My inbox is flooded with messages about the delay of TWIRL. You all care so much about receiving this newsletter on a regular timeline that it’s honestly shocking to me. Please understand, I am just a human being. I cannot be expected to fulfill a self-imposed deadline that no one is asking me for. I started writing last week but did not publish because I was in Georgia, staying in my parent’s house with my sister and some of our high school friends who came to spend Memorial Day weekend together. I find it hard to write when the prospect of hanging out is going on nearby, because I am a normal human being. As much as I love writing, or any of the work that I do, spending time being present with other people will always take priority. I find it difficult to hole up, or to be alone. I am addicted to the people and places that exist outside of my laptop. I am also addicted to the stuff inside of my laptop, of course. Lately I’ve just been addicted to life in general.
The last time I wrote, I talked about a shift in mindset that helped me overcome a depressive bout and became my gateway to this life addiction. It’s all a little heady and esoteric, but I’d like to talk about it, because it’s been helpful for healing my relationship to my own mind. I have to believe someone reading this could benefit from some heady and esoteric thoughts on life if you’re not getting that already from 40 other newsletters and podcasts and instagram reels and stuff.
The most helpful idea for me has been to start thinking about my psyche as something that comprises not just my internal world, but my external world as well. Everything I think and know, sure, but also everything I can possibly see, hear, and feel as well.
Around the time that I got really interested in filmmaking, senior year of college, I would often chat with cinematographers or sound recordists about how the camera or microphone was designed in many ways to mirror some of the infrastructure of our own eyes and ears. These organic devices, part of human biology, take in data from the outside world, and then our brain creates an image for our conscious awareness to interpret as our environment: including the things we see, the sounds we hear, and the people we meet.
When I look at my water bottle, for example, sitting at my desk mere inches away, what’s happening is that light that reflects off of the water bottle reaches my eyes, and my brain uses that information to create an image of the water bottle that helps me understand its features and location. It’s not unlike watching a film projected onto a screen.
Sometimes, to prove this effect to myself, I like to soften my focus on the world, and see where the generated image of my surroundings is slightly imperfect: where light is low and the image I see is a bit noisy, or when I cross my eyes and detect that that my image of the outside world is the combination of two images being seen by two eyeballs that will always be slightly out of sync (an effect that is compounded by my astigmatism). To some extent, the outer world I see is also part of my mind. To manage, and dare I say heal, my relationship to the outer world, is to manage, and dare I say heal, my relationship to myself.
A bit of the issue I was having the week of my last newsletter was a crisis of confidence. Oftentimes, when I feel socially anxious, have stage fright, or am self conscious in any sort of way, it comes from a feeling of separateness from my outside world and the people in it. I fear being judged or misunderstood, and project those feelings onto these other people. But with the reminder that a lot of my experience of the outside world is occurring within my own psyche, it is easier to see how those feelings are not indicative of truths so much as they are indicative of a strained relationship to my own mind.
Sometimes, I would think that this strained relationship to the world was what my psyche “really” WAS. Who I WAS, was my internal dialogue. Now, feeling like the entire world that I can see, hear, and feel, is also a part of my psyche, I feel so continuously awestruck by so much of what I am lucky enough to see. I feel immense gratitude for the lemons, oranges, and palm trees outside my bedroom window. I go on a walk through my neighborhood and see gorgeous plants and incredible man-made structures. I feel very lucky that these sights are part of my world, part of my mind, and thus part of myself.
Overall, it has sharply decreased the feeling that causes a lot of my occasional distress, which is the feeling of “separateness” from the outside world, and the people in it. This makes me feel a bit less judgmental. Like, I recognize more deeply that when I experience feelings of judgment towards other people, a part of me is trying to create distance between my self identity, and some behavior I am witnessing. However, recognizing that the behavior is present within my own mind, just by virtue of the fact that I am witnessing it, then being able to accept and displace the tension between my self-concept and the subject in front of me, feels like accepting and softening my relationship to another part of my own psyche. It helps me internalize the popular notion that accepting others is, simultaneously, accepting myself.
Quick caveat: I still believe judging other people, especially to and with my close friends, to be one of the great joys of life. However, I feel more capable of engaging from a place of less genuine offense.
It has also become easier to dissect the anatomy of an insecure feeling. Oftentimes, my insecure feeling is a criticism originating from a recess of my own brain, projected on a bystander who is either in my field of view, or is an image in my own head. In either case, it is almost always self-generated. Honestly, I was struck profoundly the other day by the thought of how skewed the ratio really is between perceived, self-generated criticism and external criticism.
Thinking about external stimuli as elements that inform my own psyche has helped me with feelings of envy and resentment. Lately, when I hear of successes in career or love that are experienced by those in my orbit, I feel grateful to be able to share in their positive experience. Not to say that I totally shake the feeling or thought of “will I get to experience this for myself,” but I do feel a strong sense that success that I am aware of, is success that I feel, and thus that I have as well. The flip side to this is obviously that the negative experiences and the pain felt by others, I hold as mine too. But that is a price of humanity that I am very willing to pay.
The idea of “being present” has always felt like a contradiction to me. It has always felt somewhat impossible to grasp, because I’ve thought that the awareness of being present is, to some extent, to escape being actually present. I’ve thought “presence” was a sort of thoughtlessness you only register in retrospect or something. Maybe it is, I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that completely escaping my internal dialogue or active imagination is altogether very possible. When I’ve not felt “present,” it has often been because I was carried away within my own head. At these times, I have been accused of “disappearing.” When they occur, I’ve found these moments hard to explain, because of that notion of separateness between my internal and external worlds. But thinking of them both as part of my psyche, inseparable from each other, I am more able to externalize that internal dialogue with others, and am more able to put it down as well, and find endless more interesting things to examine in the outside world. I feel lucky that when I am sucked up into a personal complex these days, I can more quickly detach from the analysis of that complex, and attach to anything else in my environment. To feel in control, and able to choose what to focus on in any given moment within the world, and thus the external parts of my own psyche, feels like what it is to be present. I’m addicted to that feeling!!!
Last week, TWIRL was due, but I was hanging out at my parents’ home in Georgia. They haven’t lived there very long, and I haven’t been there very many times, given that I live across the country, in LA. It’s funny when your parents move: the house has all the contents of my childhood home, surrounded by walls that feel pretty foreign. During this trip, our friends were flying in to spend Memorial Day weekend at our house, so I wanted to put some effort into making it feel like home. I decorated my room with all the crucial high-school artifacts (theatre posters and my homecoming king crown). I love to decorate my surroundings: it is another way to strengthen the connection between my inner and outer world. I now feel more deeply that my new room is my own.
The friends who came to stay with us are some of our oldest and most consistent. They are spread out all over the country, and are each living very distinct and unique lives. I had a huge sense of gratitude to be able to witness the lives of my loved ones without feeling that sense of separateness. Instead, the feeling was that I could vicariously walk many different paths through their stories.
I’ve been addicted to trees lately. I loved getting to look at the woods from the deck of the house. The beauty of nature is such an insane gift. It’s so difficult for me to be ungrateful for life when I get to see all of the incredible stuff that exists on Earth, maybe not for the primary purpose, but definitely for the secondary or tertiary purpose, of me enjoying the view.
My parents are in India right now, so it was up to my sister and I to cook and clean, and maintain the affairs at home. Having responsibility for the home helped majorly deepen my relationship to the space. I used things and put them back in the wrong places and felt like I was leaving a fingerprint, and felt much less separate from my surroundings than when I had arrived.
I think the most high-powered side effect of my recent addiction to life has been that I get so excited to jump into long-winded conversations with strangers who I meet in public. It literally does feel like drugs to break through the separateness of unfamiliarity between individual lives and form a bond where one didn’t exist before, from the most feeble, circumstantial happenings. Emblazoned in my memory is the bracelet seller from Piedmont Park who went to Michigan State, and the club promoter at the Americana who thought my T-shirt of my friend’s band was written in Armenian.
This did backfire once that weekend. My friends and I were in line for ice cream, and some old white guy came up to us and criticized us for being on our phones. I told him we were enjoying our time together and also pointed out that his wife was on her phone right when he brought this up to us. I’m not a big fan of the generational phone discourse, mainly because everyone I know over 50 has a screen time that doubles my own. I was offended by the assumption that I and my peers live some kind of vapid, shallow existence, and in an attempt to confront this assumption and also defuse my retaliatory comments, I tried to overwhelm him with chipper conversation in the way he seemed to think we were not capable of. On some level, I wanted to prove to him that he shouldn’t assume a superiority to young people who were probably just as thoughtful or engaged with life as he was, but I ended up proving that point a little too well when I realized he was actually just a bit racist. So maybe interactions with strangers are not always so divine.
Separate from that one event, life really does feel like a gift these days. It is such a privilege to get older, and experience the unfolding of time. I am so grateful for every day that I get to continue to live.
While I was in Georgia, I watched this beautiful Architectural Digest video with my friends. In this video, they cite Frank Lloyd Wright’s belief in the “continual becoming,” and the fact that he designed many of his works informed by the idea that “space is constantly revealing itself.” Lately, that’s how I’ve felt about the wonder of life: that different parts of the world, and mind, are constantly being uncovered everywhere I can look. Life is a gift that I get to constantly unwrap.