These have been some weird days. I got an internship! After a year of searching, I’ve been accepted in a pretty big corporation and I’ve spent the past 3 weeks learning the ropes, waking up at 5:30 AM, feeling all sorts of overwhelmed and unprepared and undeserving, and many other mostly negative emotions. You know me.
Work begins and I already feel fifteen steps behind my colleagues. Do you have any idea of how much distance stands in just 15 steps? A long time ago I might've described myself as a fast learner, quick to adapt. My resilience is my biggest weapon…yet…I catch myself writing and rewriting notes until eventually realise it's the forth time I’m writing this down and it still won't stick. I’ve asked the same questions so many times. I make mistakes I know better not to. Am I throwing eggs to a wall and expecting them to stick? I find out those that started with me have been asking for extra work, while I’ve been barely able to complete the standard that’s given. I suspect and notice that I don’t quite fit in like most do, I’m included in some jokes, and my name gets called, but I don’t seem to become anything. I’m spoken over many times. I’ve been the butt of some jokes, based on my tendency to worry or react, have been called out for gesticulating a lot while talking — a habit I didn’t even know until now. I guess people find me funny, although there’s ways and ways to be funny — you can tell the joke or be the joke, sometimes I’m both at the same time.
It’s not all so awry though. Meeting new people is dreary but it’s also liberating, figuring someone out, squeezing all the facts and knowledge you can like juice from a lemon. And they are kind too. They offer to help, listen to my questions, which makes sense because they do need my help, there’s a lot of overdue stuff to take care of there. But the gist of it is that you help and are helped. It’s not one-sided. My colleagues might be sick of me making questions about the most basic dealings, and they still try to assist. I’m not sure but there’s a sense that if I were to ask anyone for help, I wouldn’t be refused. There’s a safety in this feeling. I’m learning how to build my own systems and rhythms, because accounting takes a lot of attention, care to detail, memory of exceptions and tiny dealings — which I usually suck at.
So you might ask yourself, why did you go for this? And I’ll ask you right back, why do we all chase one or two things that might not be meant for us? What does it mean, to be meant for something? It’s a funny question, and it begs one to consider the concept of destiny. I might not know you but I can guess there’s at least one thing in your life you wouldn’t trade or let go off, even if it might do you more harm than good. Mine is coffee. Wouldn’t destiny work both ways? To the helpful and unhelpful?
I wanted somewhere to begin. I’ve been looking for a place to start for so long, the desperation of seeing time slip through my fingers and me having yet to learn and get a job and start a career. I felt so lost at times. There’s someone from my university there too, I recognized his name right away. We’re in different positions, I’m an intern and he was hired. Isn’t it treacherous? Wasn’t our start line the same? It’s true, that we move through changing paces, even what feels as the similar beginning isn’t what it looks like, the same situation will impact each one of us distinctly. There’s so much that escapes our eyes and enters in our brains. People spent the past year telling me not to worry, I’d find something eventually. Eventually. What a fateful word.
I wonder if I take everything so seriously because I grew up thinking I wasn't taken seriously, as if my words didn't hold weight, matter. As if no one heard them. Fate. Destiny. Meant to be. Soulmate. — so many heavy words. I’m typically a jokester, or at least the one people expect to always have something to say. I speak a lot but these days I’m mostly spoken over. I had a breakdown the other day, nothing world shattering, it was mostly fuelled by a severe lack of sleep and the violent change of scenario, learning so much in few days, but amidst my tears, my family seemed to mock me. Only my brother stood silent, and I can't always tell if his silence is a sign of support or shame. That night I wrote what can be best described as a capitalistic rant, and I expressed I didn't want to sacrifice so much out of my comfort, the happiness I had found and held close, for my internship. I had done it before, as it was told or expected, and I still had to wait a whole year to get anywhere, somewhere. It was taken as a sign that I was already giving up when I had barely started. I was ridiculed, and I detested how in the middle of it al I could still understand where they were coming from.
Life is a countless, endless list of sacrifices, of surrenders. I can’t always estimate if my choices will turn out to be one or the other. Something tells me it's more than the outcome you get that counts. I used to believe I was good at this, at guessing what others feel or think, including myself. It’s strange but I can’t ignore how a lot of the times I don’t ask myself how I feel, but how I should feel. Is it my stubborn sadness? I know I’m sick of being so sad, is it an inner mechanism, some working of my own brain to protect myself? I have to face it, that even what I love can make me feel sad. That anything can turn me sour, bitter, sad. I love life. I love love. I love waking up early even if I love my bed more, and I love the commute to work even if it’s almost 3 hours, I love the metro even if it smells sometimes, and I love the time I’m given to snooze off and read and listen to songs, where it feels as if I’m simply existing. I love my friends, and I love how they love each other, and yet I see declarations of love and moments shared between them and feel so, so sad. So dejected. I mourn the idea that I don’t have any of that, that love in that way. These threads that pull as together can strangle us just as easily.
In ‘Special Problems in Vocabulary’, Tony Hoagland shares,
There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.
There is an…idea I’ve been entertaining for a while in my brain: that I am only able to enjoy what I have as long as I don’t imagine something bigger, greater. As long as the chance, possibility of ‘more’ is extinguished. The less I know the better, or so Tame Impala said. I often lack words to describe the world properly. Metaphors help. Comparisons. I try to avoid using ultimate words these days, ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘every time’, ‘all’, ‘none’, read somewhere that they make it harder for us to spot, understand nuance.
I find my reflection in a mirror and think, I have to cut my hair. Do you believe that hair holds memories? I might as well say, I need to change. It’s all choices and consequences, but your feelings and emotions are inner and deeper, it’s the actions that allow your agency to take place. I stand quiet, and afar from those I treasure for a while. I think I need it, space. I cry if I have to, and I mull and chew the thoughts over. How would it feel to be loved in such a way? To have more time in bed? To get to live here or there? To build a thread, create a soulmate that won’t run away even when I scare them off? In moments like these I just want to be left alone. What if those are the times I should be held even closer? Insecurity has taught me that judgment comes along if you let someone closer, and I’m sad, and there’s some satisfaction and happiness in my current life but there could always be more, couldn’t it?
We usually use comparison and what-if to signal regret, the chance going back in time and staying, or leaving sooner, or saying that other thing you wanted to. It can just as work this way too, hypothetical, with no certainty and other a faint belief. But we don’t live in the hypothetic, in the supposed. We’re victims of change and destiny and maybe those are the only things that construct our present.
I burden myself with so many shoulds and musts. I am dumb and young and like everyone else, learning how to live. I don’t know what I want, not with certainty — will I ever? Maybe there’s where I’m meant to be. How do you tell apart what’s the soul and what’s not? Guess I’m figuring out how. The other day I realised the world looks a lot cosier within the lens of my glasses, those that protect from blue light. I thought growing up would be the end of questions but they bloom everywhere. I try to trust my heart, it’s what has been given to me, what’s wholly mine and forever will be.
With each day I try to forgive harder, even if I understand less with how I rummage through my head. I go by the days, witnessing life as if with a 5 seconds delay, but I do it all the same. I don’t want my breath to run out. I’m enough because I keep trying. I mean something, I exist. Days blend and I let the kindness mean more than it has to. Destiny has never promised that things would stay the same forever. Change is happening, microscopical and senseless until it’s undeniable. I'll face it in due time.
Thank you for reading Delicate this week. I love you, and I hope this October goes well for you. Don’t forget to wear warmer clothes.
DELICACIES OF THE PAST WEEKS
Olivia Rodrigo has released a new album, and it took me a while to visit it. I didn’t enjoy the tracks that were mostly promoted, it wasn’t until I heard ‘lacy’ somewhere that my curiosity was positively sparked.
Potential is a loaded word. When others tell me that I have it, I’ve never, not once, felt happy, satisfied, relieved. I felt guilty. So, instead, to the best of my abilities, I want to express that I sense Rodrigo has wonderful writing every now and then. Songs such as ‘making the bed’, ‘the grudge’ and ‘teenage dream’. stand out for it’s poignant honesty, and those are by far my favorite. They’re raw. I also enjoyed a couple others in the second half but I wished to mention those specifically.
Also, there’s this funny line: Olivia Rodrigo sings in the end of ‘Logical’, ‘I know I’m half responsible / And that makes me feel horrible / I know I could’ve stopped it all / God, why didn’t I stop it all?’. I found this passage particularly ironic because she takes half of the accountability for what happened but sees herself capable of controlling everything, stopping it all. How’s that even possible? I don’t know, I really liked this bit.
Had the chance to watch ‘Past Lives’, and I think I owe it a rewatch soon. I’ll be cliché and say, the silences in this film are so loud. The husband irritated me at the start, until I realised I was him. If you were to swap our shoes, I’d share the same thoughts, emotions, fears. The idea of destiny is a main point of the plot, and it’s explored with such sorrow, but with such kindness, it’s heart wrenching.
It would feel wrong not to spare at least one word, but if you’ve been up to the news you are probably aware of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. I remember a couple of years ago watching this video on the topic, and knowing that to this day the war has only worsened is terrifying. May Palestine be free. may Israel free Palestine, may all the suffering and death end.
This quote.
SONGSTHEK: islet by minsu, koikaze ni nosete by vaundy and the grudge by olivia rodrigo => delicate’s spotify playlist!