the choice of more beautiful surroundings

As I was writing this, the sun came out. happy pride

I’m constantly wondering what it’s like to be a very beautiful person. What I wish I believed more strongly is that, of course, everyone is beautiful in their own special, remarkable ways, but if I’m being totally honest, I have a desperate curiosity about the experience of having a proximity to beauty that requires no argument.

Which is a fucked up mental construct- that any form of beauty would require an argument. But it’s impossible to deny that conventional beauty is an upgraded social passport- it’s currency with a greater purchasing power, and in the digital era, it’s impossible to not feel tempted to gaze inside each other’s wallets.

I assume what beauty is, overall, is an effect. The effect of appearance in space, the creation of an air, an energy, that some people wield in a way that feels undeniable, effortless, consistent, and alluring. I don’t consider myself to be one of those people. I try, of course, but I try harder than someone with a truly natural inclination should have to.

Spiderman was my favorite superhero when I was a kid. Haven’t seen the new one yet, and maybe this part of this essay could be stronger if I had. But he was the first superhero I was aware of who was kind of a loser, like me. He was a little small, snarky, and smart. Naturally, the savior to a tiny, nerdy Indian kid who played with his sister’s toys. As a child, the live-action Spiderman movie with Tobey Maguire was my Bible. 

In this movie, Peter Parker can shoot webs out of his wrists, biologically. When I got a little older, and became more invested in the mythology of Spiderman, I learned that in the original comics, Peter Parker designs a special web shooting machine that he straps to his wrist in order to shoot webs. It’s not biological. The Spiderman properties that chose this mechanism for web delivery have always irked me. Why would he be able to naturally climb up walls and employ heightened senses, but a line is drawn at the ability to shoot webs from his wrists? Why should he need a machine as opposed to having the natural ability? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. I bring this up to say that in general, I feel like someone who can create the effect of beauty only with the help of some engineering. Whereas some people, I feel, expel beauty out of their wrists. 

This analogy can be applied to any given trait. I know there are things I can sling out of my wrists with incredible aptitude. Words, for one, come really naturally to me, a good portion of the time. I know that even this quality, amongst the right audience, can be a beautiful attribute that I possess. It contributes to an overall air and effect. But much of the time, I feel that even my most beautiful qualities are fighting tooth and nail to counterbalance many less desirable characteristics. Ultimately this is just an issue of self esteem. I can never tell if this is obvious to others or not, but mine, a good amount of the time, is pretty bad. 

I tell you this as an exercise in honesty. I want to be honest in my writing, and a lot of the time I hold myself back. In the practice of any art form there’s always a question of how much do you expose and how much do you protect. But with this newsletter, I challenge myself to be brutally honest about where I’m at. 

As previously mentioned, I’m someone who wields power with my words- my closest companions know me as a person who uses words to build people and ideas up: I use language to decorate conversation, to validate those I love, to celebrate feats, to romanticize; but I also use my words to tear things down, to belittle and judge and shred and attack, should I wish to. These tendencies of mine get applied towards other people, but also to myself. Which is sometimes how I justify their impact. To beat the spiderman analogy dead: great power, responsibility, etc. 

When my self esteem is pretty bad, some of the worst parts of my internal narratives go like this:

• There are inherent qualities that lay the foundation for success in a given environment, towards certain goals, and you, Rishi, are able to perform some level of proximity to these traits, but don’t actually fully embody them, and are not on the road to achieve what you wish you could.

• Your relationships are inhibited by the fact that you have a fundamental repulsiveness of mind and body. Your greatest loves have and will leave you because they become aware of your obvious inferiority and choose, instead, a life of happiness and plenty that they would never be able to access while exposed to the black hole of your presence. 

• You are untalented, the sum total of your natural inclinations and efforts equal out to “not quite enough.” Your writing is corny, and worse, boring, your acting is robotic and awkward, and you either lack the talent to create what you wish you could, or the work ethic. Or both!

We are all our own worst critic, and my critic wields words powerfully. But not all the time. Moments of low or high self esteem are influenced by a lot of factors, and I have recently made it a practice to be more aware of when I am being residually impacted by circumstances that I might be overlooking. Right now, my internal monologues have gotten more aggressive while I am in the process of moving apartments.

I can’t recall if I found the space to mention this in my previous newsletters, but this past week, I moved from West Hollywood to Atwater Village. For the last two weeks, my home environment was in complete disarray, as I traveled back and forth, moving my possessions between two apartments across the city. Packing and unpacking, simultaneously and almost constantly, I experienced a visceral sense-memory from the last time I moved: out of my college apartment to Los Angeles. But also, from every other time I had moved. It has always been unsettling. Every day, I was performing an evening of physical labor completely alone. Emptying a space I loved, and wasn’t fully ready to leave, pouring its contents into somewhere new. I defaulted to intense feelings about my February breakup pretty strongly, maybe because of the parallel experience of having “time cut short.” My internal narratives got nasty, and I felt unsettled in each place that I lived. It has been a tough few weeks. 

On Friday of last week, we got the old apartment empty enough to host our “Housecooling” party: a party in the empty apartment we were leaving. Last year, on my birthday, I hosted a party that stressed me out, and that residual feeling of anxiety towards a party in the same apartment, during the month of my birthday, had creeped into my bones. But the party was fun. I was better at hosting than I had been last year, and it was a good reminder that I’m not where I used to be. A year later, I’m in a new place in life. Fairly literally. 

The weekend after the party was busy, as I am always grateful for, so we didn’t get time to perform the final deep clean of the space until the work week. On Monday, my roommate and I work together, cleaning the place up to the tune of Clairo radio on Spotify. On Tuesday, there is little enough to take care of that I come to finish the job alone. 

Something I am surprised by every day of this move, and the clean-up, is how warm it gets inside the apartment so quickly. I mop the ground, getting sweatier than I am proud of. Dirt collects embarrassingly quickly on the pads of the Swiffer, and I change them out faster than the place seems to be getting cleaner. I take a few swipes against the tile, then return to the air conditioning unit to lower the temperature further. 

Eventually, I decide that the place is clean enough: determined less by the amount of dirt on the ground and more by the amount of sweat on my back. I sit on the counter by the front door, after all lightbulbs had been removed, and the sun is nearly fully set. I try to “take it all in,” to do the place justice, spiritually. I eulogize the apartment verbally, because when in doubt, I always have words. 

I speak about experiencing the love for another mortal thing. Mortal in that it is coming to a close. I reflect on so many endings in this period of time: the last months of my 23rd year, which now feel like absolute limbo. I tell myself that life goes on, even if I don’t believe it will, or that it does, ironically knowing that negligent of my disbelief, it constantly does.

I take a deep breath in, wincing at how it’s coated with the fumes of cleaning materials. I search for a moment of peace, comically interrupted by the AC turning on again. 

It’s a fitting, imperfect moment in the apartment I’d grown to like a lot. I exit, and take the red christmas bow off the door. Outside, I run into our next door neighbor. I’ve written about this neighbor before. I said in a previous newsletter:  “At some point we realized the duo next door were literally our carbon copies. These two guys are a year older, went to NYU, one of them does music and one of them writes or something. We’ve talked like once, and Elijah and I completely arbitrarily decided to not befriend them. Something about it felt way too eerie, and I think as a rule men shouldn’t congregate anyway. These neighbors leave their screen door open constantly; they’re one of only two apartments to do that, which is annoying. The other apartment is ours obviously.” 

You can read that one here. It’s funny how digging through past essays to find this quote illustrates some of my current points: I immediately faced a lot of self critique about my old writing, and also realized how much has changed. My voice as a writer is much different, my essays longer, I now live with two other men, and I ran into those neighbors a lot this past week. 

At a coffee shop on Saturday morning, one of them was visiting the other at work. Funny, given that visiting Elijah at his coffee job is a regular activity of mine. One of the neighbors talked to me about getting his phone stolen at Weho Pride. That’s where they were during our party, so they were blissfully unaware of the noise that got the cops called on us. In the original essay about these neighbors, they were having a party while I was at home, alone. Something about that interests me.

Outside my apartment, as I lock the door for the last time, I tell him that he’s caught me at an emotional moment. He expresses sympathy, and says he’ll leave me to it. 

With COVID in my recent memory, there have been times in my life where I didn’t feel like I got to do my life transitions justice. I want to be indulgent here. I take a sentimental stroll down the block, completely on the brink of tears. I walk down the street, to Plummer Park, a place I love, right at dusk. I accidentally stumble onto the patch of grass that held my first date of the relationship that ended in February, an event that sticks to my brain and body, that I’ve had trouble mopping away. It is the same time of day that it had been when that date ended, and I sob, and text a friend about it. And I have to get going. So I eulogize that spot as well, and wish the best to anyone who ever has or ever will step on this patch of grass again.

And then, as I leave, a guy with a mohawk riding a rainbow motorized unicycle comes driving towards me at an unpredictable pace. Pivoting at weird angles, as you do on a unicycle, apparently even a motorized one, to where it’s impossible to predict his motion. I freeze, unsure of how to proceed in the least disruptive way. I take a step to my right, seemingly the natural course to take given social conventions, and he is surprised somehow, and he falls off the rainbow motorized unicycle. 

I leave him with a quick apology and hurry away, because I’m late, and also because I’m embarrassed. But ultimately, I stepped to the right, which is normal. I tell you this, despite how it undercuts the emotional beat of the story, because it’s what happened, and as stated before, I’m attempting an exercise in brutal honesty. 

not the patch, but the park that I’ll miss

I started doing some appointments with therapists this week. I met one bizarre character that I gave a long shot chance to, and he did disappoint. I made a TikTok about it. When I mentioned pursuing a career as an actor, he went over the top with compliments about my physical appearance, which I can’t tell if therapists should do more or less often. In the appointment, I was aware at basically every moment how therapy is an area where I end up really wielding my use of words. I can’t tell if his comments about my perceived beauty were because I was in my element, or because in this room my desk is in front of a window, and the lighting is better. Maybe the mechanism doesn’t matter much after all.