I’ve been thinking a lot about finally a lot.
I’ve felt, since this March, that July is a finally month.
My theory is that the pandemic — well, the pandemic did a lot of things, but it reset us emotionally. We’re all in the same timeline, a timeline where 2020 shook our insides and outs. A timeline where things changed in the years since.
I’ve written about my regrets before, but what strikes me is that I don’t really regret the past few years. Even though I look back and sigh at my mistakes, I’m someone who prefers to think of mistakes as experiences. But I have grown to the point that I do regret a lot of my pre-pandemic adulthood.
I’m sure, on some level, this is just an age thing. Not everything has to be about the pandemic. But I’d also thought that millennials would do fine, mental health-wise, coming through the pandemic. We’re at the right age where our brains are elastic enough to adapt, but resilient enough to recover.
I do feel I’ve aged at a strange rate. The time since March has been a weird one. I’ve felt very much like someone was dumping all the things I should’ve learned gradually over the past 3 years in the course of three months. I found myself crying once a week, not out of unhappiness, but over my body demanding I get over myself. No, we are not using that tone of voice with ourselves. No, we are not sacrificing our comfort for other people’s discomfort. No, we’re not going to believe we deserve to be treated badly.
No, we’re not going back.
To which I say, FINE! (The first part of finally!) I say fine I will love myself and fine I will be kind to myself and fine I will turn to people and say: hey you’re being a dick and I don’t like it.
I mean, I’ll say it nicer than that. But I’ll say it.
As some of my friends have said when I’ve begun acting this way: finally!
I know what they mean. I’ve always known about my sweet nature, simmering under my shame. But even after exorcising that shame, it’s taken a while for my sweetness and confidence to fill in that gap, that giant gap in my personality.
It’s strange to finally overcome this part of my personality. For it to burn away, like the ice off a meteor as it becomes a shooting star.
But it’s not enough for me to have a kind of finally feeling. I realize that what I hope to see this month, what I want more than anything, is for other people to have that finally! feeling too. I want people to look around with a gasp and realize who they are, just like me. I want them to have a kind of inner understanding that makes a big difference to them.
Partly because, as someone who’s struggled to accept themselves, I’m pretty good at noticing when people aren’t themselves. I don’t know why. It’s not necessarily what I’d call a good or fun trait, for the most part. It means other people can be kind of frustrating, because I can’t tell what parts of them are authentic and what parts are pretend. I’ve had exhaustive fights with people about this subject long before the pandemic, sometimes drunkenly pointing to them at the bar to say: you’re not real, and I can tell.
(Grad school is especially good for finding these kinds of people.)
I get exhausted by how they constantly pretend. Sometimes people get angry when I refuse to follow the script they’ve written for me. It’s annoying to be around, the constant need that people have for you to act like everything’s ok but also nothing matters. The cynicism remixed with a nihilism that shits on my idealism.
I’m not sure why I’m like this, why I can see people pretending to be people that they’re not — perhaps in their faux laissez faire personality, or maybe from their assiduous attitude against their own happiness. I recognize someone whose mask is not just a mask, but a whole bodysuit that fits badly. I find that while people can pretend a lot in their words and language, there’s plenty they give away in their body language, their facial expressions, their tone of voice. Heck, even in their tone of their text messages, their emails, you can find that incoherence, that inconsistency. I find that the dissonance between the two is where someone’s true personality lies.
What I find funny nowadays is how obvious that gap is. I was telling friends constantly that life feels like a dark but very funny sitcom. People are bad at acting like themselves, or rather the selves they think they need to play. It’s so bad that it gives off a whiff of amateur acting in local community theatre.
I wonder about the roles they’re playing, because it’s clear the situations have degraded so much that they don’t even believe their own acting. I say this as someone who has always been bad at acting how I think other people want me to act. For whatever reason — the ADHD, the queerness, the general confusion around white supremacist ideals of how people need to shut up and deal — I can’t pretend as well as other people can, or as well as they think they need to.
Maybe the same is true for you. And if it is, I’ll just say: you’re not alone. And you’re definitely not alone in thinking that maybe, finally, it’s time to be yourself. That’s what I want for you, too.
Another word for finally is finale. Maybe that’s what I’m interested in. I’ve talked about the pandemic having acts, but what I also feel is that the pandemic is and will have a reverb on society for generations. But I long for a kind of closure. Not because I want to stop growing and changing — quite the opposite. I want a celebration of how I’ve grown and changed.
I guess that’s what this newsletter is, for now.
Sincerely,
Sulagna