Hi!

Happy Tuesday. How are ya? I just took my last final of the term and am dying to run back to New York for another solo summer rendezvous but have yet to actually put any plans in place. Unplanned adventures are totally the best though, right?

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking a lot about change and the process of knowing and unknowing people. Maybe because the cold days have turned warm and I feel brand new or maybe just because I am at an age where people come in and out of my life on a revolving door that spins so fast it makes me dizzy. But I’m thinking about it all the same, how strange it is to continue, and to know that others are continuing, long after you have ceased to continue to each other. Which made me think of object permanence, like a complete nerd. I’ll explain.

A POETIC LESSON FROM OBJECT PERMANENCE

When we are babies, we learn object permanence. We learn that people and things continue to exist even when we cannot see or hear or touch them anymore. When our mother leaves the room, we learn to trust that she has not disappeared from the face of the earth, but only from the face of the room. We learn to extend our consciousness beyond the immediate, beyond the sensory. So the world becomes largely abstract. It fractures and divides into what we know to be real and what we trust to be real. It becomes a place of radical imagination, where life can exist beyond ourselves, beyond the rooms that we inhabit. And it stays that for the rest of our lives. In this way, I think that learning object permanence is really just learning hope. It’s learning to believe in things that we cannot see.

I am not a religious person. Growing up in Catholic school will do that do you. But I do like to think that we exist after death. I like to think that when we cease to be visible, touchable, and audible, we still continue in some celestial form. This makes sense to me because it’s not a doctrine or a theology, but simply our brain’s natural inclination towards continuance. Our brain automatically programs itself to believe that things do not simply disappear.

SOME THOUGHTS ON EPHEMERALITY

I bring this up with intention.

There’s been a lot of (good) change in my life recently. I started this blog (perhaps my favorite endeavor of all time), I finished another semester, I got a new job. I’ve met new, cool, beautiful people. And all of these changes have been reminding me that life is continuing, that I am going on. That everything is going on. My life looks radically different than it did just a few months ago. And that’s a strange concept when you realize how much you are constantly leaving behind. All of the new little moments of life stack up, increasing the distance between you and the people you used to know. Object permanence tells us that people continue to exist even when they are not sitting next to us. We know this. But I think we also don’t know this. I think a part of us thinks that things don’t really go on without us because it is too painful to imagine that the world will continue tomorrow whether we are still inside of it or not. Our brains get it but our egos don’t.

Now, I do think that when you really know someone, when you really connect with them on that rare, cosmic level, you would know each other across any lifetime. I totally believe that. I’ve felt that. But I’m not dissecting cosmic connections today, just everyday earthly ones. And those die. Those get left behind. They are ephemeral. I know this. I’m used to this. But I think it’s one of things that will always be strange, how we go on without people that we used to love. The knowing and the unknowing. The doing and the undoing of us. Though I don’t think we can ever really undo. We try all of the time. We try to extricate ourselves from each other, to cut out pieces here and there. But that only makes us less in all of the ways that we could be more. For people I haven’t talked to in years still show up on street corners in the faces of strangers. They still dance through my mind. And it tends to feel kind of sweet, like a melancholic remembrance that makes me smile. I feel most human in those moments. I don’t ever want to extricate them. They feel like proof of the human soul.

GOING YOUR OWN WAY

But it is still always eerie to stop knowing someone. It’s like they freeze in your mind. You ignore object permanence. To you, they will always be who they were on that day, the last one in which you saw them. You retain this snapshot of who they were that not even they can hold onto. I have some idea of who I was at each period of my life, but I have a feeling that the people who knew me best at each of those times have a much clearer image. For theirs remain untouched and isolated in all the ways that mine have since been colored by all that came next. One thing bleeds right into another. But a lot of those people who knew me don’t know what came next. Ours lives branched away from each other like the arms of a tree each reaching our for their own piece of sky. We may have started from the same seed, the same school, the same street, but we are miles from all of that now. We got cut off. That’s what it is to be young and in motion. You’re constantly moving on with your life and you learn that you can’t always take people with you.

And when that happens, when you cease to know each other like you once did, you relinquish access to who each other will be tomorrow or next week. All you have is that period of time in which you granted each other admission to who you each were and all that it all meant at the time. It replays in your mind like a movie. And when it ends, you wonder what happens next. You wonder what the characters did after that final scene, how the rest of their lives play out. But you can’t know this. We can never know this. We can see the actors, years later, out in the world. We can see that they have changed. That they did not, in fact, cease to exist to the rest of the world when they ceased to exist to us. We learn object permanence all over again. But we don’t know how they got from there to here. We don’t know anything of it anymore. And that doesn’t have to mean that we want to. It just means that we are human. We look back. Vonnegut loved us for that. I love us for that too.

“But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”

-Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five

But the great thing, the bright and shiny thing, is that we then get to keep going. And I am so excited to keep going. You simply say “Okay, these are the places I have been and the people I have known and I’ll always remember them but I am allowed to go on without them. I’m allowed to keep growing and changing”. You are allowed.

WHY I’M NOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Sometimes I get anxious when I look back and remember who I was or how I acted at a time in my life. And even though I know that this is a good thing, that this means that I have grown and changed, it ignites this ridiculous urge to provide everyone with an update on my life. I think this is why social media is so attractive and why I chose to delete it when I was eighteen. We have this urge to constantly prove ourselves and our lives to everyone. I’ve always hated that. I don’t want to know what everyone I have ever known is doing and I don’t want them to see what I am doing either. I haven’t been on social media for several years now and it’s the greatest thing ever. I don’t feel that pressure to share everything all the time, I can just live my life organically.

I realize now that this is slightly comedic considering I spend most of my time pouring my soul out to the internet for all of you to read, but blogs are different. And I’m not here to be one of those people who tell you to get off of social media either. I actually think it has the potential to be really great in a lot of ways. I’m just saying what works for me.

The point is, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone. You get to just keep going. You get to change your favorite foods and places and decide that you actually really do love watching HGTV on a Friday night instead of going out and no one needs to know about any of it. You don’t owe anyone an update. You get to just exist. Because a tree falls down in the forest and no one is around to hear it, or like it, or repost it, it still makes a sound. I really love that.

TO READ MORE

For some personal posts, check out: Times That I Spend Alone: Diaries of an Introvert or Let’s Be Honest

For some self-love: Your Body is Not a Battleground

And, for some love letters to my favorite authors, see: Joan Didion On Loving and Letting Go or The Writer Who Saved My Life

JOIN THE FUN

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.