Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.
…I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—
(from CATASTROPHE IS NEXT TO GODLINESS)
my housemate once told me 23 is the worst year of your life. i’m just over halfway done with it now and i am quite certain that this is unequivocally false, or at least that the way in which 23 is bad is complicated. the way i would describe it is that the last six months have been some of the best i’ve ever had, but there’s also a massive well of anxiety always present in the background
it’s difficult to describe but i think the anxiety is mostly about not knowing the broader shape of my life - which of my friendships are going to persist? how permanent is living in sf? how long am i going to be single for? what are the most important problems i’m going to work on? i have a hard time understanding what is temporary and what is longer-lasting
i am always trying to peer deeper into the future, which i think really means that i am craving more self-knowledge. i feel like i am making progress towards figuring out who i am (or a significant piece of it, at least) and the answers are only slightly out of reach, barely concealed by the turning of the years, and god why can’t i see just a little bit further?
i know there’s no real solution to all this other than simply living longer and collecting more data. unfortunately i keep meeting older people who needed decades of upends and career changes to put all the right pieces together, which is very frustrating because of course i want to know everything right now:
“I’m not saying your seeking is useless. What I mean is that you’re an unfolding process. Your seeking is one beautiful, important part. Every day changes us. The things we do, the things we see, the people we meet - they move our process forward. Keep seeking. Living bundles the kindling. Lightning does strike.”
all this results in a weird combination of extreme nearsightedness and farsightedness - of finally having enough self-awareness to recognize what i am feeling in visceral detail but not yet having enough experience to properly contextualize it. i think this is one reason why my feelings have been so turbulent lately. the highs are incredibly deep love and friendship and the lows are wondering if present-day loneliness will persist forever. the highs are flow states and complete task alignment and the lows are questioning if everything you’re working on is a mistake. the highs are feeling like you have no weaknesses to improve on and the lows are feeling like you’ll never become someone of worth
sometimes i think about all the software tools i’ve picked up at my job in the past year and how much better of an engineer i am as a result, and then i think about all the tools i’ll have accumulated in five years if i keep writing code, and then i think about everything else i do besides writing code. things are just getting started. one day there will be a version of vincent with infinitely more tools and data than the present one, and that person will probably actually have a decent sense of what they’re doing. i have no idea what i am doing right now. there is no way to find out other than continuing
as someone currently at ~23.75, it's not been a bad year so far!
the way the world works is still (and probably will always be) very mysterious. I try not to stress too much about the things I can't control. here's to (hopefully) many more years to go!
This piece really spoke to me, Vincent, thanks for sharing