how to stop running from your life
confessions of a recovering avoidant
There’s something magical about having a trained route home and getting undressed for one person only. Biking through the same street, same song, same speed, predicting every tramrail with eidetic memory. I have been acquiring these little habits of mine – this is the longest I’ve ever lived in any city other than my own, and I’m caught up in melancholia, wondering if this is all there is to me. Early stretching, two eggs on a Friday, a flat white, same old shit to somatically work through that doesn’t seem to go away with time or cognitive restructuring, repeated conversations. Building up things that take sweet chunks of time, not just rapid bursts of mania. When marvel is habitual and the sun sets on the same side of the city, visible from my apartment at an exact 45-degree angle this week, I’m diffused and patient. You couldn’t ease my wonder if you tried.
Life tried to make me unhappy once, twice, more? Definitely more. You see, the mind needs viable solutions to nonexistent problems – a scavenger hunt for truth, a chiropractor’s dream. The rapid fire solution was always novelty. What is novelty? Perhaps avoidance repackaged into something pretty. And novelty, there’s always novelty, more novelty to want; but as you change the bandage without letting the wound breathe, like abandoning your childhood bedroom, and, later, a number of lifeless rentals you’d need about four hands to count on, novelty turns to habit turns to dust and possible infection. I thought it was something bestowed upon me – look, I just can’t seem to stay in one place or be the same person for too long. Ambition’s softened with its fingers macerating in the hot bath, I know I’m not too special, not too ordinary either – somewhere in between. Yes, yes, you can have it like in the movies. Not the pace of the arc or the lighting, but the feeling, surely.
Sensitive women dabble in inferiority, but one thing’s clear: there must be better things to talk about than the internet and better ways to be bored than with your eyes closed, running far.
There’s a word in my native language I’ve always loved – poshlost’. Nabokov best described it1 as pretentiousness of false importance, a certain trashiness in taste or attitude, often defined by a false belief in its own value. The synonymous adjectives would be crass, tacky, or the contemporary cheugy; still, none of those slap you in the face like poshlost’ does. Those of us who take pride in our ability to shapeshift know that when you’ve done enough of that, when you’ve exercised circumstantial touch-and-go to the max, you’re left with a dry shell of an organism – who am I? What do I like? Where do I go? Novelty, in my case, was just low tolerance for the ordinary flow of life, disguised as freshness. And that, my friend, is poshlost’ like no other, when by assuming life imitating art is the only one worth living you have to impose change, or worse, ‘romanticize’ a thing to bear it through. Romanticize my life, why would I do that? I like it how it is, rough and porous. How about we caress things that don’t need to look cinematic to be true? Well, me telling you what to do is also poshlost’, and now we’ve come full circle from a well intention back into poor taste.
Maybe you’re on a mission to collect more grandiose moments. That’s fair. But what does a moment really mean to you? Is it a glimpse of time colliding with attention, or the awkward pause between telling a story and realizing you’ve exaggerated details no one cares about? Kundera told us2 that the world rests entirely on non-return of a moment, therefore everything is permitted and pardoned in advance with lightness – it is in the transitory nature of life that we look at things with sweetness and derive both pleasure and nostalgia from the unrepeatable. In contrast, the idea of the habitual turning eternal would be unbearable for most. The neverending repeat would make any action so burdensome, existence would turn obsolete. We know this deep in our hearts, that the sameness we dread doesn’t quite exist: by the end of it all, everything, including what feels like infinite monotony and boredom, will be illuminated by the longing to come back to where you were – because what looks the same day in, day out blends into hindsight right before you get a chance to do it one more time. Preemptive reminiscing. We miss the body we once hated. We cherish family vacations that were once deemed no fun. Similar days built on repetition and rehearsal will, too, fade out into quiet remember when’s.
The itch to flip everything on its head is there, sure. Stuck in my throat like a wishbone. Try being in the same city for two years! Before I remember. Remember that real magic hides in every fold of routine tasks – when they’re attended to, when they’re nourished. Faced with the intricate dance of relentless ambition and permittance for repetition: whispering change must occur when I feel confined and on the verge of an asthma attack, and it must be something rapid, brutal, firework-worthy, irreversible. But my happiness lends itself entirely to holding time with stillness like it’s the only prize I’ll ever get. It is, in fact, the only one we ever get. Maybe this is what Nietzsche meant in regard to eternal recurrence. Am I allowed to get to know myself through method, not force majeure? Where do I run when there’s just nothing urgent on the table? Now that I don’t want another lover, a change in scenery, more things to mindlessly purchase online, what have I let myself become?
Perfectly content, you’ll say, and I’ll nod in silence, the most fearful state to be. Contentment is puberty’s sibling, it takes some time to grow into. I know exactly where I’m heading, slowly, and also know that each day retracts into the night like a wave exposing the shore. Another wave will follow suit, and it won’t look like this one. It doesn’t bother me how long a thing takes. It takes as long as it needs, as I’m standing right by it. Everything counts and nothing has to give, another bike ride, tramrail, kiss. It’s all just so indefinite and good, golden on the beach and brilliant in contrast. A happy girl is a girl tired of her shit enough to just go ahead and face it, and I was never a good runner anyway.
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this feels like i took a few laps around your brain then came up for a coffee and a cigarette
I think you and I might have the same native language. Also, how dare you write such beauty in a language that’s not even your native.
But in all seriousness, I learned long ago that however much I think I hate my life, it’s mine and I would never be able to settle down in anyone else’s.