experience machines

the real thing hurts better

Names become faces that become acquaintances who become friends who sit in my living room and drink my lemon ginger tea and give me relationship advice. Experiences that once represented pinnacles are now sorted into the mundane. Every time I think this is it — this is as good as it gets — it gets even better. Every time I think this is it — there’s no way it gets worse — it does, in stomach-punchingly fresh and destabilizing ways. This is splendid and staggering and scary. My grip on things is so loose; my gripping things are so many.

Each month, deluge, again: faltering on the tightrope between health and collapse, ramming the back of my head into the plastic BART seat to keep from screaming, slicing into my index finger with a jewelry saw, watching copper dust catch in the pooling blood, hugging homeless people to feel closer to God, being slutshamed by the hotline operator, repenting on my literal knees, loving so fiercely I glimpse hate, wanting so desperately I become feeble.

But there’s joy, too; softness — I’m not the type to pretend otherwise: being a girl with other girls, plummeting 13,000 feet to unlock new understanding of the sensate body, affirming the beauty of faces I like, executing clear-cut opportunities to be helpful, bowling over exhaustion with awed excitement, encouraging strangers to skinny dip in public, slurping hand-pulled noodles, being surprised by the tightness of your embrace, bracing for impacts that never come, reaping the rewards of choosing gentle, kind-hearted people.

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Two thoughts I like.

The first comes from my friend C, after sharing my belief that there are some things you can’t recover from: “I don’t know, I guess I just think it’s a long life.”

The second comes from my coworker, after telling him that even though I'm happy to be a generalist, I still wish I had found "my thing" the way others seem to have. He said that he could relate. And then, he offered me this: “But I think that being open to the full range of experience is a passion too.”

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In May, after a slow, solo supper, I wrote a thread about how I never really know where I’m headed, how I truly could not have guessed at all of this: my success, my failure, this density of meaning. And I’m very curious about what will come next.

One day, I looked up and I had a career. One day, I looked up and I had a community. One day, I looked up and owed people things: deliverables, explanations, civility, grace. One day, I acquired responsibilities, and one day, I was never without them again.

For most of my life, I’ve resisted obligation and dependency. I don’t want to do anything I don’t want to do, and I don’t want to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do either. But connection requires reliance. By acknowledging our interconnectedness — in accepting my importance in your life — I enfranchise myself, and I honor the regard you hold for me.