On some days, I sit down to write out of curiosity. As in, Am I capable of saying anything today, anything at all? On some days, merely getting out of bed feels like an impossible task, let alone writing something meaningful and thoughtful to hundreds of strangers.
Today is that day. And if you’re reading this, it means that after hours of fighting against myself, I decided to lose (or win — it all depends on how you look) and write something in the end. Hopefully, it turns out to be something meaningful and thoughtful.
I won’t get into details — not yet at least, as it’s still raw — but my life as I knew it is slowly coming to an end. Nothing fatal, don’t worry. Just things were stable and dull and predictable until, well, they weren’t. It’s funny how life can change like that — fingers snapping — in an instant. You wake up one day with one idea about your future, yourself, your life, and then you come home from a gym, and that idea comes tumbling down, making you wonder whether it was such a great idea to begin with.
The mental narrative we have about ourselves is a houses of cards. All it takes is gust of wind to send it crashing down. Brrrrrrrssshhhchchppoooooommmm.
(That was the sound of a house of cards falling down, get it?)
I’ve lived in both Russia (most of my life to this point) and the US (for several years) and the biggest difference between Americans and Russians, culturally speaking at least, is this perceived stability of the self. The Russians don’t have it. The American Dream, though, is nothing but a coherent structure of being, which holds so many people’s lives together, like glue to an airplane model. I used to visit the place of my childhood in California and was shocked to see the very same pizza places and coffee shops still standing there close to two decades after I left. Whereas in Russia, where I haven’t stepped foot in more than two years now, things are already drastically different, war aside. I am sure that if I walk the streets of Moscow, I wouldn’t recognise half of the places there. We, Russians, are used to shit hitting the fan occasionally — starting from scratch, suffering, not having much, — these things are part of our collective DNA. Which is why, I guess, we are so uncomfortable by the idea of something long lasting and sound. We aim to destroy it — both in our personal lives and on a wider scale.
Of course, it very much depends on the person. And the cultural/national comparison doesn’t really work here and I am making it more to speculate than to prove a point. You could also argue that Russians, who were always seeking stability in an unstable world, crave it more than other people. When I look at the older generation, my parents and my grandparents, I see that. They are terrified of change. They’ve had enough. They just want to live, like ‘normal people’. (The exact phrase my grandparents are using.)
Still, sometimes I wonder whether I will ever stop uprooting and imploding my life every several years. I was not just brought up in Russia, I was also brought up in a family that never stayed in the same place for more than 2-3 years. I’ve changed 8 schools and 9 different apartments before I turned 18, my parents got a divorce, and I moved to the US for university. Since then I have lived and worked in Georgia (the country) and now, the UK. Perhaps this moving around has something to do with me wanting to reinvent myself every 2-3 years. So far, I have never had a period longer than 3 years where I was committed to one thing, be it working the same job, having the same relationship, or even living in the same country. This need for change and reinvention is an obsession, a life-sized ADHD. But perhaps it’s just a matter of age and generation. I am in my mid-twenties in a world that has an attention span of a goldfish. (Or whatever that popular metaphor was.)
I can’t help but wonder whether this is the right way to live. Uprooting yourself feels good and new. There’s nothing like starting fresh and anew, feeling as if you’re reborn, able to do anything, be anything. But looking back, I see that all best things in my life happened when I stuck it out. When I purposefully committed myself to one thing and simply didn’t quit. Isn’t that one of the rules of success those gurus preach on YouTube and beyond?
But who is to say that the rock band that lasted for 10 glorious years and then broke up is a FAILED band? Who is to say that a marriage that lasted for several years and then ended was an UNSUCCESSFUL marriage? Why are we assigning these labels of success / failure based on the length of a particular endeavour? Why can’t something be successful AND short? Kurt Cobain’s and David Foster Wallace’s and many other famous peoples lives were tragically short — but very much successful. And Pulp, my favourite Britpop band, is a gigantic success, even though it didn’t perform since 2007. (So is Blur and Oasis).
The truth is that anything — sooner or later — comes to an end and this doesn’t make that thing a failure. It just marks its end, that’s it. Like an expiry date on a packet of bread that used to be delicious and now will make your stomach churn.
In fact, I would throw away these terms at all. Who is to judge what’s a success and a failure in personal matters such as a relationship? And a band that went together for 10 years is a huge success by many standards; though some of its members might disagree (just ask Graham Coxon from Blur).
Sure, sometimes sticking it out is important. Sometimes we quit for the wrong reasons. Sometimes we are lazy, afraid, tired. But sometimes quitting is good. Sometimes it’s a sign of wisdom: to know when something stopped working and to move on, instead of worrying how it might look on your resume.
Perhaps I just need to worry less about what my life looks like on the outside — coherent or not, going anywhere or not, successful or not — and focus more on accepting what is happening right now, what I am feeling in the moment, and how things and people (and I) change.
It might not make sense now but one day, it will. However tangled and illogical life might be, the narrative will shape up in the end. It will all look so logical and coherent once it’s over. You can only connect the dots looking backwards, that sort of thing.
One day, all the many short episodes of your long and weird and boring and extraordinary life will shape into a full-fledged season.
And make one hell of a TV show.