When I was in college, I started to play a game with
myself. When I was walking around campus, I would pretend that suddenly a
younger version of myself had been magically transplanted into my current body:
she could see out of my eyes, but not change any of my actions. Temporarily
confused, she’d quickly become curious and try to figure out when and
where she/I was. An iteration of it went
something like this:
Wait, where am I? Why is my hair falling in my eyes--
oh, wow, it's short. That’s new. All right, wearing a dark green coat-- that's
cool. Was that a New Hampshire license plate? Wait, is that-- holy
shit, is that Baker Tower? AM I AT DARTMOUTH? I'M AT DARTMOUTH!
On the face of it, the reasoning behind this particular
fantasy is abundantly clear: in the weird way that I self-comfort, I was
essentially trying to pass a message back to myself through time. The
message was that even though I was miserable in high school, I would get to
where I wanted to go. Now, of course, I realize that the game goes a lot
deeper than that, and in some ways speaks to the fact that often in my life, I have
trouble living in the present: I always focus on the future, or I imagine my
past self in her future, which is my present.
It’s all very convoluted, but it has very little to do with actually focusing
on when and where I am from the perspective of who I am now, leaving the past
and future in their respective places.
I also have to admit that this isn’t just about my younger self. I still carry around a lot of that younger
baggage. Playing the game is how I sell myself the idea that my having the thing that
I wanted so badly back then makes up for the sadness that came before, and that
somehow I'm emotionally in the black, or at least breaking even.
Was I very, very happy in college? By and large,
yes. Did going to Dartmouth "make up" for being miserable in
high school? I don't know—I’m beginning to doubt it. Regardless of if or how those two things are
linked, they've formed a kind of symbiosis in my mind.
And it didn't stop there.
After I graduated and spent about a year being lost and
unemployed, the game became less appealing. I think once or twice I
imagined my Dartmouth self projected into my post-grad self and thinking, Why
am I at the Glen Ellyn library? I was not in a good place for those
months, and I was smart enough to know that I should shelve the game for a
while.
When I finally got a job in a museum, which had been the
goal in college and after, the game came back in a big way. Graduate
school was hit and miss--I was unhappy, but the Colorado scenery was certainly
lovely. Coming home to Boston, and to a different job in the same museum,
I felt like I hit a new level: now I was sending retroactive reassurance to my
unemployed post-undergrad self and my unemployed post-graduate school self (the
latter had shingles-- she needed all the comfort she could get). Now,
walking to work, it went something like this:
All right, I know this walk. Oh God, please let me be
walking to the museum and not another building nearby. Hold up, are those
Frye boots? NICE. Huh, I guess my hair grew out a little too.
Okay, there's the museum sign. Come on turn right, turn right...
YES! Staff entrance! I'm home!
That was--well, if not "all well and good," then
at least no weirder or more harmful than usual.
Until things kind of went to hell at work.
Yes, this was in fact my dream job, but not since my first
job have I been silently crying in the bathroom, bursting
out in hives, and lying awake at night under a blanket of anxiety like
this. The short version is that my boss is awful, though that doesn't
really cover it. I've worked for bad bosses before-- crazy bosses, mean
bosses, outright offensive bosses. But this is worse. There are a
lot of reasons why that aren't worth getting into, but suffice to say I have
come to realize that the dream job can be made untenable by a nightmare boss.
And so it is that when I walk to work, the game stalls out:
yes, I am walking towards my dream job at a museum, but my younger self is very
confused by the inescapable pit of dread in my present stomach.
As we get older, I think we begin to articulate a lot of
things that are painful but ultimately really helpful to understand. Like
the fact that you can be absolutely correct that something sucks or is unfair
and simultaneously have precisely zero recourse. That your outrage often
has no traction in reality, and the sooner you realize that, the better.
That hurt comes in all scales, and while some are more important and should
definitely set the others in perspective, they're all there and shaming
yourself for feeling the little ones doesn't help anyone. That all of the
optics can be great, but the reality of something can be awful.
And that the reality is much, much
more important than the optics.
The game itself was always really about the optics. In those
moments when I imagined my younger self inhabiting my body, I never asked
myself how happy I was. I guess I sort of assumed that if I had a check
mark in all the boxes of my expectations, I would have to be happy.
Maybe that's why the game is kind of getting old, as I get
older.
The other night, I was lying in bed waiting for my boyfriend
to come to bed and thought about the game in passing. My younger self
would probably be surprised by the Frank Turner tattoo on my wrist (and I
would've had no idea who Frank Turner was) and would be been dying to see the
person who I could hear brushing his teeth in the bathroom.
But
as much as I value my younger
selves and how they've brought me to who I am, what they think of where
and who
I am now matters less than what I myself think. What I thought in that
moment in bed was that there can be other good jobs, and that my current
predicament
is disappointing but not inescapable. More importantly, my when and
where in
that moment were pretty damn good. So when my love came to bed, I fell
asleep almost immediately, anchored on his shoulder and in my own
present self.
