Realize that writing is a great way to feel like you’re doing something without doing anything at all; realize that this is why you do it. Realize that in everything you are making a desperate sales pitch for your own lovability, which is both hugely embarrassing and also endearing, maybe the most human thing about you. Come into this endearment only through a long phone call at dusk with a friend where you can’t help but tell them, But that’s so human, wanting that. Read a lot of bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh and old Helena Fitzgerald essays, and even return to the Bible—that hopelessly overquoted passage on love being patient and kind—desperately trying to make sense of what you are dimly beginning to understand will be the central work of your life, which is to love and be loved with ferocity, a sort of undying hellish righteous flame.
Dream about everything that might save you: a good job, a good city, a good spouse, a good family, a good friend group, a good shitty beloved bar to read mysteriously at. Think: yes, once I get it, I will have made it, I will be saved, I will have gotten through that fabled door that opens up unto adulthood, that magical room in which the lights are always sweetly yellow-orange and there is always food being pressed into open palms. Realize that every time you get something that is fabled to save you, to make you feel like you’ve made it, there is invariably more work to be done. The years and years after the blurted confession. The dishes and the laundry and the splitwising of utilities bills. You open the door to another door to another door to another door. You think maybe you should just get good at having fun in foyers, in the little interstices where everyone is taking off their shoes and introducing themselves, because this just might be the stuff of life, you might already be here.
Do everything you can to stay in the present moment, despite the seductive gravity of fantasies of better lives. Mostly fail, but try anyway. Tell your younger brother you want to move to New York and you want to write and you don’t know much else, and listen to him say, Well, there’s probably more to write about in New York; I guess here you can write about your roots. Go to his apartment and eat the salmon and rice he cooks for you and say, this is so good, how did you make it, and mentally transcribe the recipe he gives you, which is the recipe your grandmother gave him. Feel guilty for loudly doubting his cooking abilities to friends, but only a little. Lay down in his bed and listen to him play anime music and worship songs on the keyboard and think about how the only people you’ve known for longer than you’ve known him are your parents.
Come to terms with the heinous weight of your own pride, your own self-righteousness, your streak of meanness, your propensity for disgusted condescension, your anger, your frustration, your ignorance, your general fallibility. Feel weirdly relieved acknowledging all of these parts of you, like a knot being pulled loose. Realize that it is hopelessly gauche to try earnestly at anything; try earnestly to be good anyway.
Break up with your girlfriend of five years, the girl you really thought you were going to marry at eighteen. Feel mostly relieved when it finally happens; realize just how much people can change and what a stupid, remarkable, incredibly urgent gamble long love is. The night before you move out, text some friends about how you feel tectonic plates grating inside you as you separate your belongings from hers and fold them into the three suitcases you will later arduously carry down the apartment stairs, the elevator being hilariously broken, like some cosmic punchline. Then experience the actual cosmic punchline: waking to a 4.3 magnitude earthquake in the weak hours of the morning before your flight. Listen to her ask if you’re shaking the bed; say something like, no, I thought that was you. Realize that there are some things for which both of you are blameless; accept that this doesn’t make them any less scary, or painful.
Learn how to love people all sorts of ways. Have friends you text every day, friends you pick up random calls from without hesitation, friends you sit down with and marathon call into the late hours of the night. Be surprised at your own capacity to attend to others in a co-creative way; be even more surprised that you find it fun to exercise this capacity, to keep trying different things to stay connected with people. Think that maybe even if you have only this, and your writing, it would be enough.
Accumulate nearly a thousand quotes and web clippings on your single are.na board in a hamfisted, barefaced endeavor to learn how to be human. Think about how you haven’t lived in the same place for more than two months for the last year and a half, and how as a result your life is mostly half a dozen beloved articles of clothing, your Leuchtturm, and this weird, deeply personal archive. Have the sense the rest of your life may also be a similar process of nesting, of accruing evidence of life from the outside world and bringing it into you, hoping to be changed, to inherit all that glamour and wisdom, and mostly feeling the same, until you look up one day and notice the home you built around you.
Sprain your ankle for the fourth time. Add new things to the lentil soup every week, literally never learning that it always tastes best when you just follow your friend’s recipe. Open Instagram; close Instagram much later than you intended to. Make the same stupid mistakes over and over again—mean to change but never do. Change in the ways that matter. Choose life again and again, every stupid and banal indignity of being a human being, every confusing medical form, every obnoxious email, every carefully budgeted grocery list and disgusting chore and unskippable instance of small talk. Think that you could very easily be miserable; wonder at how you’re not. Wake up each morning with a unjustifiable, unshakable belief that life is worth living and that all you want to do is squeeze as much brilliance as possible out of every fundamentally insignificant moment, burning through the days with the flame of love you cultivate inside of you, hoping more than anything that you can light others’ flames, so that they can in turn light others’, an uncontrollable wildfire of people teaching people how to live, relentlessly.
With more love than there is,
Shenai
Teared up reading this you beautiful wonderful sincere person