Dear reader,
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write. I’d like to think it’s because I’m more content these days, more self assured, more comfortable with the messy bits of myself. I’ve let my life get busier, let it fill with new people, new words, new mindsets. I’ve learned to seek joy over pleasure, learned the difference between seeking new experiences and seeking to be validated, learned I get to choose how much of my energy to give to people, and learned the importance of becoming someone I can trust.
The delightfully frightening thing about New York City is that it gives you infinite chances to reinvent yourself. The lack of shared context between strangers here means that people’s perceptions rely heavily on first impressions. Many move here to figure out who they are, but don’t realize that the city is the perfect place to lose sight of who you are in the first place.
I got a haircut the other day, and as one does when in a salon chair, partook in a lovely exchange of chit chat with my hair dresser, who I’ll call M. M moved to the city at the age of 18 but retains a distinct Southern accent through which she narrates her life story, explaining how she moved here to fulfill a promise that she’d go to college despite knowing that she never wanted to study fashion. Hair was her calling– she’d known it since she was young, practicing by snipping her sister’s locks, picking up side jobs in college, finally finishing her training in beauty school. She told me about the misery that is working on film sets, her best friend’s dramatic trip to India, the key to young fun being finding rich friends, the agony of being single in New York in the 70’s (80’s? it was a time before cell phones) and the humiliation of waiting around and drinking too much at the same bars hoping a boy would show but remarking that online dating seems to channel even more of the scary nonchalance of years past. What struck me most, though, was how she described the people who come to the city. This city protects the odd ones, she said, shelters them from ever having to figure their lives out. Being a loner living in a small town would draw judgement and shame, maybe enough for you to pull your life together. But being a loner living in New York City? No one would mind you, no one would even notice.
To put it less extremely, New York lets you be anybody, stay anybody, put on a new hat everyday or keep the same one on, even if you should’ve outgrown it. Moving here enabled me to live without labels, allowed me to choose what version of myself to embody on any given day. It was freeing, it is empowering, but I’ve realized that even redefining yourself is a balancing act. These days, I frequently have the urge to write it all down, all the little pieces that make me myself, fear that it’s too easy to wander away from my essence and end up careless and unhappy, wondering what it is I want and forgetting that I already knew it, right from the start.
Who are we? It seems to be the question that most of us spend our lives chasing the answer to, though the answer whispers to us all along, plain and simple – we are the lives we choose to live. Everything counts, every day matters, there’s no escaping it. We are the choices we make, the people we interact with, the habits we develop, the routines we settle into. And if that life strays too far from the things we care about, the things that bring us energy, we end up discontent. We end up forgetting what we cared about in the first place.
As I get older, I find I’m meeting more and more people who’ve let go of what they care about, lost what brings them real joy, forgotten that even seeking joy itself takes consistent effort. In Anita talk (a tone which tends to be much more judgmental than my writing voice, i think) this usually emerges in annoyed exclamations of “most people are just SO boring” or “they’re just going through the motions” or “why can’t i ever meet someone smart.” I find it’s becoming more and more uncommon to encounter people like my friends, people like M, people whose cares and interests and joys are revealed within a few conversations, people who know what’s important to them.
I think the solution to most things is knowing what you care about. I spent a long time trying to ‘figure out my passions’ when the answer already lay clearly in my cares. Awareness is so important– when you are aware of what you seek you start seeing it everywhere. When people say you can make yourself interested in anything, what they really mean is that if you pay enough attention, you can find something you care about in pretty much everything. Feelings like boredom, apathy, and detachment come from a misalignment between the lives we live and the things that bring us joy. It seems an obvious conclusion, but like most life lessons, there’s a drastic difference between knowing a thing and learning to live it in practice.
That is all I have for today – I’m grateful my wifi went out on this sunny, stormy weekend, giving me little else to do but write to you all once again :)
Later,
Anita
And some music for your time ~ I made this playlist the summer before I moved here, listening to it again prompted this letter 🌻