Too often I find myself feeling incredibly overwhelmed and on the verge of tears. Two summers ago, I was in New York at a friend’s penthouse celebrating my birthday. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event. This was going to be so goddamn cool; my normal idea of excitement was reading a book while drinking nice coffee, so getting to be in New York on my birthday in a fucking penthouse (!) seemed completely outside of my notion of reality. And all these cool, shiny, friendly people were showing up too, so I was gearing up to have the time of my life. Instead, there I was thirty minutes before the event, anxious and overwhelmed.
I’ve always struggled with connecting to the goodness in a moment. Starting from middle school, I spent most of my life in a perpetual state of tension. Anything that wasn’t completely certain might go wrong, so I had to be vigilant and obliterate as much uncertainty as possible. So sometimes I turned down grabbing meals with friends or going to concerts and freak out about my subpar English essays instead. And in college, during some of my unhappiest moments, I’d walk around on campus, look at all the people around me and wish I could trade places with them. They looked polished, preppy, and functional. Please just let me be happy, please just let me be like them, I would think to myself. Please let me be someone else.
I’ve chilled out a LOT since I graduated and moved to Austin. Maybe it’s the year-round sunlight or the nice people or that I’m not constantly around other hyper-anxious, hyper-driven people anymore, but I’m proud to say that I’ve only cried a handful of times in the past few months and only twice at work so far (to be clear, you are allowed to find this funny). Being much chiller as a baseline has made it hard to access my high school and college selves; they seem like strangers to me.
To be honest, I’ve also been keeping an intentional distance from my past selves. I might get overwhelmed if I remember all that angst, and it’s easier to block out as much of it as possible than it is to Relive and Heal TM. I wish I knew how to relate to the often self-imposed suffering of my past selves, but I feel scared and helpless when I think about it. That’s why this essay is pretty short — I don’t have any concrete answers here, and I don’t feel particularly inclined to seek them out either. I got extremely lucky in leaving the burning house of my previous internal state once. I’m not about to risk entering the flames without any protective gear on any time soon.
For the most part though, I’m incredibly glad I can’t relate to my past selves. I was on a call recently with someone I hadn’t spoken to in many months. She was shocked by how composed and put together I seemed. I used to cry inconsolably to her about my family and career prospects, and it used to be hard for her to support me sometimes because I felt I would feel so goddamn much. Even the thought of entering finance would send me spiraling, and now I was mentioning working long hours at a trading firm without any agitation. She was so fucking delighted for me that I improved on so many axes of my life.
I guess if I could plant seeds for my past selves, I’d say the following: you have many more choices than you think. Yes, you probably have a predisposition for thinking that candles will burn down entire cities and for worrying about being old and withered in your twenties (I had a running joke when I was 22 that I’d be old and withered at age 23), but the ability to find at least one non-shitty thing in the present is a skill you can cultivate. You CAN appreciate your current situation, even if it goes against your innate emo desires.
In last night’s draft of this essay, I had these following sentences towards the end of my draft: “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you. It hurts me that you’re hurting so much, and you’re going to struggle for a while longer. I don’t have any solid conviction that it’ll get better, and I’m sorry about that.” Alex was like, “Valerie, these sentences don’t make any sense. I thought this entire essay was about how you’ve gotten less anxious and improved a lot.”
“But my getting better was a fluke. But in other parallel universes, such as ones where I didn’t meet you, I might not have gotten better, so I don’t have solid conviction that I’m going to get better.”
Alex and I went back and forth for a bit. He said that I was on a trajectory of getting better even in other universes, and I insisted there was no way I could know for sure that I would get better. At some point, I paused and wondered why the fuck I was so tied to not being as happy in other parallel universes. “Yeah Valerie, isn’t that SO SUSPICIOUS?”
Anyways, this is all to say that maybe I could benefit from taking more of my own advice. I will cherish the rest of this weekend before I become a Corporate Goth for the week at work.
Nicely written essay. Reading the second half, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Everything Everywhere All At Once!
yay to life in Austin - I can totally relate on becoming less anxious💛🤝🏼