Compulsory Bravery
2024
I started this year off professionally lost, relationally isolated, and bald as an egg. There were some harsh stretches. Even when my hair began to grow back, I looked a bit like a peach-flavored sucker that’d been dropped on the floor of a barbershop.
That’s life!
But last week, the laughing winter wind flushed against my cheeks and fat snowflakes drifted down from fatter clouds. Tumultuous early months gave way to smiling at voice memos in my AirPods on the walk home, mussels in spiced oil from the Spanish bar near my apartment (I’m gatekeeping), puffer-bundled parents correcting my Mandarin over our first Christmas in New York.
I won’t claim life as anything less than worth living, a thousand times over. But, some days, weeks, and years are grueling. They are not always for the best. Suffering can be mindless, and the only guarantee in it is that whatever you once feared losing, you’ve now lost.
An addendum: the only two guarantees are that the fear of loss has been realized, and the fear of loss is gone. The skin bears bruises and loses tensility and raises scars — and perhaps some of those accidents weren’t worth the marks. But the only way beyond fear is through. Fear is anticipatory: it refers never to the past or present, only the future. In loss, there is black, bleak grief, but there is no fear. And tending the hearth in its place is a sort of safety, a relief. Everyone says these cuts will heal, but it’s Schrodinger’s pain until the bandage comes off and the skin, in time, is whole.
Fall off the bike, take the wrong job, break your own heart. Almost all decisions are reversible. Sometimes they go wrong, but if you can make it through, you can make it through stronger than you thought you were. Hardship doesn’t guarantee becoming braver or funnier, but without it, it’s impossible. Have courage.
2024: 4/5.
Bonus!
10 thoughts:
Laugh!
Hold strong character like a slap from God. You may be punished for it. It’s worth it anyway.
Be present.
Tell your friends they can stay at your place. Give an extra blanket and walk them to the train station and don’t get stressed if they lose your spare keys. Show up on their stoop with jelly cups and ask if you can have dinner. Call when it’s inconvenient, every chance you get.
We owe each other.
Beauty matters, but don’t think too hard about it.
Vulnerability isn’t given. Train tickets to see someone are earned over quick text exchanges and weekday dinners and sitting in silence waiting for the subway.
You will always have less time with your parents than you think.
Being there for the little things is required in order to be trusted for the big thing.
Cowardice, not ignorance, births indecision. Trust intuition.
Favorite quote:
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
— Haruki Murakami
loved the intro
happy ny cat!! :-)