A note on settling
The beauty of living long enough to have myriad selves in the rearview is knowing that all these things make up a life worthy of celebration.
There’s a viral video circulating today where a man catalogs his entire day. He goes to work, works out, plays with his dog, microwaves a meal for dinner, showers, goes to bed, and does it all again the next day. It’s almost startling in its mundanity.
The reaction seems to be, widely, that of sadness. What an empty life this man must have, the replies say. How purposeless it seems to be.
I don’t know. It’s strange that something so mundane, so familiar to so many of us, is worthy of such conversation. Such disappointment.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to sit front row at shows covering Paris Fashion Week for NYLON. I wanted to share a forbidden kiss with the beautiful soccer player I’d had a crush on since freshman year under fireworks on the fourth of July. I wanted to work in the White House. I wanted to wake up in New York and go to bed in London. I wanted so much beauty and drama from the world, the eagerness rested sweet and bitter on the tip of my tongue, and leapt forth anytime someone asked: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
It's been ten years now, and here we are. I’ve taken the train from my trendy Brooklyn apartment into my sleek Manhattan office every day for a big girl publishing job and my name has been in all the magazines I admired as a kid. I’ve sat beside a boy I loved on a grassy hill overlooking the Eiffel Tower and done karaoke into the early morning hours with new friends in Tokyo. I’ve bought a house and adopted two dogs and moved back to my hometown and there’s something to be said for how wonderful it all is.
The stability of my late twenties rests comfortably alongside the restlessness of my early twenties. I wake up at the same time each morning and make myself a smoothie. I sit on the back patio with my dogs and watch them chase squirrels through the yard while I write. I take naps in the afternoon and long baths each evening and call my mom regularly even though she only lives twenty minutes away. I wear fuzzy slippers to check the mail and make polite conversation with my neighbor about the work she’s having done on her house.
Most days, I am deeply and profoundly happy with the life I’ve built for myself. It is simple and slow and fulfilling in a way I never anticipated. I look back on the unpredictability of the years I ran and struggled and slept sporadically and loved recklessly with a kind of fondness that I generally reserve for small animals and babies: Oh, look how happy you are. You don’t have a clue, do you?
But the beauty of living long enough to have myriad selves in the rearview is knowing that all these things make up a life worthy of celebration—the ambitious teen years, the chaotic coming-out years, and the simple and steady early thirties years alike. Knowing what satisfies you is a beautiful thing. Knowing who you are and how you want to be in the world is a beautiful thing.
Sometimes that looks like getting pickpocketed at 3 AM on a train platform in Barcelona.
But most days it looks like writing a book on your back patio while the trees whisper above you and your dogs bark beside you and that’s life.
A damn good one, if you ask me.
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Here’s what you missed on Glee:
Ellie Engle Saves Herself has been out in the world for a little over a month! You can find her wherever books are sold, but my suggestion would be to buy a copy from Bookshop.org. If you use code ‘PRIDE2023’ you’ll get 20% off your purchase through the end of June. Go forth and spread the gay agenda!
I spoke to Alex Chambers of WFIU for the Inner States podcast about book banning, the realities of writing under capitalism, and superhero origin stories, and that piece is up now. Give it a listen!