the jitters

are a sign

I’m an anxious person. Friends and colleagues have all told me I’m the biggest pessimist they know, my own parents reprimand me quite often that my nerves hold me back, so much so that when time comes to prove myself, they believe I freeze. Back when I studied, that was their favourite excuse, that I always knew, and anxiety was the one that made me mess up. I become little more than a corpse at the sight of my fears.

It’s a maddening ordeal, walking with jittery bones, and it does not, in any shape or wording or way, help a single bit when I’m told ‘it’s all in your head’. Isn’t everything? Like pouring water to put out an in-house fire, the flames grow stronger, eating at everything they can touch. Saying that somewhat belittles the unsteadiness, makes me feel weak — because no, unlike what they expect, most of the time my mind runs free, like a bird, and I’m merely a watcher. I control it here and there, but it takes tremendous effort. It’s equally frustrating to hear that old phrase, the one that goes something like that deep down, you know —you already know before you even know that you know; that knowledge lives within you, and it’s waiting to be discovered. You know the end, and you know you can do it all. I call all that bullshit.

Controlling my nervousness has been crucial in these past months. Learning how to drive demands a certain amount of confidence, of sureness. It’s a careful equation between the sum of all dangers around you, of the information you drink from your surroundings and your own awareness, the knowledge that is already within you. My nerves slow me down, have me commit mistakes I know best to avoid, or quickly forget warnings my instructor tells me. No matter how much I seem to try, I can’t shake away the feeling that I’m disappointing him, that I’m not at the level he wants me to be.

I have a poem I’d like to share with you today. Imaginary Conversation, from Linda Pastan.

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

I think that expression in the first line is familiar to a lot of us. Live each day as if it is your last. There’s such a great yielding in it, isn’t there? A surrender, the release of everything you carry, just to hold the moments, this now, with your bare hands and grip it with your nails. The static of your fears, worries and such, they won’t be nothing but background noise, chirps, traffic, a soft but steady downpour in the middle of the night.

But for some reason, I always think of how that line has a bit of a hidden meaning: if you live as if it’s your last day, it means you’ve lived plenty beforehand. You tally up your lessons like piles of coins, there are certain things you already know. And I don’t think I believe that, at least today.

Of course I have sayings, things I believe to be true — still, sometimes I wonder how those, too, might be hampering me. I used to believe in ‘if they could, they would’, I used to think that with honest attempts, anything I wanted would be achievable. I always believed I’d find my destination, but so far, I’ve been only carving paths.

Hanging Laundry by Jeffrey T. Larson

So, as of lately, I’ve started to wonder. I try to look at my fear and anxiety as reminders that I’m alive. When my instructor, wary, asks me if I’m nervous, I don’t jump to deny it. I take a breath, sometimes two, and tell him I’m doing what I can.

What if we lived our days as if they were our first ones on this earth? Not a last chance, but the earliest one we got? With curiosity, and a beating heart (this made me think of the Divergent series and oh my god the NOSTALGIA…).

Let the fear be the sign that we’ve never been as alive as we are right now. No thinking about who we were prior to now or who we might be soon, what matters is the here. Let the shaky breaths, the unruly rhythm within your chest, the stubborn tremble of your leg or finger, all these and so much more, they’re clues of your presence. As long as you’re alive, nerves will come along, and it will be terrifying, and it won’t last, just as we don’t live forever. These emotions that appear as fireflies, their source is in my perseverance to live through and through, to stay for all I have yet to discover.

I believe in calculated risk rather than that we’re capable of conquering or destroying all our fears. Somehow, someway, I’ll always find something to worry about, and not much of it will make a lot of sense. Maybe the uneasiness isn’t even anything worth losing sleep over, yet, there’s no reality where my nervousness doesn’t exist, and if there is one, I don’t happen to live in it. It isn’t easy to bear, but we still try, don’t we? There is so much strength alone in that effort.

It subsides, quiets, and hopefully, from now on, perhaps if I open my arms to it, the jitters might now help me move forward. This is one of the thoughts I’d like to take with me for this year that approaches us.

There is so much I have yet to dread and cry about. To laugh and enjoy, to prove myself right and wrong. Isn’t that what life is all about? 2023, you scare me to the bone, please be kinder then you ought to be.

Thank you for reading Delicate. If you happen to celebrate the New Years, I’d love to know what this year might have in store for you. I wish you luck, if you feel like you need it.

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DELICACIES OF THE WEEK

• The Conflicting Ideals of Hayao Miyazaki was a really fascinating video essay. This is coming from a person that has watched Ghibli, but doesn’t consider herself a huge fan (or didn’t, before the documentary at least). Miyazaki is someone I think many people might relate to, his complexity and how it’s expressed in his works is something to admire. It was a great video to accompany me as I ironed, and one I’ve rewatched. (Runtime: 1 hour and 40 minutes)

• Sysiphus works are always compelling, because they make me feel as if my brain is being slurped like spaghetti. Quoting one of the most popular comments on this video, they are either a dose of reality check or an existential crisis. To me, it was the earlier. do you want to be loved or do you want to be yourself?, with a runtime of 11 minutes, and a couple of stark takes.

• This week, after watching Mic The Snare’s Top 10 albums of 2022, I learned, much to my surprise, that Jack Antonoff participated in the latest The 1975 album. I’m not very fond of Healy, and many of the lyrics in their songs tend to be wonky or crude, to the point I can’t take them or the concepts seriously - still, I was once 15, listening to ‘Chocolate’ as if I knew what it was about, so I might not be the best judge of character here.

  • With this, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ was an album that surpassed any expectations I had. Again, it was probably Antonoff’s magic touch, but songs like ‘Caroline’, ‘I’m In Love With You’, ‘All I Need To Hear’ and ‘About You’ blew me away, either with their dreamy atmosphere or mushy, in your ear lyrics. I could even somehow appreciate ‘Part Of The Band’, particularly the line of calling ego imagination — everything else in that song felt slightly like hot garbage though.

SONGS OF THE WEEK: everywhere by fleetwood mac , have we met before by so soo bin and silk chiffon by muna ft phoebe bridgers || delicate’s spotify playlist!