the process of self change is slow

the thing about a newsletter is that, at some point, so much time has elapsed since your last post that you start to question whether you can keep saying you have one. (and so goes another entry in the long history of writers apologizing for how long it’s been since the last time).

it’s been an unexpectedly busy few months. in the beginning of the year i committed to a couple of performance workshops, which as it turns out, live up to the ‘work’ part of their name. it’s been 65% fun, 35% stressful to flex my writing skills in this new medium and to find my confidence on stage. ironically i actually forgot, until a friend reminded me, that exploring more performance stuff was one of the things i mentioned in my 2019 intentions. if you’re one of the two people i haven’t bugged about it, you can watch the first solo show i did on race and identity here.

i turn 30 on sunday. my feelings swing between 😳 and 😎.

i’ve been thinking a lot about the ebb and flow of identity (a recurring theme for me, it seems): how we nurture new ones and shed the ones that no longer bring us joy. how effortless this felt as a kid, and how effortful it feels as an adult. how the world of things you can possibly be narrows over time, the mantle of what you are hardens.

as a general rule, i’ve found that i’m happier when i have a basket of identities to call on. so if something isn’t going well at work, for example, it doesn't weigh on me as much as it would if work is the only thing in the frame. there’s a related concept about raising pointy vs. well-rounded children: kids who were consistently praised for just one thing growing up, whether that’s being smart or a great athlete, tend to have more fragile sources of self-worth, compared to kids who were praised for a range of qualities.

so how do you step into a new identity? one way is by committing to things — to people, to new experiences, to different environments. you go back to school, you move cities, you become a parent.

my friend jeff has this metaphor that i love, of each of us as celestials (the below is from his fantastic newsletter):

Imagine we are heavenly bodies in space. Moving through the darkness, finding each other, finding the special ones that tug on us. Circling, orbiting, trading energy. And then maybe letting go. Releasing ourselves from the gravity of that person and careening back into the darkness on a new, an influenced, course.

The attractive force of gravity ends up feeling very much like my experience of human attraction. For the people I’m attracted to whether platonically, romantically, sexually; a cornerstone of that attraction is often this swelled sensation that they are pulling me in a direction I’m curious to go. Often a direction that’s difficult for me to access alone.

It’s not just people that pull me in this way. All experiences, all environments have this quality of gravity. The longer you spend at work, the more that culture and those people nudge your life trajectory towards them. Drug experiences tug you into new perspectives; the more you take them the more your path is shifted towards that viewpoint. Travel abroad puts you in orbit of culturally different people, pulling your life arc towards them, towards a destination that may have been impossible to find from home. Even reading has gravity. Compare reading a book to reading a synopsis of the same book. You’ll change more from reading the book because you’ll have spent more time in that ideaspace being pulled.

Thinking as Celestials, it’s obvious that the process of self change is slow. There’s so much inertia in each of us. We’ll need to be pulled for quite some time to truly be on a new course. It reminds me to judge myself not by who I am now, but instead by the direction I’m heading. I can’t control my location, all my past encounters brought me here. But I can control the constellation around me: the people I spend time with, the experiences I go back to, the ideas I let linger long enough to shift me. I can control the directions I choose to be pulled next.

what are some identities you’d like to step into? what are some you’d like to leave behind? what are some ways you’ve been successful (or not) in doing either of these things?