constellations #104: a throughline

Hi again.

• I was reading the latest entry in Meaghan Garvey’s new Pitchfork column the other day when a line struck me. The entry reminisces about the so-called good old days of the internet (roughly 2011 to 2013)—especially good for sharing and making and writing about music, she argues: before we were all chained to the “attention economy,” before algorithms took over music discovery, back when “frivolous pop music could be enjoyed as such without pretending it was of grave socio-political importance.” (Yeah, I thought to myself while reading, I was there.)

• The songs she loved back then often came from “weirdos who were self-possessed enough to will their worldviews into being,” she writes, and she wanted to use the internet to invent herself that way, too. But that was then. Lately, she isn’t trying to see herself “reflected in the internet’s hall of mirrors,” she writes. Now she’s more interested in trying to see through the fictions of our strange era, this moment where “‘What is real?’ feels like some sort of trick question.” 

• Then came the line that struck me: “Sometimes when I push past the doomerism,” she writes, “I wind up at the idea that the breakdown of consensus reality is a golden opportunity for us to reacquaint ourselves with our intuition.” In other words: When everything feels like a simulation, it’s our job to figure out for ourselves what is real. It gave me pause. When I tried that perspective on for myself, my vision got blurry; as I’ve said before, I don’t really trust my intuition. 

• The line rattled around in my head alongside a couple other ideas I had encountered recently about finding, or even putting faith in, a throughline from one’s youth to the present. Maybe that is not the same as intuition but it stems, to me, from the same idea: that there is some wisdom within you, perhaps wisdom that’s always been there, and you simply need to seek it out.

• Someone wrote to an advice columnist to ask about developing a “personal style” (lol) and the response said, in part, “Time is probably the most important factor. … Years may pass before you feel like you’re onto something, and this process will likely involve plugging your ears to the siren song of trends until you realize you actually have the same sensibility you had as a kid, it’s just grown up now.” (Again, when I tried this on for myself, I laughed, thinking about the strange combinations of clothes I put together as a kid that I’ve long since, thankfully, foresworn.)

• And then, in a recent Miranda July newsletter about whether or not one ought to blow up one’s life (or, in other words, make a radical, life-altering decision, particularly in midlife; often, for these readers, it means leaving your husband of many years). “Look for the through-line of your most inner self,” July advises. “What did you want for yourself when you were younger? Is it connected to what you now, so problematically, want? If yes, then perhaps you are not so much blowing up your life but rather redirecting it back to its most elemental and true path.” (Does my life have a “most elemental and true path”? I’m not sure.)

• Then there’s a social media trend I saw going around: “I met my younger self for coffee today,” the videos all start, then unravel into an emotional spiel about connecting with one’s past self. Have you seen it? Like most of these fads, I originally found it touching and then found it cloying. (Probably because the first one I saw was posted by Nikki Hiltz, a professional middle-distance runner, reflecting on how their process of coming out as queer and trans has affected their running career. Maybe a little corny, but very sweet imo! But then I saw a bunch of sorta-ironic parodies of the trend and immediately soured on it.)

• I am always falling prey to the fallacy of pondering, what would my younger self think of my life now? Aside from the general feeling that I’d like someone to be proud of me—why not a precocious, studious teenager sneaking clove cigarettes and listening to Circa Survive in her boyfriend’s Jeep?—there is indeed something tempting to me about seeking out that throughline. I’ve always loved music, I think, and so of course my younger self would be impressed with my career! As in: of course all the steps would seem logical from her vantage. As in: of course my life took this path—despite the fact that it so easily could have taken any other. The throughline means: I am on the right path; I am on the inevitable path. That’s comforting, right?

• (Of course there is no actual inevitability; I know this. Even the people I know who seem to have followed the most straight-and-narrow paths, who always knew they wanted to be a doctor/lawyer/writer/parent/etc., narrate their lives as being beset by strange turns they swear they couldn’t have foreseen.) 

• There is so much that would make sense to my younger self about my life now—she would love that I get to go to shows for free, that I’m still writing, that I’ve retained a core and wonderful group of friends from back then. She would love, I know, that I’m still in love with someone I’ve loved for so long. So maybe there are some things I (or my intuition) have always known are real.

• I imagine she’d be disappointed in some ways, too. And of those disappointments, well—some of them are reasonable (I’m disappointed, too!), but some are things she just doesn’t know how to make peace with yet, or things about which her mind will legitimately change. Maybe that’s why the most elemental and true path stuff can irk me—this privileging of what has always been known over what has been learned. Many of the things I like most about my life now didn’t come from doggedly following one true inner voice (a beautiful path, too, to be sure) but through allowing myself to be open to chance and change, by grappling with hard questions to which there was no straightforward solution, by surrounding myself with people different from me and much wiser and seeking their input.

• I feel like I ought to say: I am not anti-intuition! Many of the people I admire most are constantly tending to an inner flame, sometimes one that only they can see; they are holding fast to their truths and their values in a world that seeks to deny them. I’m not trying to say that being true to yourself is overrated. I don’t think it is! (Plus, for what it’s worth, I feel tenderly about much of the advice in July’s newsletter.)

• Still. If I took my younger self to coffee, I think most of my life would be incomprehensible to her; much of that, I have to believe, is for the best. “Thank god people can change,” a friend of mine is always saying, and I think they’re right. Maybe my younger self would agree.

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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately:

• books: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (liked it but didn’t love it as much as everyone else?) and No Fault by Haley Mlotek (which I found brilliant and which made me cry); movies: Emilia Perez (truly awful), Madonna: Truth or Dare (truly delightful), The First Wives Club (obsessed); music: the new Horsegirl record (also loved Hazel’s review of it); the new Weather Station record (which I reviewed for Pitchfork); Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America; this More Eaze album that Matt has been playing around the house lately; have I shouted out the Hemlock record 444 already? Incredibly sweet, big-hearted alt-folk from last year; etc.: my friend Chris Mongeau’s newsletter “Having Been There,” about travel and photography, which has recently included some really lovely reflections on spending time in Vietnam; this essay about deciding whether or not to have kids; Rancho Gordo royal corona beans; [redacted number] cocktails in the company of beloved friends at All Souls in D.C.—wonderful!!!; a Cold Stone ice cream cake to celebrate my mom’s birthday, which was just about as good as I remember from high school

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This time last year I was: being a sucker; and before that, lying, revisiting seventh grade, and loving my cactus flowers

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Thanks for reading. Say hi to your younger self from me :)

xo,
M

(tried to find a photo that really screams “my most elemental and true path”; this was the best I’ve got)