time is a flat circle

Hello,

One calendar year has passed, and I find myself in the exact same spot I was last August. I’m back home in Sugar Land, I can’t get a visa to Beijing, I’m deep in the throes of internship applications, and I can’t seem to figure out what city I’m supposed to live in. Oh, and I have a new passion project. This.

I used to live by this phrase: “Complacency kills.”

Meaning, if you are the same person you were a year ago, then you’ve failed.

I hope that I’m not the same person I was a year ago. I hope that internally I have grown, but externally, I am in the same spot somehow. It puts into perspective how much I’ve changed and also how redundant my graduate school experience has been in some ways. I’ve been living in a purgatory for planners.

I used to have a better sense of where I wanted to be in 3-5 years. Between COVID and this whole nesting doll of terrible visa experiences, I had to confront the reality that the unexpected will happen, for better or for worse. I’m not the only one who had to grapple with wayward plans, and what I’ve observed in our acquiescence to circumstance is a reckoning with realities. In the aftermath, you have to scrap your daydreams about who you wanted to be at 22 and then, actually, painfully turn 23. In the last two years, I have lived more life than I expected myself to, but there has also been no way to plan beyond a couple of months. Even when I try to plan, I end up back home in Sugar Land in an overheated August.

In many ways, I crave stability. I dream about prisms of light that cast competing shapes across a living room floor during a slow afternoon, laying the groundwork for bookshelves. Light or dark wood, they would fit from molding to crowning, and they would house the totality of my humble library. I dream of a soft chair, a bar cart, and a gentle evening with Heihei (who has also been unceremoniously transported). I want a life that I can sink into, that I can wallow in. I want an espresso machine and a fish tank. I want to have local spots that I can walk into where they know my order. I want to keep more clothes than what can fit into two suitcases. I want furniture and posters in frames. I want to be able to make friends without having to say goodbye in a few months. I want to live around the people I love.

But, when you interpret contentment as complacency, and then accept the premise that complacency kills, you don’t trust the sensation of contentment.

I often find myself teetering on this idea of whether I want to spend my early twenties in a nomadic fashion — from year to year, bouncing between cities and people and experiences — or if I want to settle in contentment, at least for a while.

If we were to parse through the noise, then we could find within these years of our lives the beginning of the answer to: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At 24, I still don’t have a clue. Do you?

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes
In the opening scene, Hughes throws his textbooks from Columbia University into the ocean as he sets upon a voyage that will have him working on ships to Africa and in the clubs of Paris. This memoir had me confront the idea that the need for stability can act as an antithesis to life’s wilder experiences. If you don’t give a fuck about if end up broke as shit and sleeping on the apartment floor of a dancer that you’re not even having sex with, then you too can begin to inhabit the breadth of life that Hughes collected in his youth. It is, in more blatant terms, the unabashed portrait of the poet as a young man.

This is a newsletter of my pure thoughts, and I would love anyone to respond to me by email, text, or call. I have so many anxieties about life, and I want to hear other people talk about theirs.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie