notes for a friend: on being lost
This piece is for a friend who thinks they lack direction, maybe not knowing their life is already a testament to carving one’s own path. I want them to feel at home with themselves and I wish them joy, strength, and good days spent making art — just because. Hi M.
Life has a way of tricking all of us — again and again. But I’ve heard that often enough to almost believe it. Whiners must learn to smile more; naughty children must be trained to prize discipline above delight. Daydreamers are urged to pay heed to the practicalities of life, and the stubborn ones, they say, could do better with a little fun. I used to be so much more lost as a kid than I am today. Perhaps you felt that way, too?
Far from finding our true purpose, I was constantly preoccupied by the thought of finding true friends; Away from the routine of direction, I wanted adventures, real and make-believe. And most of all, I wanted to be loved and I wanted to laugh a lot. A sense of direction was ironically on the top of my list, even as a child. But all that meant in my head was to have a great day.
I tell you, M, that when I was a little more grown up, I noticed that those of us preferring silence were labelled uptight. The talkative, dismissed as distracted. Those who mingled and pleased were seldom respected for their thoughts, while the opinionated grew used to being quietly exiled to the edges of conversation. And I could tell from their eyes that they, too, didn’t think tat they were enough.
To feel out of place is the only consistent theme of all our lives, right? Major chunks of this theme being an emotional overdraft each time one of our chosen tracks turned out to be peak nunya. Each decade brings new realizations, habits to acquire, habits to shed. Add to that the dizzying cocktail of race, gender, and the tangled social fabric, and the rules of belonging reveal themselves as ever so subtle and much more relentless, shaping us long before we even notice. So then, who we’re supposed to be is that much more difficult to pinpoint—decade after decade ushering in a freshly shaken kaleidoscope of so many nunya-coded detours. But there’s also some eye opening paths or at least a handful of good people that touch our hearts in a way that makes us smile and feel life more deeply. For me that was you.
So, I think everyone out there has at least some amount of anxiety with tracking their direction and nobody is quite there yet. I was thinking that the idea of “normal” feels perilously narrow these days, and most people live with the quiet dread that they’re overdue for an upgrade (is it just me?) — as if being different were, by default, a defect. And “flawed,” instead of being a simple mark of humanity, tends to bear the weight of moral judgment — not of imperfection, but of being wrong.
But you already know all of this with your unique gift of perspective. I’m just here to remind you that its the same recycled instinct of running circles around the fire and belonging to survive has come all the way to us huddling around our screens and curated acceptable versions of ourselves. And its all seemingly unfolding in one direction.1
But what if the next evolution isn’t adaptation — it’s refusal?
Perhaps the real rebellion now is to be content in one’s own skin, and to revel in one’s own texture — unpolished, unoptimized, and be profoundly unique, kinda like modern renaissance.
So, what say, we be direction-less together?
The feeling is strangely common?Maybe we’re not meant to feel “at home” all the time, just aligned enough to keep moving, curious enough to keep growing.