E: I’m sitting beside Kai-Lin, her head smeared with pigment, at an achingly bright salon off Guad. Going to each other’s colored hair appointments for emotional support has become an unspoken tradition of ours that started with “I’m going to dye my hair pink on Saturday, do you want to come with” and evolved into ten shared boards of various hair colors that we thought about and imagined ourselves with. It’s a very girl thing to know how long a trip to the salon takes. You walk in a lesser version of yourself and walk out hours later, a different person in a different world, the sky some fading color from an exhaled day.
“Ugh I kinda want bleached bangs,” I tell K from the swirly salon seat, feeling a pang of envy. “But I think I need to stop doing things with my hair. I did it so often because I was unhappy with my life. I don’t know, maybe I’m therapizing too much.”
“I always thought it was part of who you are.” K shrugged. She does know me well. I pulled up my Pinterest board again, silently replacing the girls with cool hair with my face.
I think about change often. How to make what’s changing inside match the outside. I tell people it takes a certain personality to have pink hair, and I found I didn’t have that feistiness in me anymore towards the end of last summer. I’ve been enjoying the black hair, the feeling of anonymity, and stability. I’m living in Austin again, and it’s like reliving everything that brought me joy before I became restless and went out searching for more. I wake up nowadays grateful for the routine I built in the years past: soco cafes over the weekends, long walks to the rec center, reading on the lawn at sunset, weekday lunch dates.
I remember seeing a post that imagined how it would feel to leave the world (die?) and return the next day. The comparison is a bit melodramatic, but I feel that way about returning to Austin. I was gone for just enough time for everyone I love to still be in the city and to still know the bus stops without having to pull up a map. Of course, there’s change—friends are telling me under the disco light that they’re moving to xx city next year and all the core memories they experienced. I love hearing about them. We go round and round and catch up to who we are now. Remembrance has a way of making you feel lucky, doesn’t it? K and I walk out of the salon at nightfall into a strange cold, our conversations carrying time and space.
K: two things i wrote within the same 30-day period:
december 30: “there is just so much brokenness in my life and at the center of it all is me, the most broken thing of all.”
january 16: “the source of our pain and the source of our healing are both people.”
i’ve been in frequent conversation with myself and my close friends all winter about trauma. when eb asked me how i was doing that first night we had dinner after six months of continually being in different cities, i said, “i’m not as happy as i used to be.” i feel ok about that, actually. i know myself well enough to know not to shun these feelings, or not to claim and make room for them in my life. there’s a lot of stuff i don’t get right about friendship, life, love, etc. but i still believe what i wrote about happiness last spring:
Happiness, I’ve learned, is actually not all that exciting. There are no triumphant gospels waiting in the elevator that will beam you up to true love, just a sense of things being not as difficult as they once were. You must tend to happiness every single day, kind of like a little hearth for a little house. You must not level upon it all your expectations. You must not forget it is a very small and dumb thing. You will likely grow bored of it sometimes and taking it for granted, venture out into the night to look for trouble. But like a small god, if you are patient, it comes back time and time again to save you.
i have officially de-pedestaled happiness from my life. whatever, it’s ok to be sad. it’s ok to be angry. it’s ok to even feel shame, to really hate yourself sometimes, to despair and spiral and all the other things we’re taught to defend against with everything we have at our disposal in 2023: pilates! hair dye! workaholism! tiktok! substack newsletters! “casual” sex! it’s ok to have majorly bad days because, with or without your permission, they happen.
here’s a rough transcription of a text convo i had with rishi the other day that pretty much sums up what i’ve been thinking about.
K: does trauma make you smarter and wiser or more stunted and tunnel-visioned?
R: it probably makes you prematurely cynical and jaded. certain types of trauma make you wiser about certain things by default but of course, all trauma is definitionally debilitating and sets you back.
K: it’s almost like trauma gives you a headstart when you’re a kid but then when everyone grows up, you fall behind. sometimes i think about how two girls can be similarly hurt at ages 6 and 26 and the 26 year old will be able to recover with [comparatively] minimal damage if she had a loving foundation.
R: i think it’s all dependent on the perception of self. we avoid [engaging with our trauma] because it is just so debilitating and it can emotionally cripple you and leave you all fucked up and weird. i think people that get through it are superheroes but i also think that’s very very rare.
K: it’s really not fair.
R: it’s not fair at all. but if you are smart enough, and it wasn’t bad enough, and you are persevering enough, you can probably get a leg up and rejoin the well-adjusted people. which is very deeply sad, actually. because so many people get left in the dust for reasons that aren’t their fault.
K: it’s hard to know that and not have a really fucked up perception of self. i feel crazy sometimes. what if my trauma has made me into a really malevolent and unforgivable person?
R: blaming yourself is the crazy part. i think that’s why people do end up getting left in the dust. any kind of turning to drugs, sex, apathy, whatever it is it, stems from blaming yourself.
K: as long as someone in the world thinks i’m redeemable and good.
R: nobody needs to think that but you. but i also think it.
What we’re listening to
E: “Escapism” by RAYE ^^ which A says sounds like a My Brilliant Friend post LOL.
I’ve also been listening to Gracie Abrams’ newest release “Where do we go now?”, NIKI’s Nicole album in chronological order for nostalgia, and my new york anthem playlist for a short story that I’m writing.
K: some audrey nuna, some shreea kaul, some magdalena bay, some maude latour. sooo much maude latour actually. i don’t always feel connected to my girliness—it feels like there are fewer and fewer opportunities to do that these days—but artists like maude have the strangest effect on me. i was scrolling through her tiktoks last night in bed when i came across this slideshow of just mirror selfies of herself in different orientations, overlaid with small case text about her vision, her mission, her music, her dreams. “when i was 19 doing this, i felt so certain of my vision, of my mission and the world,” she wrote, perched like an inscrutable bird over her bathroom counter with a point-and-shoot in hand. “and now i find things to be so much more contradictory, so much more nuanced, where two contradicting things can be true at once.”
some kind of party was going on in the courtyard outside our apartment. through the paper-thin walls, i heard all the common sounds of saturday-night merriment: collective roars of laughter, liquids sloshing, punchy music blaring through someone’s speaker. as i read what maude had to say, and a 27-second clip of an unreleased song (“heaven”) played on loop in the background of this slideshow—high synths, gravelly vocals, lyrics so simple and blithe—i heard the kids outside start to sing happy birthday. and i don’t know why, but i suddenly started to cry. maybe we’re all just so starved of connection that even being in the vicinity of other people’s joy can be gutting in the best way. i felt so young. i felt like something had found its way back home to me and everything beautiful in the world had gathered itself around this apartment in west campus. i could go to heaven with you. be that lucky 7 with you. i could dress in denim with you. i could make your bed with you. now i got that venom in you, perfect chord progression with you, 11:11 with you…
when i first found maude a few years ago, i instantly liked her because she sounded like a brighter, fluffier, new-age lorde. same husky alto register, same kiddishly clever lyricism, same fine-point attentiveness to the fleeting feelings of being young, pure, bright, primal. it always surprises people when they find out i like bedroom pop and not something more underground, more niche, more “subversive,” something with more edge. people tend not to believe me when i tell them i am not any of those things—that i only have a cruel look to me because i forcibly took up cruelty young, and that one of the hardest things about being “grown” is that i am actually not at all. i was once a lonely little girl blowing bubbles by herself in the backyard, dreaming of mermaids and fairies, watching sailor moon on youtube, nursing flowering weeds in the garden…i’m still that girl. and it makes me sad when nobody sees her in me.
the greatest gift that comes with girlhood is softness. is vision. is…is our intrinsic ability to make a home out of practically nothing at all. is the way we cry to ourselves at night, enduring wave after wave of subliminal sorrow because we are moved to pieces by the sounds of the world, by the vastness and miraculousness of bearing witness to ordinary perfection. my long hair, my long nails, my voice, my laugh, and my watery black-rimmed gaze sliding sideways into you: that’s my terrible, terrible girlhood. if you aren’t on my frequency, you just won’t understand.
from maude: “some of my initial missions: making you spill your secrets. making you think about your inner world. making you believe in art and believe in life itself. you know, i still feel those things.”
i still feel those things, too.
What we’re reading
E: I finished The Idiot by Elif Batuman last week. I had high expectations going in—it’s a bildungsroman ft. Harvard undergrad writer! Alas, unfortunately, I was disappointed, mostly because I didn’t feel immersed in the story. I get that the observations-heavy narration was intentionally done to show the clever, yet obtuse (idiotic?) personality of students from elite institutions. Every comment/event/relationship held a symbolic significance that could be traced to some part of Russian literature. It’s nothing like I’ve ever read before, and I did find myself appreciating college and class discussions more.
But the structure and pacing didn’t do it for me. I felt SO incredibly bored and distracted because the main character kept going on and on about her first year of college and the summer after, with a lot of unnecessary details that don’t connect. I also did not like the central love story. I can deal with miscommunication (hello, normal people) but I can’t deal with the lack of romance and banter! I couldn’t feel the chemistry enough to root for them in any capacity - maybe have them be a tad less stoic? I gave it two stars on Goodreads because it made me think, albeit reluctantly, and I did like Svetlana, the main character’s best friend (she’s fun!! running by the Seine, complaining about $$$ haircuts, etc.).
Next up is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (finally)! I’m a few pages in and already loving it.
Some articles I enjoyed recently:
anyway it’s about old friends (substack): on study abroad friendships and friendships you keep when you’re in different cities. “do you choose your home based on the city or the people?” reading this over & over & crying!
a late person’s guide to being on time (the cut)
K: anna karenina (ongoing), the vegetarian (finished), the collected schizophrenias: essays (ongoing), and anne carson’s lecture on corners (regularly reread and replayed). just like…anything and everything about the idea of “going insane,” about how it’s possible for insanity to be a place that you “go” to. i’ve been contemplating the absurdity of a lot of what comprises the core tenets of our ordinary lives (material success, prestige signaling, social belonging) when you hold it up against much more primordial things like psychosis or chronic illness or the sort of veil-lifting dreams that have pushed people past the boundaries of civility and into some colder, stranger, more brittle plate of existence.
People speak of schizophrenics as though they were dead without being dead, gone in the eyes of those around them. Schizophrenics are victims of the Russian word гибель (gibel), which is synonymous with “doom” and “catastrophe”—not necessarily death nor suicide, but a ruinous cessation of existence; we deteriorate in a way that is painful for others. Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas defines “schizophrenic presence” as the psychodynamic experience of “being with [a schizophrenic] who has seemingly crossed over from the human world to the non-human environment,” because other human catastrophes can bear the weight of human narrative—war, kidnapping, death—but schizophrenia’s built-in chaos resists sense. Both gibel and “schizophrenic presence” address the suffering of those who are adjacent to the one who is suffering in the first place.
— The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esmé Weijun Wang
i think to “deteriorate in a way that is painful for others” is pretty much the chief driver behind why mental illness is so severely stigmatized. we shudder to consider what life is like on the outskirts of reason, because what remnants of that “life” would even be comprehensible to us? that such a manifestation of total liberation and total isolation is possible is innately threatening to our instincts for self-preservation.
written between the lines of anna’s destructive fits of jealousy and paranoia which plunder her husband, lover, brother, and children of peace is her invisible depression and borderline personality disorder; yeong-hye’s ascetic “vegetarianism” descends mid-novel into full-blown anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia, nearly driving not only herself, but her sister, to suicide; anne carson describes the loss of her “daughterliness” in tandem with her father’s dementia: “he is becoming an x-ray of himself. you work with that. his language diminishes to word salad. you converse with that. his fatherliness dissolves a pace with your daughterliness. you fake it. you both fake it, maybe. you wonder this.”
we are profoundly disturbed by another person’s internal disturbance, whether we want to be or not. that’s a hard truth for a person on either side of the equation to come to terms with: that neither the mentally ill person nor the people he comes into contact with—kind ones, cruel ones, ones who understand and ones who misunderstand—will emerge unscathed from his spiritual untethering, his sinking inward of self, his silent unraveling and disappearance over that aforementioned plate of existence.
"I am the space where I am," says Bachelard. Demented people do not seem to experience the self as a shelter. There is some basic animal certainty that you are who you are and it's okay that is deleted from them. No more dialectic of inside and outside. You are simply exposed. You are open to all the winds. Your life is taking place in that space that the ancient Greek philosophers called to apeiron, ”the unbounded,” which was synonymous with “chaos” for Hesiod. While to Shakespeare it might be the heath, to Emily Bronte, the moors, to Samuel Beckett, a late evening in the future, but which my dad acutely described in the last complete sentence I had from him in this way, "Fires are the furthest in you are and the worst you are." Notice the direction of the fires.
— Lecture on Corners, Anne Carson
What we’re watching
E: I’m on season 5 of Love Island (UK), per KL’s recommendation. Frustrating at times, but really heartwarming to watch the contestants grow on screen. Also, watching season 3 of Jack Ryan (thriller ft. John Krasinski) on Amazon Prime with A and finished catching up on Emily in Paris! Just something new and lighthearted to watch while unwinding after dinner or recovering from the flu. I didn’t really watch any TV shows last Fall, maybe out of an effort to be more ‘present’ and read more. But I’m rediscovering the feeling of zoning out and watching a show, lol. Not sure why I was so hard on myself.
K: season 3 of bojack horseman.
thanks for reading! our first advice column is out next wednesday, february 1st!! mark your calendars. send in last-minute letters to oneseventystories@gmail.com. we read them all.
“maybe we’re all just so starved of connection that even being in the vicinity of other people’s joy can be gutting in the best way.” ugh so so real