If That Makes Sense #9
On reentering the world, feeling guilty, and remembering how to be yourself
Hi! Hello! Welcome to your monthly free column. I hope you enjoy it – if you do, here’s where to click to receive another one in two weeks. Anyway, I’m going to have a slice of cake.
I’ve been waiting for the world to re-open for so long, but now that it’s here I’m worried I don’t know how to enjoy myself anymore. I’m seeing friends but I feel like I’m not interesting enough, that I’m more anxious and tired and that they can tell. I should feel so happy, shouldn’t I? I get home and instead of feeling grateful I feel guilty that I didn’t do it well enough: see people, have a good time, just live life like I used to. I know it was such a weird year and it’ll take time, but I really thought I’d feel better than I do. How can I move past this weird uneasiness and get back to myself?
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Two weeks ago today, I turned 25. My birthday is my favourite week of the year, but I’m also painfully aware I am a nuisance, a real immature nightmare, to everyone who has to hear me plan it in the weeks leading up to it. I felt really weird about it this year – not because of the age itself, which is already a hell of a lot better than the nothingness of 24, but because of the strange limbo we’re all still in.
Last year, it quickly became clear I’d be stuck indoors indefinitely and I had made my peace with that, and had a surprisingly brilliant day. But this year felt trickier – I could go out to see some friends, but only a few at a time and only from a certain distance; I could sit outdoors in the rain in three coats, but not show off any nice summery clothes I’d made such a big deal about buying. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a wet park with five people I loved and talk about how little we had done and how strange everything was – I don’t think it would have been fair on anyone to pretend we were enjoying it.
In the end, my two-day birthday was quite lovely: I invested in a jacket and a dress, I hopscotched across several groups of two or three all over the city, and spent plenty of time indoors. But for some reason I just spent ages crying in the weeks before, frustrated by the seeming amount of choice and the obvious lack of freedom, still. I think it was nice to see people but also worried they were just pretending because they had to. In-between each goodbye, I had to convince myself everything was as good as it could be – but that doesn’t mean it still won’t get better. It’s felt both reassuring and very sad that I’ve had this conversation with several other close friends – really outgoing people who I’ve always felt, frankly, very intimidated by socially – they’re now telling me they’ve felt exhausted and nervous about seeing friends again. Less about the logistics of it – wear a mask, only hug when vaccinated, etc – but they’re worried about themselves; not being interesting, not paying attention properly, not being able to find joy after waiting so long to be allowed to have it.
I think the problem is twofold: things we used to do all the time – dinners, drinks, just very straightforward socialising – we realised over the last 14 months that we took them for granted, and so they also, in the interim, have earned much higher stakes. I suppose it’s a good thing to realise the value of such things rather than expecting good, fun, free times to just happen, but I also think it’s kind of harmful that we’re now forced to put so much pressure on them. Like every single pub trip should be as joyous as your very best birthday. It wasn’t before, really, so why must it be now?
There’s also an element of how much still needs to be juggled before you make, well, literally any decision to leave the house. Should I really be taking the tube? Did I use enough hand sanitiser? Oh god, was it weird that I just waved when they very clearly wanted to go in for a hug? The nature of a global pandemic (lol, bear with me and don’t expect anything properly conclusive on that matter here) is so endlessly exhausting and just annoying. I’m talking about the mental toll which, even if you’ve been lucky enough to not at all be affected physically, is so much heavier than we let on.
I can’t say how you should or shouldn’t feel, but I know that I would feel so plainly happy to see my friends right now if I had simply just gone to live elsewhere, or do a different job, or another project, for the last 14 months, rather than what actually happened – having to completely uproot my life and sense of self while fully sitting still. Returning to anything after being away for so long is hard – but now you’re being asked to do that after being forced into a state of nothingness, of frustration and impatience and fear and claustrophobia with no real reward. If it had been a week, two weeks, a month, fine. But this goes so much deeper.
If you’re feeling like you’re anxious and tired and that your friends can tell, it probably means they’re picking up on signs that they are feeling too. In which case, it’s a pretty good thing to be able to share the load, isn’t it? It doesn’t change the pain of it all, but I felt such a relief when my friend I was trying so hard to impress told me just how unlike himself he was feeling. It didn’t make me judge him or feel disappointed or weird – I was grateful that he was being honest about something that, he thought, was just completely unheard of.
The thing is, you don’t need me to tell you that the last 14 months have been unheard of. It’s got to the point where every mention of it irritates me, yet for some reason I’m still struggling to let myself use that as a very easy and logical explanation for all these guilty and shameful feelings. I want to blame myself for not being myself, instead of the circumstances that nobody has, or ever could have, somehow trained you for.
I do fundamentally believe that you are still you – interesting, interested, hopeful for all the world has to give you and all you have to give to it. But you have been forced to tamp that down, to squash any kind of expression and interaction in fear that it would have anything to do with the infectious virus threatening everyone around the world. If you’d been living, very literally, underground for a while, it would surely take a fair bit of time and effort to climb your way back to the top, wouldn’t it? And after such an effort, nobody could blame you for being exhausted, could they?
“Being yourself is, like, not changing yourself to impress someone else,” says voice of a generation Kayla Day in Bo Burnham’s wondrous Eighth Grade. “The hard part about being yourself is that it’s not always easy.” She’s talking about being a teenager, and the fact that people suck and evil people exist, and that people call her quiet and shy and the fact that, actually, if people talked to her they’d know she’s “really funny and cool and talkative”. I do not know how Kayla would deal with what we’re going through right now, and I am aware of the many, many layers of Burnham’s excruciating and brilliant writing in that opening scene, but I do think of Kayla when I have this panic when I get home that the person I was on that day out was not the person I really am.
In the movie, we follow Kayla throughout her final year of middle school, which is the most nerve-wracking year of her life at that point. She gets through it, as I did and you did too, and further proves she is the coolest girl in the world by recording a video message for her future self at the end of the film which she will let herself watch at the end of high school. She’s kind, and she’s patient. She hopes more things will happen for her – maybe a boyfriend, maybe a new look – but also is giving herself room and grace in the eventuality that these things do not happen. She’ll still have grown, even if she spends the next couple of years sitting still.
“Just because things are happening to you right now, it doesn’t mean they’re always going to happen to you,” she says. Just because the world is asking you to move faster than you feel capable of right now, it doesn’t mean 1) the world will always do that 2) you will always feel like you have to catch your breath. Who is telling you that you should feel happy right now? Dr. Seuss said it first – those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter. “Things will change,” Kayla tells Kayla. “You never know what’s going to happen next, and that’s what makes things exciting and scary. And fun.” She’s right: it’s all of those things. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes more scary and sad and difficult and sometimes just plainly euphoric. We’ve spent so long feeling nothing, having only a sense of numbness to pass the time, that it’s all a lot to take in right now. My annoying, embarrassingly long-winded answer to your question is: it’ll take time. You’ll move past this weird uneasiness by being kind to yourself about it. It does not stop you being you – the world isn’t going anywhere and those who love you will always wait for you to catch up. “Stay cool,” Kayla says as parting note in her time capsule, thankful for the year just finished and hopeful for the one ahead. “I can’t wait to be you.”
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Next time, we’ll be talking about wanting to make art, to tell the world that your voice matters, when you feel like a fraud who, actually, might not have anything to say. If you’d like to write in to respond to this week’s letter, or to ask questions of your own, you can email me here.