thank you joan didion and playboi carti

painting by manal asad (bestie)

today i woke up with unbridled joy and i thought it was a good time to write about everything else going on; a time to walk the calloused ground but with joy by my side. every day since i got back home, i have slept all day and stayed up all night worrying about my employment prospects. my skin has seen very little sunlight lately and has definitely paled a few shades (even my body is starting to forget abu dhabi). but yesterday i went outside and saw a few dozen lily pads in the lake. i keep remembering, as i did in this moment, about another time i stayed up all night and left my room to see a sparrow hovering about in the living room. the early sunlight in the room made the small bird look iridescent. the biblical quality of this sight was matched by my awe and wonder, so naturally, when i recouped a second later, i rushed for my phone to take a picture. the phone, designed in california and assembled in china, seemed to be an affront to nature incarnate in my company, and the sparrow, sensing the iphone in the room, escaped through the same crack in the window it had flown in. “great,” i thought. “no one’s going to believe me.” this is not the first time something like this has happened, and i learn from the mistakes of those who came before me, so i never told anyone about it. mary grew jesus in her womb, whom god himself had placed there, and whose birth led to all this, literally all of this (motioning to the whole wide world). but even to to this day, you meet some people who want more proof. “no way. mary is hiding something.” well, god placed a sparrow in my living room, and i am not arguing with anyone.

it’s just that something has slowly been creeping up on me all year. or if i am looking at myself from the outside, something has been peeling off of me very slowly. what i can pick out is that i look like i have shed the weight of my fears. (to say inner peace was creeping up on me would be so incredibly tacky and i couldn’t bring myself to write that.) i have already written about everything i used to fear, and i was dwarfed in a particular way for so long, that the entire public archives of my writing is a testament to a coalescent drive to fix something. i have only ever written about some inter/personal problem or another, and all of my posts have been about me trying to figure them out. in the end, maybe all of the talking and writing did pay off, and i can sort of trace the developments in my posts throughout last year. playboy carti’s words, from his song Long Time (Intro), ring heavily in the room right now: "just to feel like this it took a long time, yeah (Slatt, feel like)”. however, somehow at this moment, it feels like it happened all so suddenly, and i can’t remember ever being any other way, let alone the work that i had to put in to get here. it is as if i just snapped out of it one day. for a few days i have been terrified of what this might mean — that i cannot write anymore. so much of my writing has been along the same lines, and because the lines aren’t quire there anymore, i am afraid i might not have anything to write about. but my blog is so dear to me, and between my first website zoneoutwithzion dot com, a few more domain changes in the following five years, and now with blog dot zzzzion dot com, writing has become almost ritualistic. like a theist fears losing god to nihilism, i am scared of losing writing to contentment.

but i’m not entirely convinced writing is lost on me. i still think a lot, and observe, and i can rarely, if ever, relate to someone when they say their head is empty. my head is never empty, and i am actually grateful that i am this way. i would hate to be a blank slate for any moment that i am on earth, where i live among so many beautiful things: a cigarette at dawn, long running inside jokes with friends, and jstor, are all incredibly fulfilling things, and i cannot afford to waste any unoccupied time i have to myself not thinking about or enjoying them. i don’t think i’ll run out of things to write about as long as there are still things in my head. it is just that the landscape inside my head has shifted significantly, and the tool i use to navigate it, writing, needs a little adjustment. but this is not to say i am rid of fears, or anxieties, entirely either. i don’t think anyone ever gets there, and i have never tried. i am terrified about my path forward post grad. at the time of writing, i don’t have a job, nor do i have an end in sight, and sometimes i’m not sure if i know enough javascript. i can’t fall asleep at night because i am frenzied by the fear of what is coming next. i text my friends i am going to sleep but i am just on linkedin for hours on end trying to figure out where i’m heading. but the thing is that it feels different than all the other times i have been scared. this time, the fear doesn’t have that tinge of desperation that usually brings everything crumbling down in the end. instead, the fear is clotted with impatience. i am scared i won’t have a job soon, and i want one really bad, but at the same time i’m doing the work to get there, daily. i wish i could elaborate more on this, but right now it really does feel that straightforward. everything always used to be so complex that i haven’t figured out how to write about or explain straightforward things yet.

i think my newfound lightness just comes down to having realized that i don’t have to shoulder the weight of everything. this plain fact that crystallized from all my experiences, shines the light on my way forward now. as it stands, i really have no way of knowing what is best for me, and i will not find out until later, so there really is no point in being too particular about one outcome or another. and the things i used to try so hard to control almost always involved other people. controlling what other people do is also impossible, less so controlling how they feel or what they believe. of course, control is distinct from impact: we incontrovertibly shape each other in the course of knowing the other, but to lay claim to parts of the other is egoistic to say the least. the only answer then is to treat people with gentleness, because no one, at any given moment, can definitively say what is going on, and is thus not in a place to confer definitive judgements on anything. i am certain this resonates with everyone to some extent: some things i thought were good for me did not turn out to be good, and things i wasn’t that excited about turned out to be positively life changing. sure, you can be confident in your instincts, and i am not advocating for doing away with gut feelings. i just think that life feels great when you do away with desperation. and this translates to everything in life. when you accept how little you really know, you can tread with a beautiful lightness.

speaking of lightness, for a long time, i really wanted to be the best for the people around me. i wanted to be the best friend in the shape of a romantic partner. i wanted to be the most emotionally intelligent friend, the one solving all of my friend’s problems. but i realized that is not how things work, that even i don’t go to the same friend for everything. that’s the whole point of having more than one friend. so that you can talk to one about playboi carti and to another about susan sontag. i don’t have to be exactly what someone needs at all times, i think they account for that on their own. people really do love you as a whole, and in places where you think you fall short, their love comes in the form of patience and compassion — just the things you needed to grow. same goes for liking yourself. contentment doesn’t come from being well-rounded, it comes from taking your sharp edges as they are. etcetera. my philosophy of lightness, as i speak of it, is not entirely my original work, though. every good thing i talk about having now was once an act of love bequeathed, since transformed into beauty. just being able to sit in your room one day with two friends, and finding in their presence the courage to wheeze out “maybe im not that bad of a person”, and the response being “type shit” and a dap, does some insane heavy lifting for your mental health.

to answer the question, what do i write about now, i don’t really know. i think it will come to me, as naturally as it always has. mostly i just affix certain states of mind to a physical form with words, and i think i’ll be able to keep doing that. since i don’t have that many problems of my own right now, maybe i can start an advice column here. if you are reading this and you do have problems, i have created an anonymous google form for you to send them to me. if they are interesting enough maybe you will find a solution in my next blog post. either way, even if i don’t get any responses on the form, i’ll keep writing because writing will still have its merits, for it offers a unique space, where i can assert myself unlike anywhere else. on paper, i can let my voice ring out, and it is my own only, and i don’t have to make space for anything else. this alone is reason enough to keep writing. in 1976 joan didion gave a lecture at UC berkeley called why i write¹.

“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

to borrow didion’s words, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” i don’t think i’ll ever stop thinking. that’s good news, which means i can keep writing.

1. Didion, J. (2021, March 9). Why I write. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/