The thing about keeping your life in the internet – through email, through social networks, or maybe through blogs and other ephemera – is that it makes you infinitely searchable to yourself. I logged into my old Yahoo! mailbox yesterday looking for one specific thing to help mentally bring me to a place where I could write about it in the present, and I looked up an hour later to realize that I’d lost myself in the world of “who I was, 2001-2004.” Older versions of ourselves so often don’t seem real.
“It is good,” said Gwen when I mentioned this to her later, “to look back and at least be able to see how far you’ve come.” And I shook my head some, and laughed: “That’s the thing. I think ultimately, it’s reminded me that I really haven’t changed at all.”
This is of course not true, and never is, but it is interesting to read the words of someone you used to be and know exactly how many times you’re going to repeat yourself. I found two things, in particular, that stopped me in my tracks: not because I’d forgotten that they happened, but because time and self-kindness had softened them in my memory to be less bold and definitive than were in real life. The first was a response to a sorta-love letter, the first I’d ever written. “I know all you’re going to write back is, “?” I’d said. “You will then say, ‘It’s all relative.’”
He’d written back almost immediately. “No, I would’ve answered like this: “?!!”
“There are so many questions, far beyond just liking somebody. Can they honestly put up with my shit? Can I honestly put up with theirs? When i say “hey, I’m moving to Greece next month”, would they say “Yeah, i’m coming”? I’d like to think i’m extremely kind to friends; but significant others can get caught up in the same perfectionist criticisms that I level on myself.”
That note felt at the time like the beginning of adulthood as a space in which we could be calm and rational about feelings and events. It felt civilized, like maybe there’d be a future where you could just have some kind of panel discussion about love. Of course, it was in reality one of those well-timed anomalies that make it possible to stomach all the rest of the ways that other people really react to existence. At the time of writing, he was the same age that I am now.
There is this, too: an email I have read and re-read at least four times in the last twenty-four hours because it touches on every single bit of regret, vanity, and self-doubt I have ever had. In 2003, I was struggling to fund my first full year of graduate studies. I mentioned this fact anecdotally to my thesis advisor, who was the head of the undergraduate philosophy department at the time. She wrote me a week later:
Dear Sarah,
We’ve been working on trying to increase your tuition waiver at the GF for next year. (I didn’t mention this to you earlier because I wasn’t sure we would succeed.) Today I was told that your waiver had been increased to 50%. Would you let me know when, or if, you hear the same news? Hope all is well.
Best,
Alice
P.S. [Professor / Head of the graduate philosophy department] was instrumental in getting this to happen.
I mention this because there is another anomaly in life that is very important: when people you really, really respect come out of the woodwork to support what you are doing. Of course, there is a universe inside of me that aches when I read this, knowing that this is one of many tokens of faith that got put towards a career I completely walked away from without even so much as offering an explanation. (“Sarah,” said Alice a few years ago when I attended a reading for her new book, “where have you been?”) Regret is a shitty takeaway, though, and the reality is that if this has happened once in your life and you are not a complete savage, it will happen again.
I’m slowly learning to give the same kinds of advice that I have previously had such trouble paying attention to. I have been mulling this over as a few favorites and I have puzzled over the actions and the intentions of others. There is the sense that if you don’t succeed with respect to someone else, you are “wrong”. I don’t really have any brilliant answer on how not to think this way: it seems sometimes like pure over-motivational self-talk to say otherwise. I can say, though, that the “wrong” moments are all informative in their own way and should make us appreciate (rather than take for granted) those rare times when people are nothing but constructive and honest. Ten years ago, I’m afraid I didn’t know that either of these letters were instructional or unique or very helpful in navigating less-clear situations, and so they sat buried in an old inbox under a pile of other evidence that indicates I was “wrong” about so many things.
People have been real-talking the shit out of me lately in unexpected drips and drabs. I remarked recently that someone I know is wonderful but has a tendency to offer herself to the world very, very tentatively and then take it as rejection when she doesn’t get a response. “You do that too, you know,” said my friend. “You don’t put yourself out there as much as you think.” Last night I mentioned to Rebecca that I’d fallen into that ten-year-old inbox while writing. “My own inbox has been rather empty lately, you know,” she replied, as she is the person to whom I email all drafts of everything I write. It would be stupid of me not to recognize these moments as defining in the same way as Matt’s response to a love-ish letter, or as Alice and Jay’s efforts to secure me as part of a department. There are all of these things that we can say that we’re wrong about, but there are all of these other signs that are telling us that we’re headed in the right direction.
You have to show up, I guess, for those signs to make sense, and if you’re acting on them, there’s really not a whole lot of time left to worry about all of the times you may have been wrong.
