Hi world.

How are you?

I’m sitting outside, drinking coffee and applying to jobs in New York City, much to my mother’s heartache. This is about the all of the things running through my mind as I do so, in these final months before jumping into my big, crazy dreams.

THE NUANCES OF HOW

If you aren’t a kid graduating from college and entering the workforce, let me tell you what it feels like.

For the past six years moving to New York and being a writer has been my pipe dream. It has been the thing that I fall asleep at night dreaming about, the thing that has gotten me through my college years spent living a claustrophobic ten miles from where I grew up, surrounded by a culture that I have never fully fit into. While everyone was getting high on the beach, I was wearing black turtlenecks, reading Patti Smith and dreaming of exposed brick. These were my cliché fantasies of a far away land that I would one day get to, no matter the nuances of how.

Now, here I am, facing the nuances of how. 

I’m looking for roommates, applying for jobs, and browsing apartments. I’m confronting the truth of there being just eight short weeks left of my college years before it’s time to actually go.

Time to go. 

Time to go. 

Time to go. 

These are the words that appear on the sides of buildings and in the clouds and swirling in my endless cups of coffee. They fill my head as I fall asleep and greet my feet on the hot October pavement of my college campus. I just saw a poster that read It’s time to leave, isn’t it?

I’m working on it.

Which starts with getting a job, a daunting task that feels a bit like being the needle in the haystack, hoping that someone will see you. My resume and cover letter are perfectly crafted, yet I know they are just one of thousands upon thousands that land on New York City desks everyday. Which brings me to the concept of dreaming.

When I tell people my dream, they all have the same response. They’re quite excited, but skeptical. But how are you going to make money? Don’t you think that you’ll get, you know, cold? Homesick? It’s not like California over there.

Well, yes Sharon, I know. That’s kind of the entire point. And as to the seeming impossibility of the whole thing, of wanting to live and write and love in NYC, it doesn’t worry me. It should. Probably. But I just have this thing, this magnetic thing pulling at me with such unwavering strength that I know something, something, will work out.

I think it’s called hope. 

HOPE HAS DIRT ON HER FACE

I read this thing on the internet the other day that said,

“People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

–Matthew @CrowsFault

That’s what it feels like to me. Application after application sent out into what feels like a cold, cold void, this personification of hope is what holds my hand in the dark. Someone responded on Pinterest to this and said, hope has been sitting in her car with her head on the steering wheel for fifteen minutes straight, but is getting up to go inside anyway. I’m going anyway.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN CYNICISM AND NAÏVETÉ

I like this brutal personification because it turns hope away from being a flowery, childlike thing, and into a strong, intimidating thing. So often when people ask what I want to do with my life, as everyone so loves to ask young people, I get spoken down to as soon as I mention anything too “dreamy”, making me feel embarrassingly naive in the eyes of my elders. But the thing that I have realized, with the help of aforementioned quotes, is that hope is not naive. It’s bloody-knuckled and bruised-kneed. It’s a soldier at war with the overwhelming cynicism of this world, fighting for it’s life against all odds.

I came across these words on The Marginalian the other day that read,

“To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope.

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”

-Maria Popova, The Marginalian: “Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves”

At twenty-one, I am, by definition, fatally hopeful. I won’t deny that. But I suppose the point that Popova is making is, perhaps, why should I? Hope is not naïveté, it’s the thing that survives everything that you have been through, everything that the world has shown you, each heartbreak, loss, and utter disappointment. It’s the flower that grows through the cement of the cracks in your life, against all odds. It would be so much easier to just, not.

CYNICISM AS ANETHESIA

Meaning, I think there’s a grave misconception in this world about cynicism. So much of the time, negative thinking is mistaken for wisdom, sage advice, or rationality. So often, adults feel the need to drop a dose of cynicism onto the youth in an effort to protect them, or keep them grounded. Why? Because hope is so often the predecessor of pain. Don’t get your hopes up. I just don’t want to see you get disappointed if it doesn’t work out.

Cynicism becomes an anesthetic, a tool used to numb yourself and others from any possibility of pain. If you don’t expect good things, you won’t be disappointed when they don’t arrive. That’s the idea, right? But what a miserable way to live.

You can think critically and be hopeful. It’s, as Popova exposes, a difficult dance, but it’s one worth clumsily practicing. Logically, I know that I will not leave heartbreak and suffering behind in San Diego. The human experience is a bell jar, to borrow from Sylvia Plath, and it hovers over us no matter where we go. I know that getting a job and an apartment and being across the entire country from the only world that I have ever known will not be all sunshine and roses. I know that it will be hard. I wouldn’t want it not to be. But I am also bleeding with all of this uncontrollable hope that it will be the most extraordinary thing at the very same time.

DOING IT ANYWAY

A cynic would say to lower my standards, to settle for a job I don’t want in a city I don’t love because it would be easier. A cynic probably wouldn’t try. It would too frightening, too close of a dance with disappointment. Too cold, too far, too cut throat. I might be a personal growth junkie, but in my experience, the coldest and hardest things I have ever been through have also been the most enriching. They have made me who I am.

So to me, wisdom is not telling kids to not get their hopes up. It’s telling them to look critically at this world, to understand that it is not perfect or catered to them in any way, and then to go out into it with all of their hopes and all of their dreams anyway. That’s wisdom to me. That’s what I would want to teach my kids. Radical, raging resilience and whatnot.

What else is there?

Love, m.

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