Recently, I read a play that my friend's playwriting classmate had written. An insecure young girl attempts to make a sale to a finance bro. She is supposed to acquire self-confidence in completing such a sale. The draft is rough, and for me, particularly, it felt rougher as there's nearly 90 pages of whining that happens by this protagonist. By page 10, I had already defaulted to a whiny nasal monotone for this woman's dialog.
There's nothing wrong with bad art. We all have to start somewhere, and I too haven't been particularly skilled at rendering the nuances of insecure sales. But the metaphor has been sticking to me, and in articulating the metaphor, I'm worried that what might follow is some experimental writing.
A lot happened this semester, and I think detailing all of them becomes a tedious repetitive exercise. All I have to creatively show for it are many many pages of journals and even a few tear stains on my pillow cases. One question that's been driving me through these times has been repeatedly asking, what's it all for? This is a question commonly asked at the edge of the void, a space I seem to enjoy living at despite paying rent in upscale Philadelphia. Throughout the semester, from the very purpose of business school, to the very reason for why I seek connections and friendships, I have relentlessly asked myself what's it all for? If I were an internet thought-lord, I would flatter myself and say that self-reflection is productive. But since I am not, I can tell you that this pattern of constant self-questioning is also residual anxiety.
The short list of things I learned: how to care for myself in distress, what makes me feel abandoned, how to reconcile money in accounts receivable with accounts payable, how to set a price when you know a competitor expects to dethrone you in the future, how to make the best soupy noodles, what will make me feel like I have valued the nearly 300K of tuition this institution costs, what are we fighting for and what isn't worth fighting for.
An even shorter but more important list of things I learned that keep me alive: I have to have a creative outlet, I have indeed found God in the gym and I have to have a good relationship with my social media algorithms. Could I have learned these lessons through any other combination of circumstances and people in my life? Most certainly. I've reached a point of spirituality in my life where I accept that if there's a lesson to be learned, it finds me no matter how many creative ways I try to dodge it.
I wish I knew peace though.
Last night, we were celebrating the end of finals and we were out with our cohort. I felt my age in real time because I intended to be "slutty" and fun and do not one, not two, but three entire soirees of friends celebrating birthdays. What party people taught me is that there is very little pretext to celebrate as long as there's a critical mass for the attendance. At dinner, I discovered that who I am as a person is best understood through my internet footprint and through the spreadsheets I make. In person, I feel like a concept of a being. On the internet, I am able to use a multi-channel pathway to be whatever I want. I do not owe explanations. People can unfollow or block me silently without me having to register their feedback in-real-time. After swallowing this truth, I could only stay for a few hours longer to wish one happy birthday and then crawl home.
The insecure girl reveals credentials that are impressive but she hides them as if they are heritable diseases. She is insecure in the trademark way that one markets an emotion off the shelf: Insecurity for 4.99. But I have been around real insecurity, I have suffered real insecurity. It does not come with clean open proclamations. For me, it comes in anger, in dismissal, in hiding so much of myself that I feel almost invisible. I have felt insecure for being "too much" and "not enough" simultaneously. I think my issue with the the girl is really that I just complain better than her for 90 pages.
I've discovered that I hide the things I deeply loved because to love is to accept loss, and sometimes that loss feels unbearable. A classmate and dear friend of mine puts her lipgloss on me, and she prepares my face with a sisterly tenderness that will break me if I think too hard about it. All the girls at this soiree end up wearing the same lipgloss. We all preen in the mirror together. We are posing for selfies, and I know in that moment we are infinite. We may never get back this moment, but I try not to think of the terrible transience of it all. To be in constant awareness of the void is also exhausting. I have been fed. I have been witnessed. I have received affection from people in ways that have been surprising and alarming. I have experienced the passage of time.
There have been intense periods of isolation this semester too. Times where I've simply had to sit down and beat into my brain things that simply were not intuitive. I have felt time find me in the corridors of school where once I too was a sophomore or a junior or 23 or 25. I've had to drink from the firehose and swallow a volume of material that expects me a cognitive plasticity from me that I have either lost or simply never had. And yet, that is the nature of school. Despite my best efforts to find community in business school and despite my (successful) attempts to fight off the FOMO, I have sometimes caved to the fear of not fitting in and to the desperate anxiety of finding ways to weaponize that to feel some sense of control. There are times when I have abandoned myself, and though they have been fewer than before, they happened nonetheless.
Reading the play made me angry enough to write seven pages of an adaptation. In these seven pages, I switch some characters around and push more plot in 7 pages than the original had until page 30. Perhaps satire is my comfort genre because I am productive when I am angry. My friend who shared the original draft says he will read and offer feedback on the version that I sent to him, which is kind, because my draft is also rough. Part of me believes that I should finish the draft as an exercise in writing again. Write some more fiction. Read more of the things I care about. Find peace and love and God and a job and skills and better recipes and routines and structure.
Instead, for the first time in four months, I have found time.