Mind Games

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.