There are things you want to do, and should.

There are things you want to do, and shouldn’t.

And then there are the things you don’t want to do, but need to.

It’s the sorting board of our lives, the cold, metal bit we grate our teeth against.

ON SELF-RESPECT

In her essay “On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion argued that we only learn to navigate it once we gain self-respect. Self-respect, she argued, is the thing waiting for us on the other side of innocence, where our character is constructed. Character being, “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life [and] the source from which self-respect springs”.

She wrote,

“Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me…”

-Joan Didion “On Self-Respect”

Something about that struck me, for it made me think of the point of my life where I came to my own understanding of it. Shortened perhaps by global circumstance, I would, without a doubt, pin seventeen as that age.

DUMB FUN RECKLESSNESS

Fifteen might as well have been sixteen and seventeen might as well have been eighteen. But there has never been a greater distance than the kind that stood between sixteen and seventeen. There was never a world where one could have been mistaken for the other. Things were one way, and then they weren’t.

Before the events of my seventeenth year, I had, without knowing it, been afforded a lackadaisical innocence—to matters concerning love and friendship particularly. I was a stranger to heartbreak and to the utter helplessness that arrives when a problem larger than high school reaches it’s icy hands around your neck.

For context, before that year, I was quite dumb and reckless because I had no reason not to be. I went out with a heavy metal drummer with seven functioning brain cells and a hockey player who had even less than that. It was exciting and dangerous and I was young enough to not care about the repercussions. I didn’t have to, not yet.

When the pandemic hit, coinciding with my first taste of real heartbreak, the world simply fell apart. I was really into using the fall of Rome as a metaphor back then, something about ruins, something about beauty, and it remains fitting. The empire of my adolescence, of unchecked recklessness, had fallen to my feet and I would spent the better part of the next year learning to navigate the ruins. Even now, I can sometimes still feels the broken shards of those years poking my feet when I walk. Some days my socks are bloodier than others. I spent a long time alone in that rubble, piecing myself back together into the shape that I more or less embody today.

BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN LIFE

The point is, like Didion wrote, that period marked the end of something, and it may as well have been innocence. My world rebuilt itself with a stronger foundation, sturdier posts, double-pained windows. Recklessness gave way to responsibility, responsibility for one’s own life. I knew, and I could never again not know, that I was, and always would be, solely responsible for the saving of my own life. The princess movies were wrong after all and now I was paying for it.

I don’t know why I am telling you this other than to be able to better explain my current situation. The one that involves me, realizing that I am, without flinching, making the kind of smart, not-nearly-as-fun-choices that would never have occurred to me back then. I am finding that I can’t rendezvous with idiots anymore and when I go on a mediocre first date, I no longer stick around to see another. I find myself standing and up leaving places where I probably would have hung around a moment longer back then. I don’t know if that is a tragedy or a triumph, only that most days it feels like both. Maybe he’s not great for you but there is something magnetic about the way he laughs and maybe a few years ago that would have been enough. Maybe a few years ago, you would have run out and kissed him anyway because why not.

I know why not. It was more fun when I didn’t. But the thing is, the thing that Didion arrived at by the end, is that it’s the only non self-destructive way to live.

“to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”

-Joan Didion

It gives us back to ourselves. Adolescence is a constant straying from the self. Like a dog on an expendable leash, you test your limits, knowing something will always pull you back. But then the leash snaps, untethering you, and you find that you can actually do whatever the hell you want. I think it’s there, as least it has been for me, that you decide what kind of life you really want to live. One in accordance to a self-sustained credence of respect, or one that is forever straying from it.

You get to make dumb choices when you don’t know any better. You get to see the signs and ignore them. You get to feel your gut screaming at you and tell it to be quiet. The audacity. You get to stand outside in the cold, waiting for your first boyfriend to come pick you up after his trip, feeling a little dumb the whole time, but waiting there just the same. And when he tells you that he missed you, you get to believe him, even when you know it’s not true. Even when you know you are losing something every day that you choose to stay.

I don’t get to do that anymore. And thank god.

But wow, how strange it is to remember.

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