What wants to die?
thoughts on trajectories and evolution and letting go
Junior year of college, I sat down in my advanced German literature class the first week of school, looked at the syllabus, and a thought hit me for the very first time: what the fuck are you doing here?
I didn’t particularly love studying German. It wasn’t part of my future life plan (as in, move to Germany, or teach it, or become a BMW executive). But I had just spent six years of my life, including my precious university time that I’d be paying for until I was 40, in those classes because… why exactly?
Because when I was fourteen and it was time to pick a foreign language elective, I’d wanted to make out with a cute soccer player.
Being a German scholar was a life trajectory that, once I was on it, I never actually stopped to question. I was pretty good at it, and when it came time to pick college classes, I defaulted to it, despite the existence of a thousand other options. The more years I put in, the more I assumed the right next step was to just keep advancing, because American culture teaches us that linear upward progression is good, and I was very invested in being good.
But something happened in my seventh year of German, skimming the syllabus of books I didn’t want to read. The “WAIT! What am I doing here?” feeling that came over me was so sudden, it felt like a spell breaking, like Cinderella at midnight. What in God’s name am I doing in this pumpkin?
I left class that day, went to the registrar’s office, dropped all my German classes, and replaced them with studio art—a thing I actually loved, but hadn’t yet studied in college. In a shock to no one who knew me at all, it was a much better fit.
Like most American GenXers (and at least older millennials), I grew up believing that one’s professional life, if plotted on a graph, was a line that should go up and to the right.1
Not only did I underestimate (or not understand) how much the world had changed from our parents’ generation—that the days of working at the same company for your whole life and retiring with a pension were over—I also underestimated how much I, myself, would change over the course of my working life. That the person I am at age 47 would care about, want, and value totally different things that the person I was 20 years ago, or even 10.2
I have a clear memory of a conversation I had in college with my friend Tim, sitting on someone’s roof at a party, smoking Djarum cloves like a couple of extras from Reality Bites. I can’t recall what I was wearing, but it was 1996 so it was overalls and Doc Martens. We were judging someone’s annoying chameleon behavior—acting one way around one group of friends, and a different way around another.
Tim said something like, “I love how you’re the same with everyone. You’re just you, you never front.”3
He was calling me authentic—a compliment. And I remember my response, and how proud I was of it: “I know exactly who I am, I’ve been basically the same person since I was thirteen, and this is it.” I will be this version of myself forever, and obviously this is an extremely valuable quality.
I made the mistake of conflating authenticity with unwavering consistency, which (duh) are not the same. Consistency was a quality I was determined to wear like a badge of honor. Looking back with an adult’s perspective, I understand that this was because changing, shifting, would have meant admitting the old me had gotten something wrong. And I was extremely invested in never making mistakes, because I believed that getting it right the first time was necessary in order to be loved.
Y’all, imagine if I (or you or anyone) were still the same person we were in middle school? I would like a one-way ticket to outer space, please, because sweet Jesus, no.