Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Lit, 1892
At 20, couchsurfing my way through Europe and Asia, I tried not to spend more than $15 on a meal and was stressed to death about my visa problems. The knowledge that I could one day live in the US without issue, reliably make money from my writing, be able to, say, spend $200 on a hotel room without using my mom’s credit card, and even write a novel would’ve felt so unbelievably reassuring. If you’d told me all that was true, there was literally no way you could convince me that I had anything to complain about, as long as I was mostly healthy and in possession of all my limbs. If I described all my present problems to her in acute detail, I can imagine exactly what Past Ava would say to me: You have a bad attitude.
Do I have a bad attitude, and how could I acquire a better one? When I think about my friends, it seems obviously true that many of them have achieved their younger selves’ wildest dreams, and yet they don’t seem to be particularly enjoying it. Their success has come with a new set of problems, and they’re too busy wading through those to spend all day feeling grateful. Plus, there are always unexpected complications of the heart. It’s easy for me to point to them and say: You’re too in your head, look around, think about all the things that have gone right. It’s much, much harder to do that for myself.
After all, if you asked me, I would certainly tell you I’m generally happy and grateful. I like my life! I love my friends! I try to be rigorous about writing without being rigid. I feel really lucky I have a job that allows me to explore my interiority. And yet day to day it’s so much easier to focus on what is or might be going wrong. There’s something about my criticality that feels reassuring—many of the people I love the most have a deeply paranoid streak, and they all believe it’s essential to their functioning—the ability to just notice things instead of living in blissful ignorance. And yet this criticality creates a resistance to gratitude and joy.
Sometimes I’m burrowed too deep to notice what’s right in front of me.
*
The truth is, it’s hard to feel grateful all the time. Yesterday, you and I were about to enter my apartment when I spotted S crossing the street with Akko. He was wearing a pair of shorts that made me wonder about the state of his relationship with athleisure. I decided it wasn’t the right moment to say hi. This morning, I bumped into S and his date while Yumi was sniffing around the base of a tree. I guess it’d be fair to say that S and I are a very modern family.
S is afraid that if he remains close to me I’ll make his life weird. It’s certainly a valid fear, though I remind him that he opts into weirdness over and over, even when I’m not involved, and maybe he should just integrate his desire for it. But I do agree that I have a weird life.
Fear of weirdness is obviously fear of something else disguised. Like fear of losing yourself, or fear of being unable to draw boundaries. I see that in myself. If you told me two or three years ago where we are now in our relationship, I think I’d be thrilled. After all, I essentially couldn’t imagine a love that I would prefer to this one.
And yet I fear that I have developed an inability to enjoy things. You seem amazingly present with me, and confident of what you feel. When you’re present, I feel so comfortable, but when you’re gone, I start going in circles. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about relationships, it’s that getting cerebral doesn’t help anyone. I start analyzing the nature of romantic love and how I couldn’t possibly know the nature of my own experience and every reason I have to mistrust what you say, instead of just feeling into my own fear.
When did this mistrust become such a fundamental part of my experience? Is it your fault, or was it always there? Am I too caught up in doubting your love to feel it? At times I wished that you would definitively prove that you didn’t love me so I could stop wondering. Which, yes, would be a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
*
Gratitude is bound up with a lot of things. Like awe and openness. Like remembering what it felt like to buy and eat Trader Joe’s sushi on my first trip to San Francisco when I was 13 and marvel at the cable cars and the hills. Like acting like I have free will and I can wake up in the morning and write or not write. Drive over the bridge and walk around Mill Valley. Go to Fort Funston with Akko, or Stinson Beach. Get a scalp massage, see my friends. Fly to Europe. Fly to China. Not leave my apartment for a week and give the dogs to S. Get a cat. Learn how to swim. Get a new tattoo or seven new tattoos or get one of my tattoos removed. Bleach my pink hair again. Introduce two people in the hopes that they will fall in love. Listen to a song that reminds me of the first time you kissed me. There was no song playing the first time you kissed me and I remember thinking, mouths are so wet.
At dinner I joked that I seem like I can do a lot of jobs, like sometimes people tell me I would enjoy being a PM or working in finance, but actually I am only suited for the very specific thing I do, which is writing and theorizing and talking about love. Sometimes this causes me angst but mostly it seems like a relief to be so specific. I can change what I do, but I can’t fight what I want, and I only seem to want the same couple of things over and over again. Sometimes I think I’d be such a great partner, if only I weren’t insane in the way I’m insane, but then maybe being exactly how I am is the particular thing that makes me alive.
Another week in my body is another week in my body. I took a picture of the matcha ice cream they gave us at the end of the meal but I was too drunk on sake to properly t taste it. How I feel about you today doesn’t have to be how I feel about you tomorrow. Which is not to say that I’ll love you any less, but maybe I could love you even more. I’m excited by the idea that I’m still at the beginning of knowing how to feel things. My therapist said she decided to have a child after her mother died in her 30s because she thought that death was such a powerful experience, birth must be an even more powerful one. There are some pictures on your phone of me smiling like I don’t know what’s to come and I’m grateful for it.
“When I think about my friends, it seems obviously true that many of them have achieved their younger selves’ wildest dreams, and yet they don’t seem to be particularly enjoying it.”
Amen. There are many such cases. Two things come to mind:
1) The adage “A thankful heart hath a continual feast.”
2) The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that what we wanted was what we needed. I think modernity is largely a nightmare because we have everything we want, but nothing we need.
"I took a picture of the matcha ice cream they gave us at the end of the meal but I was too drunk on sake to properly t taste it. "
Weirdly enough, this added to the reading experience in a positive way :)!