Lucian Freud, Still Life with Aloe, 1949.
By popular request, matchmaking for Bookbear Express subscribers is back! You can choose platonic matching, romantic matching, or both. You will be matched with someone in person if you’re in SF or NY, and there’s a penpal option for people who live in different cities, though I will try to match people based on their zip code this time (no promises). I am going to charge people $3 to disincentivize flaking. Warning that the form is very long.
A subscriber wrote me recently: I met my boyfriend through your first July matchmaking cohort in 2024—we recently moved in together, and our two-year anniversary is coming up!
See, love through Bookbear Express is possible! (Dear reader, if you’re reading this I am so sorry I have not yet responded to your email yet but I WILL tomorrow.) If you are another Bookbear Express Matching success story, whether platonic or romantic, please email me to let me know at avabearexpress@gmail.com!!!
I turned 30 five days ago. I celebrated with the friends I love more than anything, but beyond that I barely noticed. Everything has been so intense in my life for the past six months that time feels like it’s barreling right through me. Or rather: I feel like someone holding desperately onto a train with one hand, dragged along by g-force. I worked through more this year in writing and in love than in the six years prior. It’s hard to say whether I’m coalescing, metamorphosing, or unwinding. Everyone keeps telling me that I look happy.
I feel happy. I’m unburdened in a way I haven’t been since I was 25. What this reflects is not a lack of complexity but rather a sense of congruence with myself. For a long time I was living in a way that didn’t feel representative of who I really was. I mean, it was who I was at the time, but it didn’t feel true to who I wanted to be. But being who I really wanted to be required knowledge I didn’t have. I had to live in order to know, and then to act differently.
Being perceptive about other people is infinitely easier than being perceptive about yourself. The biggest change I notice in relationships now is that I can say the honest thing very directly. And often the most useful thing to volunteer is just information about what I actually want and how I tend to operate. Before, I was so much more focused on predicting other people and making them feel good. But I was often unconsciously obfuscating facts about my own experience. I think back to May, when I told a boy that I needed someone “passionate, committal and insane.” I don’t exactly remember how I came to that realization—it’s such a ridiculous thing to say. But it’s true! Of course it’s true—I’ve always been an emotional extremist in the Truman Capote sense. But for years and years of my life I don’t really think I was conscious of that, because other people’s experiences loomed larger in my mind. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t selfish—people pleasing is ultimately a selfish quality, in the sense that you’re trying to get what you need by making other people happy. But like many other people pleasers, I just wasn’t that aware of what I was trying to get, and why I was taking such a circuitous route to secure it.
No one tells you these things. It’s so funny to me how most of us go through life with no guidance on who we are and what our deepest desires might be. We fall in love, make friends, get jobs, get married, and have children with a muzzy-at-best sense of our own psyche. Maybe if we’re lucky an astute therapist or partner might tell us, but for the most part we probably wouldn’t listen even if God himself was shouting into our ear. People sometimes tell me I’m self-aware, but my big learning of this year was how much I don’t know about myself. I cannot believe how lucky I’ve gotten just walking around blindly, getting into trouble at every turn and somehow wriggling out unscathed.
When I reflect on how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent analyzing other people, modeling their inner life and their behavior, I now think: Ava, get it together! Consider putting 1/50th of this effort into examining why you are behaving this way and what you hope to get out of it. When I talk to friends about their relationships these days, I constantly find myself turning my focus back on them: Sure, this is what he’s doing, but what are you doing?
Analysis is a million times easier than knowledge. Analysis is like the Charlie Day conspiracy meme; knowledge is so simple. Once I started understanding more about what I wanted, everything became so easy. Most of what I truly wanted to communicate could be conveyed in a sentence or two. Now, since I’m overly verbose, I’m more likely to communicate it in a 45-minute rant, but you get the idea. Once I said the thing, it became so easy to act. Everything is astonishingly obvious in the light of day, so simple it makes me feel stupid.
The truth is it took me so long to understand certain things because I was hoping that someone else would save me from knowledge. We are very complex systems, and we have infinite reasons for protecting the status quo that we’re in. What I wanted on one level was often in direct conflict with what I wanted on another, and I would get stuck. If I choose A, I lose B. What am I supposed to do? It was so tempting to believe that it would just sort itself out if I kept going.
I’ve written this before, but what I truly learned this year is that God loves movement. Nothing in my life moved until I moved. Then, all at once, everything started changing. But the critical thing was that my action came not from a performative place (placating someone else, trying to provoke, seeking safety, soothing my ego) but from the deepest part of me: I felt that I needed something different, so I did something different. It was so hard and so scary, like all change is. I had no guarantee that things would be better and in fact I was very worried they would be a lot worse. I had to give up a fantasy of how my life was going to be, who was going to love me and how I would live. I had to pry some very stubborn attachments loose. It hurt! But at the end of the day, the pain was clean pain, because it was pain that came from acting in accordance with a real knowledge of who I was. I earned that knowing: I had to live to know, I had to make mistakes, I had to suffer. The knowledge is more than worth the price I paid for it.