i have actually said everything there was left for me to say
I spend a lot of time poring over my plans for growing up. Not just in the sense of aging, but I am more so in a daily, visceral race, against my own skin and bones, to grow. I feel that I am behind on meeting the mark, of making sure that my mind grows to fill the space left by my growing body, which ages self-assuredly. That I am being honest here should be clear from only a glance at anything I do: I write so I can remember what the world looked like to me once, when I was younger. I read so I can memorize what it looked like to an author, probably of higher moral standing than me. I take extended smoke breaks with friends so I can steal what it looks like to the people I like. This last one I undertake with the highest sincerity, in that I have no qualms postponing my other commitments or sharing my cigarettes if it means I can get a peek at the stand they take in life. I have done all of this long enough that I should expect myself to be no less than a behemoth of emotional intelligence. But I feel less than that — what I think I am now is a twenty something year old less good of a person than I would like to be. So it appears, that I still have to keep learning new things every day, and to my dismay, I have been told that this growth endeavor I am obsessed with is a lifelong one.
This is probably a needless thing to highlight. Indeed, I will have to concede that everyone grows — life is predicated on change. It should then be enough to know that there is barely anything that doesn’t change a person, at least to some extent, and everything that happens to other people and transforms them — experiences, achievements, loss — have happened to me too. (Some of these happen to me every day — I just stitch myself back before bed every night.) I also have a feeling that changes to the self is harder to pick through on a daily basis, and it is easier in hindsight than in the moment to see how parts of yourself react to times of joy or grief. Still, I carry this clawing urge within, to dissect everything that I cross paths with, to wrench out a life lesson then and there. So, there is then grounds for self-reprimand when I read a journal entry from, say, a year ago, and realize I still feel the same about some things, and some other things that I never really liked about myself are still somehow a part of me. This must mean I haven’t grown at all in the year past, that I felt joy and grief in vain if I must still carry the same weights with me that I did 12 months prior.
I should say that I have no ambitions to become the best person in the world of all time; I am fine being a good enough person to myself and the people around me. Still, my thoughts of self-rectification are unrelenting. It is ironic even, how I see and envy people who seem content with how they are, and in trying so desperately to emulate their inner peace, I have to wage a war with myself. A war for peace sounds incredibly dumb and is equally tiring. This mix of low ambition and intense passion for some sort of transformation must not be coming from the good of my heart, or I would have at least in my own eyes become the minimum viable good person by now. Instead, I have a feeling that it comes from, and I cringe saying this, a place of dire self-loathing. I am just sounding out this explanation at the moment, but it seems to fare well under my line of inquiry. Why doesn’t all my self-awareness convert to growth? How do I still find so much to loathe in myself, even though I have been at it for so long? Probably because this self-loathing part of me is content doing only and up to the self-loathing bit.
This is all so lame, and at this point I physically cringe. I can hear myself swearing, “I am a good person!” but also doing all this song and dance to prove the contrary. I can, however, just put myself in the reader’s shoes and tell myself to just grow up, but then I am back to square one — a deadlock. All that is left to ask is, what is all this resentment for? Why do I hate my past self so much, that I am willing to go such great lengths to widen the gap between? I have to stop and take stock of the situation, because I am otherwise out of ideas.
The basic premise is that I would simply like to be different. But then all this raging against the past feels unfair; having to hold my younger self at an arm’s length feels like I am depriving myself of something. But as it stands, the past is the only thing that truly belongs to me. It is not my future that I own; my life could branch out in all sorts of crazy directions, and neither do I own the present, which is just as capricious. The only thing I can really be sure of is the past. Nothing else is as concrete, or even as safe. How then can I then hate it, when it holds all the good that has ever happened to me? Did that really happen? Yes it did, and I know because I was there. I cannot speak of the future with half as much certitude, and I’d be indulging myself if I said I understand the present. My self-contempt aside, the parts of me that I do like are all a curation of all the good that has ever touched me. The love I was once shown lives on in me in the way I now savor my chilled drinks, letting the ice slowly melt, how I occasionally peel away from my laptop to stretch my arms and legs, or the way I change into clean clothes before bed.
To be fair, in small ways, I do like myself better now. I like how boba doesn’t give me a sugar rush anymore and my bedsheets don’t have all the germs from outside. The good from the past, just like the past itself, was ephemeral, but I am glad I can carry some of it in myself. This is not to say that I am all of a sudden glorifying the past, because we still have the question from square one: what about all the bad from back then? I honestly think I will soon just slowly forget all about it. I can only remember so much, and I’m already so busy not just tending to the nice parts of myself, but also foraging for more to love, that I just don’t think I’ll have the space for the sad and ugly parts. At some point, I will like, maybe not all, but most of myself, and that is good enough. Then I’ll be able to pass it on to the world better.
So I suppose it doesn’t have to be a race. The ‘minimum viable good person’ is a relative concept. I actually don’t know what ‘mark’ I was talking of meeting earlier; I literally made it up myself. The general idea is, and this is what I am starting to come to terms with, that all kinds of things happen, and when the past is past, I will like myself a little more, and it will show in the way I show up to the world. I suppose it’s alright that I wasn’t able to give back in the past, I just didn’t have it in me then. But I can make up for it later; I have the present and the future for that.
There’s this orange and black cat that kind of hangs out around the bookstore at night. When I go out there for a smoke and there’s no one else nearby, it runs up to me and keeps circling me, rubbing against my arms and legs, hopping on and off where I’m sitting. It keeps so quiet I barely ever notice there’s two of us sitting. Only the other day, a stranger pointed out the cat begging at my waist. “Is that your cat?” I broke out of my spell and noticed I wasn’t petting it, and I realized I hadn’t pet a cat in a while. So I rubbed the cat’s back, in the direction of its fur, and scratched under its chin, just like how cats like it.