(Preamble: I initially wanted to use this vomit to write about a conversation that I had with my boss recently. I’m still thinking about it. It’s about what I’m good at [making friends online], and what I want to share with the world. But I felt a little bit stuck, so I kinda “vibed” for a minute and realized that I’m not actually in the right mood to talk about it yet – and so I switched to this. And I’m pretty proud of myself for doing this, because it seems like the obviously correct thing to do on retrospect. This is the skill I want to get better at. Being in tune with myself.)
I did a thread recently about how I was cleaning out my closet and found that several of my t-shirts – from my own t-shirt company, no less – no longer represent me anymore. There are several t-shirts that seemed really clever and great when I was 22, 23 – that now seem literally self-inhibiting on retrospect. Was I… surprised? It’s not surprising per se. I felt several feelings. I felt a little silly, a little stupid – how did I not see it coming? Why didn’t I notice sooner, take action sooner? But that’s hindsight bias for you. By the time you have enough information to make a smart, firm decision, it seems obvious. But it wasn’t entirely obvious until that point. And I think it was also necessary for me to make and wear those tshirts. As I put it in that thread – I had to write and read my story before I could really, properly notice what needed changing.
I suppose all of this is part of a broader point about transformation, rebirth, renewal. My trip to San Francisco was a convenient event to use as a marker for this change, but as always, I want to be careful not to overweight it, not to lean too heavily on it and demand that it function as some sort of narrative cornerstone. It expanded my imagination, my world-concept (this is something I procrastinated writing a wordvomit), and I’m still piecing together all of the implications and all of the changes.
On a parallel path, I’m also thinking about the value of silence – how sometimes the best thing you can do is to not say anything at all. This is particularly relevant for me on Twitter, where… sometimes when I post something, I get responses that are kind of missing the point. And I always feel this urge to respond, because… not responding to something means you’re ignoring it, right? And ignoring something is bad, because… it’s like, a sort of denial? Intellectually it sounds silly once I say it out loud, but I know that I have this idea rooted quite deeply in my psyche. And it’s something I’m going to have to adapt and change, just as I’ve changed my wardrobe.
So… what is it, about transformation? What do I need to talk about, what do I need to keep in mind? Well. The first thing I’m thinking is that surely this won’t be the last time. I don’t want it to be the last time. I want to keep transforming, keep evolving and changing as necessary. And again the interesting tension is – how do you know that you’re changing appropriately, and not overdoing it? How do you know you are responding correctly to the right things, and not simply being unnecessarily fidgety? This question itself is something that I might be overweighting because of my backstory as an ADHD child, constantly distracted, constantly starting new projects without finishing them.
And yet, it’s a valid question. And it seems to be a recurring question that’s come up in the past few vomits too. How to know that you’re reacting appropriately without being reactionary. How to know that you’re being persistent without being stupid. And the cheesy wisdom is true – you can’t know in advance. You figure it out as you go. You calibrate as you go. You make mistakes and you learn from them, and you have to be mindful to not develop too much scar tissue, not to overcorrect in response to errors and failures that may not actually mean the things that you think they mean.
It’s also something that my wife and I have been talking about in the context of our marriage. So much time has passed – we’ll be married 7 years in December. In several important senses, we’re completely different people than we were when we got married. We’re in different contexts now, we have different concerns, different focuses, different goals. And it’s interesting to look back together on all of the misunderstandings, all of the confusion, all of the ways in which we misinterpreted each other. It’s a challenging, painful and upsetting conversation to have – but there’s a certain lightness at the end of it. A relief. It’s like working a knot out of a tight muscle.
Nothing is as fixed as it seems. Given enough time, everything changes. These seem like obvious statements, and yet… do I live my life in a way that truly appreciates this? Not nearly as much as I’d like. Will I ever “truly” embody this in my lifetime? It’s an ideal to strive for.
At some level all of this is about orientation. I saw again a thread I had about analemmas (the pattern that the sun makes in the sky when you take a picture of it from the same location at the same time over the course of a year), and I remember thinking, wow, it’s amazing that there are people who are so “well oriented” spatially. They know where the Earth is relative to the Sun, and they know where the Earth and the Sun are relative to the stars in the galaxy. I can barely get an intuitive sense of where I am in my own neighbourhood. It’s something I’d like to get better at. Orienting myself. Knowing where I am. Knowing who I am.
We are voyagers called to the sea
Called by the great god of the sea
Who puts up a challenge,
We take on that good challenge
So prepare
We read the wind and the sky when the sun is high
We sail the length of the seas on the ocean breeze
At night, we name every star
We know where we are
We know who we are, who we are
Aue, aue
We set a course to find
A brand new island everywhere we roam
Aue, aue
We keep our island in our mind
And when it’s time to find home
We know the way