The Future? Not Hot

My dearest hotties,

I'm afraid I have been in a little bit of a funk. I'm not sure what is going on. I don't feel a lot of motivation to do much of anything. Though I've put on the same exercise outfit three times this weekend to get myself to the gym, I have not succeeded. Most days, I feel like I am on autopilot: though I'm moving through the world, making decisions and doing the things I decided to do, when I look back on my day, all my choices seem foreign and distant. I can't seem to find the usual bubbly passion that undergirds my erratic movements through Manhattan. I know I haven't lost my bazzazz, but I can't remember where I might have put it. I've been, once again, shackled by unfeeling.

I'm not sure when all this started. Maybe, upon returning from Barcelona, my soul, which usually takes a few days to catch up to my body when we travel in fast-moving vehicles, got lost somewhere over the Atlantic, and I've been operating without a key piece of human infrastructure since arrival. Or perhaps my soul is here, but it's too busy wistfully looking to some other imagined reality where she believes, hopes, we might more successfully achieve... fulfillment? happiness? company? identification? than in the reality in which we're currently living.

Along with my moody moods, I've also been plagued by a mysterious ailment that has been affecting my poor body in the form of a lack of appetite, an ongoing headache, nausea, stiff necks, and just generalized malaise that, when exacerbated by too many people and lights, turns into some tangy irritability. I've wondered whether my moods have been caused by the ailment, or if the ailment is contributing to the moods—regardless, I worry that my generalized listlessness won't release me until I've successfully diagnosed both the diseases of heart and mind.

Among all my symptoms, the most mysterious has been an almost biological aversion to writing and language. You likely noticed my silence on the newsletter—I promise you that typing out each and every one of these letters is causing me a pain so existential I can barely get myself to continue. I don't know why, but despite my "primal desire to turn to language when I’m drowning in feeling," there's nothing that scares me more than finding "the right combination of 26 letters [such that] I may be able to hold on to something of this fleeting life for just a moment longer." I'm in a fight against words—they feel too clumsy and insufficient to trust them to hold on to the big, vague vacuum of feeling against which I'm currently wrestling. I am afraid that these little words might trap me; what if they might lock me into a world, a way of being, a choice, that I don't want, that I didn't intend? I feel more comfortable, at present, staring at an empty page.

This aversion to fabricating stillness through language makes a lot of sense given where I am emotionally and spiritually. After the trip, I realized that I have outgrown a good deal of the choices I have made in life. I'm not feeling any regret or resentment toward how I live my life—quite the opposite, in fact. Rather, I've simply been overcome by a recognition that something fairly substantial will soon have to change. But pressed to explain what new choices I might make for my life, I don't know how to respond. I know there's something about writing and creation (of things, please, not people), and gaining more agency over where I am and how I spend my time. I also know that there's something about the people who surround me, what language(s) they speak, and how they inhabit their worlds. And there's something about proximity to family, community, belonging. But beyond those broad principles of inquiry, I don't know where I might go. Yes, I realize that I've brought forward no specifics: that's exactly the point. I (rightfully or wrongfully) trust the world around me to bring me what I need—and, more importantly, I don't trust my own ability to diagnose the problems and prescribe a solution. There's simply too much I don't know.

In the past, my ability to steer by broad, unspecific landmarks has served me well. When I was about to embark on the search for a university as a teenager, I remember stating that I wanted to be near a beach, attend an excellent program, and hopefully not pay too much money. At the time, the place that seemed to most obviously fulfill all these criteria was some state school in California, and I daydreamed of taking a surfboard to class. Little did I know that there was a kooky liberal arts school on the opposite side of the planet that checked every item on my uninformed wishlist and offered much, much more. It would only be a matter of months before NYUAD appeared on my horizon, making my decision about which university to attend unbelievably easy (so much so, in fact, that I didn't apply anywhere else). Similarly, I have long said that I would like to spend my days working at the intersection of people, stories, and language. Naturally, here I am in writing, but this holy trinity has also led me to book publishing—an obvious outlet where these three concepts intersect. That space, however, wasn't quite right for me, causing a bit of a zig and a zag in search of something else to do with my time. Fortunately, over the last year, I've realized there's another way to combine those three interests, and it happens to be fascinating to me: psychoanalysis. Will I pursue a career as an analyst? Who knows! Probably not. What's more important is the realization that there are many ways of connecting arbitrarily defined dots. The world's (universe’s? god’s?) ability to diagonally deliver what I ask for continues to fill me with wonder and awe.

So, you can imagine my frustration when I'm asked to be more specific about the ways in which my life should evolve now that I've reached a plateau. And you can also likely imagine how perplexed I am when I encounter another human being who is willing and able to plan more than a few weeks in advance. I don't know what I want to eat for breakfast, let alone what I might be doing in February of next year, so please don't ask me to plan a trip for then. Perhaps most superficial things—my job, home, haircut, wardrobe—will remain exactly the same, but I want to hold on to the possibility that I might be somewhere, or someone, completely different from whom I am now.

(To giggle at the universe for a second: I am currently writing on a lawn at Carl Schurz Park on the UES, and there are two separate people within a three meter range toting BARCELONA-themed accessories)

This all, of course, naturally brings me to the question of marriage. Alright, alright, give me a break, it's just that marriage is on my mind because I am 28 and every weekend, my social media feeds are full of just another wedding or another elaborate proposal. Every single weekend. This weekend it was someone I know from university who talked me off the law school cliff at a party a handful of years ago (and who looked dashing in the pictures, congratulations!). Last weekend it was someone who, in high school, completed his final computer science project alongside me during a month of missed break times. We had a third computer science project buddy, who also happens to be married, though he got married much earlier, before the full flow of this present wave of weddings. I know that this is just the age during which everyone is on the commitment carousel—I was warned about it when I was 22—but holy cow is this real and here. (If any of you reading this are 22, be warned.)

Despite all my other existential qualms, I generally feel pretty comfortable in my position as a "singling, mingling young adult in New York City." I haven't really met anyone with whom I'm excited to share in the trials and travails of partnership. I've learned to enjoy my own company so much that I'm not easily wooed by the idea of disrupting that peace for the sake of not being alone. Sure, there are moments when being single stings, but I find that those instances usually only arise when bringing "a partner" is an expectation for a social event. You know the ones: black-tie optional, but please don't forget to bring your boyfriend.

Everyone around me, however, seems to be on a frantic hunt for a partner. At an Oyster Shuckfest I attended yesterday, everyone I spoke to introduced themselves and their fiancés. I was recently "dumped" by two separate people who did not seem to understand that I am in no fit state to commit to anything or anyone, and presented me with an ultimatum that quickly shut down my happy dance with ambiguity—well if you can't commit then I don't want to do this at all. I've also met countless people who are completely and utterly besotted by the idea that they must marry the next person they date. Is this really how we want to be living? As comfortable as I've come to feel about my "condition" as a single person, I do sometimes lose equilibrium and worry that perhaps I am missing out on a critical moment to snatch someone off the dance floor. What if there's no one left on the other side of this wave?, my illogical brain probes, What if I am left with the dregs?

Last week, I finished reading Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. I was struck by Carson's examination of the damage that both desire and writing commit to real life as a result of misapprehension: both desire and writing seek to have, hold, grasp something that cannot, by its nature, be possessed. This apprehension takes place through an attempt to control time. The lover, besotted by desire, is entirely consumed with the now, doing anything in their power to make that "now" last forever. The writer does something similar: they use words to attempt to crystallize the "now" in language, and hold on to fleeting moments just a second longer.

Carson arrives at this argument through an analysis of a speech by Lysias, in which he seeks to displace common preconceptions about love by proposing an alternative relationship to time that allows a person to sidestep the immediacy that a lover may experience in Eros. According to Lysias, the lover damages his beloved, himself and his reality in their attempt to hold on to the now because they become unwilling to accept change. So, as a response, Lysias proposes that we step into the perspective of the future: the acceptance of the inevitable end of love allows us to become what he calls the nonlover. The nonlover, no longer obsessed with the now, can confront all Erotic encounters with a knowledge that everything will end, so they no longer experience a need to keep things exactly as they are. The nonlover can, according to Lysias, remain a master of themselves.

As I read, I found myself increasingly seduced by the position of the nonlover. I want to remain master of myself; I have no interest in starting a fight with time that I know I am going to lose. The times that I have found myself inhabiting the position of the lover have been moments of complete madness, obsession. Fun, sure, but no one emerged unscathed from that experience, least of all me. I connected what I understood of Lysias' lover with my experience of the two people who recently requested my commitment and inflicted in me the opposite effect they sought: repulsion (the Ick, so they say). I thought that they had exposed themselves as lovers for the way that they tried to exert control over me (and the now?) by resorting to language as a way of creating certainty about the nature of our relationship and its direction. However, as I sit with Carson's words, I see how my understanding of apprehension was incorrect—to apprehend isn’t the same as control. What the lover wants from the now isn't about restriction or boundaries, but rather the opposite: a boundless, free, unending now.

I think my ailment has something to do with the fact that I'm spending far too much time standing in the future, thereby sidestepping the present. I have become the nonlover, perhaps unintentionally, lured by the comfortable stasis of stoicism. But unfortunately, I've now been trapped by a future that I can't stop thinking about. Since returning from Barcelona, I haven't allowed myself to sit, comfortably, in this now; what if I lose sight of the dreams I dreamed over there? What if I forget that I want to be there more than I want to be here? I'm terrified by the dizzying spell of the now, and yet I'm almost certain that my nausea results from the vertigo one feels when they've spent far too much time outside of reality. I should abide by my own lessons and allow myself to just be.

To close, since in the United States today marks the beginning of white pant season, I bring to you a confession. I've been putting off my inauguration of Hot Girl Summer for a lot of bad reasons: I'm tired, this headache, the nausea, it's so far, so expensive, I don't want to drink. I didn't realize, until this moment, that this is probably just another symptom to add to the magical bag of medical mysteries I've been carrying around all week: Hot Girl Summer asks us to be here, now, silly in the sunshine. Hot Girl Summer is a moment for lovers, not nonlovers. Alright, alright, I get it, I get it. I'll do the Hot Girl Summer thing. Here we go.