I suppose this is part two of my Isn't autumn shit? post from a few weeks ago, and with that in mind you might just want to navigate off somewhere else without getting into it. I'm sure there will be others who've said what I'm about to say more eloquently, and made more sense of it, but I'm going to give it my best shot. So here's what has really hit home this autumn: that over the last five or ten years, I've become more and less certain at the same time. More and less certain that I can trust my instincts, and more and less certain of what decisions to make.
Things I'm more sure of now: that if you give me a map I can find anything; that I don't need to impress people I don't respect; that as a freelancer sometimes you have to accept jobs that you're terrified of, and turn down the ones you can do with your eyes closed. Things I'm less sure of: where to lay the blame when things go wrong, and how to cope if you can't lay it anywhere; how to 'fix' things for friends and family who are struggling; and where the hell I'm going.
Recently a male friend asked me out. We've known each other many years. Nothing has changed recently except that he has spent more time being single. I have no way of knowing, but I wonder whether he is experiencing what so many of my friends are going through. I wonder if he's started to question his own instincts, and make decisions based on a worry that he might've got things wrong before.
I might be projecting my own experiences onto him, because I've spent the last year or two questioning my feelings about some of the people closest to me - those I've loved and those I've wanted to love. As you settle into being an adult you find yourself becoming resigned to people's flaws, and being grateful and amazed that they can put up with yours. Things become more and more a mass of moral and emotional greys. When they go painfully wrong you muddle through the process of learning who you should and shouldn't forgive, and how the hell you go about that anyway.
Of course this isn't a new thing - I remember dealing with the same things as a teenager. But it just keeps getting more complicated. Things don't work out in the crystal-clear way we thought they did. Nowadays the closer I look at a problem, the more it expands and develops, and this autumn I've found myself surrounded by problems that don't have solutions. That's what's new: this total bafflement about what to do. I used to have a feeling, and trust it and act on it and never regret it. Now I have ten feelings, and they're totally inconsistent with each other, and I can't put my finger on any of them.
Fug Ling
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She's baaaack. And tackier than ever, thank God. Bai Ling's short flirtation
with sartorial respectability was both boring, and bad for her brand. This
is ...
1 hour ago
3 readers just couldn't let me have the last word:
I hope things looked brighter in the morning.
All I know is that when I was a smug little swot I thought I could resolve everything with paragraphs and arguments and triumphant, crowing spots of holes in others logic but really I now think such confidence is about confusing teen debating society absolutism and rationality with messy, incoherent reality. (I always think that's what's happened to young Milliband.)
I think all of us make all the big decisions for all the least coherent, most irrational reasons.
Then again I don't know what I think.
You know that Joan Didion Year of Magical Thinking? Everyone loved it as a meditation on grief; I found it most compelling as evidence that even v. smart, aged, worldly people still believed they could control the world and the lives of their loved ones.
I think protracted singleness is a complicated thing in relation to getting a bit older, because it can make one fret about oneself more. The best thing about being old is not finding the banalities of my own existence very compelling or surprising. It's all fiddly and variable, but in sum it seems easier to see one's little circuit of concerns as a wave to get on and surrender to rather than a Meccano kit to assemble.
That old platitude about God give me the grace to change what I can, to know what I can't, and to not stay up fretting about the other shit - well, annoyingly, in one's dotage, it starts to seem like it might be onto something.
Also he leaves are all nice colours; there's some magic Autumnism to be had somewhere, I'm sure.
Very frank stuff. Experience trumps all else, usually, and hones instinct. I don't know you, but like the fact that - on appearances - you aren't overly hurried to be comfortable, or 'settled', by your own definition or anyone elses. That this is troubling you must be difficult to deal with, but honestly I think it's pretty healthy.
If the only pressure you're feeling comes from yourself, embrace it. Do what feels right for you; be selfish. There is virtue in it; you'll have what you want, and you will respect other's wishes to do the same. Just be yourself.
I know what you mean, I'm amazed at how much I've grown and how much I've lost over the last 10ish years, I guess that's part and parcel of growing up (not something that I'd readily admit to doing!). One thing I've figured is that I've never had the slightest idea where I'm going but also: it doesn't matter.
Things have a way of working themselves out, so roll with the punches and don't fret when you get utterly lost, a bit of faith in yourself is pretty much all you need =)
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