Your worst fears have already come to pass
Also, happy new year
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Dear friend —
Is it possible that we’ve already become what we’ve feared becoming?
Maybe that’s too aggressive a question with which to start a love note, but bear with me here, and think back to your childhood, your youth. In those early years, what was it you promised yourself you wouldn’t become when you grew up?
The angry man? The lonely woman? The cog in the wheel of the corporate machine? The unknown writer, struggling year after year without ever making real money by the pen?
Perhaps you were afraid of becoming your mother, your father. Or you swore as a kid that you’d never turn into the impatient parent, too tired and irritable to answer a child’s question with equanimity.
Or did you simply fear the mundane?
Were you afraid you might end up utterly average, living your inconsequential, forgettable life, just another unpaid extra in the film of human history, one more anonymous face in the crowd scene?
Well, here we are, you and me, in 2021. It seems our worst fears of becoming no one of consequence have already been realized — and, in fact, likely came true quite some time ago.
And yet, somehow, we’re still alive, surviving.
If this were a self-help column, I would now segue into talking about how this year can be our year — one in which we make our deepest and most fantastical dreams come true. A motivational paragraph about not letting our past define our future and instead upleveling to fulfill our unique, one-of-a-kind brilliant and decidedly un-mundane potentials seems entirely appropriate here, even expected. You can publish that bestseller novel! Make that billion! Find love with a smart and kind and openhearted perfume model who for some reason doesn’t even realize just how good-looking they are!
But I’m not going to do that to you today.
Instead, let me point you to an essay I love by my writer friend Laura Warrell: “I gave up on love, and it was the best decision I ever made.” In it, she details what was once her greatest fear of the future — going through life without a romantic partner — and her realization that the future was happening now.
“What weighed on me was the horror of imagining myself alone forever. But really, this lonely life I envisioned far off in the future was already happening. For nearly two decades, I’d been living it. There’d been good days, not so good days and days that were hell. But the same was true of marriage and the time I spent trying to find a new partner. I was already living the worst-case scenario, and I was surviving it.”
What I love about this essay is that it forces you to think differently about any fears of becoming you may have. Afraid you’ll toil as an unknown writer forever? Well, you’re already living that terrible future, and you seem to be getting through the days and nights somehow. Tormented you may never get thin, own a home, have a child, win parent of the year, be conventionally beautiful? These things are already true of you now, and you’re doing okay.
I think there’s a freedom to accepting our averageness, the ultimate meaninglessness of our lives. What would we do with our time, our energy, our minds, if we simply accepted we already are what we fear becoming?
“Once I accepted my circumstances, I started to thrive,” Laura writes. Laura and I chat sometimes, so I know she, like everyone else, has her ups and downs. Some times are just going to feel thrivier than others, and acceptance is a daily practice.
Which is to say, I still often indulge in elaborate daydreams of what I might one day become, if only. Oh, if only the world would realize it loves my writing, see how special and un-average I really am! What I would say then, what I would do! Oh, the places I’d go!
But I suppose those types of daydreams, too, make me pretty average.
From one mundane human to another: Happy new year. However we can, let’s thrive in 2021.
And tell me what you’ve feared becoming.
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love
For more existential musings, read Joshua Rothman’s take on the uncanny allure of our unlived lives in The New Yorker: “Historic events generate unlived lives. Years from now, we may wonder where we would be if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t shifted us onto new courses. Sometimes we can see another life opening out to one side, like a freeway exit.”
Those who cannot stop planning for the future are doomed to labor for a life they will never fully live, argues Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.
Here’s another essay of Laura’s I recommend: Writing while Black. “To write as a Black person in America is to sustain a barrage of gut punches from a community and industry that don’t do a great job transcending the larger inequities of the culture surrounding them.”
