All throughout the day I think things I’d like to write down. Then I sit down to write them and they disappear. It’s symptomatic of my life at the moment. One minute I think I have something nailed. The next minute, it’s floated out of my reach. I feel like I’m constantly grasping at dandelion seeds. You know the way they seemingly have their own air currents and disappear the minute you reach out to catch them?
I hate starting things. I can’t believe I formed such a strong opinion in a millisecond. But I think I’ve always been hasty. I don’t always think things through. Or I begin as deep in as possible because I don’t want to consider the start. I just say or do the thing and qualify it later, flesh it out, give it edges. It’s how I begin everything - projects, papers, even the way I speak.
It’s not that I don’t finish things; I do. I’d like to be more considered, although the first entry to this blog was a whole thought process on why I even started writing it. But I didn’t plan it, I just wrote the first thing that came to mind. I feel that way when I talk - like spilling the water but still filling the glass.
Maybe all the things I thought will come to me if I keep writing. Maybe I’ll articulate the things that really ‘mattered’ because only the things of ‘value’ stuck. But Gee and I told these students that what you think matters and to write it down as soon as you think something you want to remember. I think of Mad Men and the episode where Kinsey loses his big idea and struggles all night to remember it, and when he sheepishly goes to face Don in the morning he simply replies ‘It happens.’
How do things just happen? Isn’t there some kind of dandelion air current swirling events toward you? Do you step into their paths? Where is the agency someone must have exerted somewhere to propel it into being? What is behind the thing that will happen? What was behind the thing that happened? The first question is for strategists and king’s hands. Consultants. Writers. The second is for over-thinkers and psychologists. And of course there are overlaps in that venn diagram. Because everything has multiple sides.
I watched a tv show where they said that if you could visualise all possible outcomes then you will never be surprised. In my work I am trying to understand every angle but at some point I lose track. I am holding a cube with so many sides that it’s become spherical. These days I’ve been approaching conversation this way. What is this person needing from this interaction with me? Do I offer solutions or emotional support? What do I have the energy to give this person? What do I want to give them? If only one of us can get what they need, how do I respond? Will they register me putting my needs above their own as a quiet aggression? If I think this much before responding, does that make my answer inauthentic? What would my gut instinct even be before I’d morphed it into a cubist thought? Why is my view of conversation so transactional to begin with?
I learned about critical theories at university. I still can’t read a book without some kind of Marxist, post-colonial, feminist filter popping itself over the page. It feels like someone is shoving my head into the text like a bully shoving their victim’s head into the toilet. With all these perspectives swirling around me, more currents, I’m becoming tired and tired of myself being tired and tired that I am becoming the protagonist of an American bildunsgsroman who is ironic and self-aware but not aware that their self-awareness can never be all encompassing. That the one thing they can never truly be aware of is how other people perceive you. Who still thinks they can really put themselves in another’s shoes. We might connect with people, share similarities, but our experiences are singular. It’s things like that which make me feel really alone. I wish I could unknow it. I want to suspend the filters for a moment and see a moment for what it really is. But now I know there is no objective reality and boy is this getting trippy but there is no ‘what it really is’. It’s 11 pm and it’s fucking subjective.