a couple years ago i met a woman in her mid-twenties who complained: i’m getting so old! your brain doesn’t form as many new synapses after age 25 and then the only way to keep growing and learning new things is by taking psychedelics!
that’s an exaggeration of course, but it’s also not entirely inaccurate. i feel much more settled nowadays, and sometimes the rigidity terrifies me. every year i change in significant ways and have fewer problems than i did the year before. what happens when the upward ascent stops?
i often think back to fall 2023 - i was living in a large house with forty strangers, in a new city with zero friends and zero hobbies, and i did absolutely nothing to help myself escape the situation. i hardly saw anyone aside from my coworkers, i spent my evenings either sleeping at the office or watching shows in my room, and my life essentially froze for six months (i think this is not an uncommon new grad experience?)
the truth is i never actually found a way out of that state. instead i was fortunate to be bailed out by amazing friends - my current housemates moved to sf and invited me to live with them, my best friend started calling me multiple times a week, and so on. when i say i owe my life to my friends i mean that everything good from the past year has happened downstream of them
so i often wonder: what if everyone disappeared? would darkness find me again? could you take all the great things in my life today and peel them back one by one like layers of an onion, and what would you find if you did? would it be the same person from 2023, helpless and paralyzed? on days when i’m especially sad i catch glimpses of past versions of me, skipping meals and neglecting to put on sunscreen and thinking excessively cynical thoughts, and i worry - what if it’s always just me?
i think the easiest way to avoid getting stuck is to convince yourself you really want something and to hunt that desire to the ends of the earth. there are a couple things i’ve wanted very badly for the past year and now they are finally within reach but maybe i no longer want them anymore? the chase has been helpful regardless. i’m always worried about pursuing the wrong direction, but almost anything is better than remaining stationary
we often talk about fight-or-flight responses as instinctive reactions to danger. unfortunately i don’t really have a fight response or a flight response; instead my instinctive reaction to danger is to freeze. i freeze when cars swerve towards me as i’m crossing the street. i freeze on hiking trails with steep slopes and large overhangs. i freeze when confronted with impossible decisions to make
(only slightly relevant: the other day M asked me which of anger, sadness, or fear has the largest influence on my life. for me the answer is fear, by a wide margin. i think it’s kind of amusing how in some sense anger / sadness / fear correspond to fight / flight / freeze responses)
i spent a long time disgusted by my inability to do anything besides just stand there when the time called for it. lately i’ve been training myself to do literally anything else. it’s one of the reasons i’ve been trying to dance regularly - i sometimes get very nervous and tense up when running through choreo and it’s been good practice, confronting fresh waves of fear and paralysis every few minutes, forcing myself to just keep moving
"i hardly saw anyone aside from my coworkers, i spent my evenings either sleeping at the office or watching shows in my room, and my life essentially froze for six months (i think this is not an uncommon new grad experience?)"
Thank you for writing this because this is actually so real. In the first couple months of working I felt incredibly isolated and could not get myself to initiate hangouts with friends despite living in NYC. I always knew adulting was going to be hard, but it was hard in a different way than I thought it was going to be. I picked up adult things fairly quickly (401(k)s, getting a doctor, etc) - that was not hard. What was hard was to find the energy to do anything other than the adult things. I'd like to say I'm better at it now 1.5 years later but truthfully speaking I don't think I'll ever have enough energy for the not adult things again as if it was college
Im honored to witness ur dance journey and social dance will train ur muscles and brain to not freeze
Separately… is it not also you that formed the friendships that pulled you out? Can you trust yourself to form more, or to find new ways in the present/future to jolt into motion?
I am afraid of something similar and maybe it is cope but have started to try and believe that I am someone that can always find a way, or make one