WHAT New Year’s resolutions? It has worked!
I have become the person I always wanted to be. Days when my self-esteem feels critically low, I can tear through the virtual catalogue of activities, ideas, experiences, idiosyncrasies and interests that I’ve deemed the collective elements of My Life and smile a little because they look exactly how I’d like them to. I’m blowing up singular inside of a cliché: a fabulous single city girl, Brooklyn hipster on tiptoe, intellectually engaged inside a generation that is most devastating where it is least interested. I tell people I am an actor and a writer. I tell people I like Paul Thomas Anderson movies. I sometimes wear crazy clothes into the world and bask in the myriad reactions. I like recreational drugs. I like all the quotes I remembered intentionally for the purpose of putting them in my Facebook profile. Even having a therapist falls neatly and sweetly into the great tome of Who I want to be SLASH (by default) Who I want you to think I am. I am a synthesis of contradictions. I have done the synthesizing work. I own a synthesizer.
For reasons (I’m not sure exactly what they are, only that they exist), having a self that is basically PRODUCT is where the Western World begins. Other people must want you for things in order for you to succeed. Thus, having a self that seems unique in a constellation of billions is critical, especially for artists and thinkers and people who aspire to have their faces rendered in marble somewhere. That’s Darwinian. And having a self that’s constantly engaged with seeking out and reassuring other idiosyncratic, yet somewhat like-minded selves is how we communicate and how we find love, which is also pretty Darwinian, which is to say a habit and to do with Mark Zuckerberg. The idea that preoccupies this Thursday – while I try to avoid serial commas and listen to must-be Neil Young -- is the contradiction that is my synthesizing work, my neat catalogue: I have always thought I was such a loophole, such a success at being a freakish individual even in worlds and fields devised of other freakish individuals. I’ve always believed I was at least special, even when sixteen taught me about boys etc and twenty taught me to feel abundantly horrible on solo Friday nights. But to formula, succeeding at being unique in this world means only that I’ve made myself marketable (or more troublingly, I labor under the delusion that I’ve made myself marketable), and that must be a hollow thing, and limited. How can I really be this fabulous entity of sensible contradictions, this living thing inside a cliché, if I am 1) Made. Working at it, at least by even thinking these thoughts at all 2) clearly kowtowing, even if unconsciously, to some higher social order? Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m driving at the hollowness, stay with me on the hollowness. As of this Thursday, I no longer believe I am “successfully unique”, which is to say, a success. The idea of being “unique” is corrupted by the fact that the world I live in asks everyone to rise to oddity like excellence. The idea that I meditate on my own uniqueness and consciously praise myself for becoming an idea of uniqueness that I (or, someone like Rupert Murdoch) has engineered is also zany, and has very little to do with my real life. So. This leaves me with thesis questions: Why does my society (which I question only as an extension of myself) ask me to synthesize my contradictions? Why am I packaged? Who wants that? What is it to be unique, or special, without agenda – impossible? And, like, you know, what does it all MEAN?
BITE SIZING:
I’m spending New Year’s with my mom this year, for reasons. This will be the first year in at least seven when I will not spend the hours preceding January 1st drinking someone else’s alcohol and being cheerfully loud about things that are forty percent sad. Two New Years’ have passed, in When Harry Met Sally fashion, where I kissed a boy on or around that vital minute.
ASIDE: Now I don’t remember magnifying those midnight kisses to oracle, then predicting signs for how the year to follow might unfold. I sort of wish I had. I could at least chart my progress to present, sitting pretty with some distant age, and decide if the 525,600 minutes times nine (or whatever) indicated a God anywhere. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. But to reiterate, do you see how I catalogued just there? I’m imagining that these disparate events make a whole somehow, and that the whole has analyze-able meaning and the work of analyzing means something and says something and makes me. But why should it? This is why New Year’s is important to the self. New Year’s is random, just like the universe. ASIDE OVER.
I have just told my friends I won’t be attending the New Year’s party at my own apartment in New York that has been “in plans” for three weeks. I need to spend the time with my mama. I don’t need to spend the time with my mama, and the real reasons (alluded to earlier) are these: 1) I don’t want to drive to New York and back 2) I know exactly how this party will go. It will be awesome, and not anything else. These are my best friends in all their hoarde glory, and I know them and they’re safe and there is nothing unpredictable about them moving around in a big group, just like there is nothing unpredictable about your friends or Barack Obama's or Tim Gunn's friends moving around in a big group, and this is neither good nor bad.
And I will be upset to have missed this party. I am an asshole for how I handled backing out. I will be hanging out with my mama, and she will fall asleep at 11:13 and I will drink a bottle of wine alone. And what did I feel then…Ta-da!
If you were interested, I could accurately predict most other things. Such as the future.
The reason this is – or seems to be – is that I feel sometimes like I know my world too thoroughly, which is a complicated disaster and I will explain why. I feel like I know every avenue readily available to me, and I can imagine its fall-out in the short term and the crazy long-term. I am probably not right about any of it but that doesn’t matter at all, because this is my mind, I am a know-it-all, and I think [therefore] I am. I’ve come to a point where I am backing away from good things, things that belong in a catalogue to make me, because they’re too familiar. This is like they’re alien. This makes me a stranger to myself. What do I want? Kicker.
Here comes the hollowness again, and I think it’s involved with the unnameable pressure and unnameable guilt stitched into the previous paragraph. I want to take responsibility for my actions and feelings, but let’s say the only thing to measure an authentic kind of self is Want. I collapse further into the ashes of my synthesis. I have no imaginary ideal, dramatic drop-kick New Years. I don’t want anything, because I have become the person I wanted to be. This person, then, is not a person. I am dead or a robot. It has not worked.
TRAPPED IN A BOX OF TREMENDOUS SIZE
Sometimes people tell me I have high expectations and I have trouble understanding what they mean; it strikes me that one can only either have expectations or not have expectations, and I don’t comprehend at all what it would be to live like the latter. Following the twisted logic that not wanting to do anything for New Year’s is the second reason why I am not a person, it stands to reason that maybe my Want is just dull and missable. I feel like I mostly expect everything to improve, eventually or all the time. I expect that everything about this life has potential to be better. I spend time thinking about vague ways in which my life could be better: feelings, ideas. And in a vague ‘everything’ there is a specific ‘nothing.’ Now I have become the limits of my catalogue and my imagination has apparently gone on sabbatical: I am the starving artist, Brooklyn hipster, I am her, I am Carrie Bradshaw close-enough, I am, on paper, the person I always wanted to be and there is no other criteria to inhabit and no sensible next move inside the catalogue nexus, no directions. I am where I want(ed?) to be, but it does not feel like enough, and so I have no idea where to go from here.
Lie. I do have another want. What I don’t have in my life is romantic love, or any sex to speak of. Because I don’t have this, I have assigned the lack paramount importance. I am lonely, that’s the problem. No one will pick up the phone to hear me whining in a parking lot. Honestly, I look up to the sky and find this fact sort of cosmically amusing, even though either my emotions or my intellect (best guess this time) is upset. My friends are mad at me, and I have done and can do very little to dispel this for at least the next few days. But am I lonely? Am I really lonely? Do I want to be with another person, with other people? A fraction of my catalogue has made a choice not to be, on a holiday. Part of me feels tepid at best about that. Another part is warm and sure. This is a paradox. An un-synthe-fucking-sizable party paradox.
Okay, so, would I go to this party if I knew something outrageous could happen there? And by outrageous I mean wildly unusual, I mean a validation, which is to say reassurance that I will not always be lost, which is to say a fulfillment of lack, which is to say… sex? Yes. But maybe we can draw thin lines along the page to make that both emotional and intellectual, and not just shallow. This leaves only the glaring elephant in the room: what do I actually want to do. If we go deep enough into the lack and the quiet belief that conditions will improve in time, perhaps that’s all only un-phased sky, too. And maybe that all means I have no feelings, heart or sex drive and am, as feared, a bona fide zombie. It could also mean I’m very bright, by my own standards.
It could mean there is work to do, synthesizing. But that seems like a lesson unlearned.
RECORD COMPANY PEOPLE ARE SHADY
This year I have learned a lot, and if I want to treat New Years like the grand marker of all things, now is the time to conclude neatly. Fuck the man (Rupert Murdoch, me, or whoever). The sheer amount of work required to keep making sense of all my contradictions (READ: THIS ESSAY) so they might become presentable and pleasant for all is stupid, and at last I can see, wasted energy, and what people are criticizing in me when they think I am quiet or spineless in a certain way. While the exercise has always felt smart and interesting, it’s time to cut losses and live in the space between choices that make no sense internally or externally when assembled together and compared. It’s time to get a little reptilian.
And speaking of work, I have lots. I’m driving out. This rambling missive is going out into space, where several people could ostensibly read it and get their feelings hurt. This is an attempt at fulfillment and honesty, and towards this end hopefully the last simmering, directly selfish act completed for a while. By driving out, I mean the internal idea-hopping-brilliance-energy will go towards writing and acting with competence and consideration. This should leave more room inside for caring about other people, which has been poor form for 2010. It will, in fact. I know this because I can predict the future and am learning to discern it from the past.
These are how New Years resolutions function: Tidy. Bright. Optimistic.
These are how great essays function: Idea, Mullage, Brilliant Bolt Conclusion, Shattering Last Line (note disparities above).
These are truths non-conforming to everything I’ve discussed here:
I will be better. I will be great. I will be loved. It will get better.
These are my fingers, typing: sdifufjenensmslfov
I am blind now, but here I am. Becoming something I can’t see and must stop looking for.
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