When Left To Your Own Devices, Who Are You?

I’m young, an incongruous 23 years old — I say incongruous in regards to my age but I mean it in so many regards, to my personality, my loud persistent laugh, my ability to freeze a joke and squeeze it until it miserably dies. Even my face is unsuited to my age, more closely resembling that of a 12-year-old than an existentially-petulant post-graduate girl in the NJ suburbs who is Google imaging every known city in the universe for a sliver of hope pertaining to any of the following: a career, longterm financial independence, any legitimate starting point for the cultivation of a life.

Weird how I don’t feel like any of this has been up to me. It’s not that I feel like a victim, but it’s true in some sense that every time an ignorance of mine is stripped away, I feel betrayed by myself and by every human around me that failed to strip me of it earlier. Why, in fifth grade, didn’t I keep practicing the drums in my musty basement, with an intuitive understanding of how important music would be to me later? In high school, why did I stay friends with people who, by the definition of any person just a bit wiser than I was, couldn’t be classified as friends at all? Why didn’t I know I should negotiate for scholarships at colleges I actually cared about, instead of sadly accepting the best offer with my head down? I feel that I’m at the age where certain lucidities are finally being granted me by the sheer fact of having been alive longer, but I’ll never be alive long enough to not experience that stab of guilt, regret, and dismay when in one epiphanic moment everything about a terrible decision becomes clear.

We’re surrounded by people living in the same paradox. Nobody knows what’s best, in any situation, ever. It’s almost pointless to be writing about it, because it’s impossible to balance intelligence with wisdom. The moment you gain knowledge you’re tilted into egoism and future-looking and assumption; when you’re standing back, comprehending intuitively your place in the universe and how it all fits or doesn’t, it’s because someone made one destructive decision or another and you’re gazing at the wreckage. And even then you’re not saved from doing the same thing later.

Life is a weird thing, but the continuity and extension of it in time is what really boggles me. Apparently, this is not guaranteed to go on, yet I have to assume it will and make decisions accordingly. Same thing with finding a long-term career. I can’t live day-by-day. Caucasian, United States of American, spent only God should know how much on college, where I majored in something that I’ve always known that I want to do for the rest of my life but by no means has anything to do with my professional future. It’s all a big blur. All movies with their romances and dramas and symbolic events are confusing. Every single stigma, every word that defines more than one person like “biddy” and “hipster” and “art kid” and “rich dude” and “nerd,” any book about any refugee from any Third World Country — I’m sorry, but is America actually the dream? Is it a dystopia insofar as it sacrifices the people outside of it? And what about the inside? I get it sometimes, I truly do, but there are long and endless streets in my town and highways housing Burger Kings, kids eating Easy Mac because there’s time for nothing else and refusing spinach because it’s green and they have freezers overflowing with freezer-burning Eggo waffles and they watch Nickelodeon show after Nickelodeon show after fucking Nickelodeon show.

I don’t want to “brand” myself. I don’t even know what gender I want to be a lot of the time. I’ll wake up thrilled and go to bed hopeless and the other way around. And that’s just fine. I’m a hypocrite — I have a website, I’m applying to real jobs, I’m trying, I really am, and I know how important and good money is and can be — but I’m so incredibly tired of objectification in general. Boys. Girls. Comedians. “Creatives.” Tree-huggers. Jeggings-wearers. Sport-types. Are we really so many and confusingly varied that we have to make it easier by grouping each other up? Make each other fit into after-school clubs and gain interests that already exist, literally so that we can be happy and to survive in the culture we happened to be born in? Am I selfish, am I not seeing the full picture? What the fuck am I missing?

I am desperate to be alone sometimes, and not just alone in a I’m-going-to-read-a-book-tonight way but a who-the-fuck-am-I-when-I’m-left-all-alone-with-as-minimal-a-number-of-outside-influences-as-possible kind of way. What do you do? Who are you? Do you sink into a rage and pound on the pavement and everyone, all of whom suddenly resemble zombies, stares at you? Do you pull out a pen and a piece of paper and start garbling and making up names? Do you learn coding? Do you end up deep in the dirt labyrinth of the internet, torrenting Expressionist films? Are you laughing? Crying? Understanding true comfort? Wallpapering your jeans? Staring at water? Thinking of family? What?

When left to your own devices, who are you?

I don’t care about money, or survival, or any of that crap in the context of what I’m talking about. I acknowledge that there are way more human beings than I could possibly be even aware of whose inner worlds I could never even dream of understanding, points of view developed by the crawling roots of good, bad, neutral, or indescribable circumstances that are unprecedented to my ears. I know my parents pay for my gas and that there are Indian farmers killing themselves, and I don’t know shit but I can say for a fact that I’m an empath and have a really hard time not thinking about the natural horrors of this universe. When I’m left to my own devices I get amnesia of the practical and rational. I leave my keys and my cell phone and I forget that I have to eat and my brain soars off into an imaginary wonderland. My favorite thing to do is, I’ll roll a small joint, get in my car, park outside a K-Mart or a Barnes and Noble, nudge down the windows, play a song, and smoke it, just staring at people and thinking and realizing and sighing and forgetting and remembering. I am just a person in a place. I can be responsible, I can be reliable, but that hinges on every single other person relying on me. I don’t rely on me when I’m alone, all alone, truly alone. When left to my own devices I feel feelings and I think, deeply but into the air, and I experience love, and connection, from being alone. Or I sink down, into depression, or I don’t think, and it just is. A bit good, a bit bad, always secure and sheltered though. You’re so lucky, my brain purrs. Human. Underwater earth. Crooked trees. Wondering what someone else is thinking or what your own intentions are. Being interrupted, the stark anxiety. I am. I’m real. Argue with me. I don’t care. I’m done talking.