll see.
As always, I am sending you warmth wherever you are, literally or metaphorically, however such a thing will serve you best. I hope February is as kind as it can be to you, and cheers to the new month, whether you are welcoming me in from the future or ushering me ahead from the past.
Your huckleberry friend,
Sha