At some point, which is another way
of saying now, your tireless indecision
of what to do with your life
becomes precisely what you have done with your life.
From “Self-Reliance” by Dobby Gibson
After fidgeting, and scrolling, and checking apps, and trying to decide how to spend my evening, I settled on reading and writing (and maybe some scrolling). The first lines of Gibson’s poem “Self-Reliance” greeted me with the honesty of a sledgehammer. I have many evenings and more than a few weekends when trying to decide what to do becomes what I do.
I have, for many months now, gotten in the habit of spending far more time outside of my apartment (at concerts or hanging with friends at our local bar) than inside my apartment doing the quiet and solitary work of reflection or reading or listening – the quiet and solitary work of “self-reliance.” When inside my apartment, I squander the hours doomscrolling and watching, in real time, the daily horrors unfold – of which, there are far too many to enumerate. It’s a wreck from which I can’t avert my eyes. We live in strange and troubling times.
I’m trying to change both of those habits. I’m trying to go out less often AND make better use of my time when I stay in. It’s not easy. My brain has been trained to look for tiny pellets of activity, small pieces of news over which I can feel outrage. The attention economy has me hooked like an addled fiend.
For the past few nights, I’ve had some success with staying in and a little less success with reading and writing and editing (or doing anything other than scrolling). I managed to write a few draft poems. I read a few more. To scratch the itch of feeling powerless in our current political climate, I wrote to my representatives to voice my concerns about what’s going on in our country – a step I’m not sure I’ve ever taken before. But none of it felt enough.
On the tech front, I officially deactivated my Twitter account. I hadn’t been using it for months. I also looked into, but made no headway on trying to organize my digital life (photos, videos, and music). Ideally, I would like to do this without using Google, Apple, or Microsoft, though I’m not sure it can be done easily. I’d also like to break from Facebook, but I still get quite a bit of utility from it. There, I follow an account, Baghdad by the Bay, where people post cool and interesting pictures of the city. I also learn about a lot of upcoming concerts and events on Facebook. Until I find a viable substitute, I’m afraid I’m stuck with it.
But it’s the “not enough” part that gives me pause. It’s as though I’m failing to adequately fill my own coffers. In some respects, I’m surprised at how easy it’s been to fall into old social media habits – habits that I’ve broken and resumed many times. But more than that, I’m surprised at how quickly I’ve adjusted to this middle space where I’m not spending a lot of time alone, but I’m also not spending very much “deep” or “meaningful” or even mundane time with others.
It’s in these moments of examination that I miss the deeper relationships – the ones that have their own routines and cadences, the ones that carry with them a sense of normalcy and something to look forward to at the end of a day. I don’t look forward to scrolling through the news on my phone, or swiping profiles on a dating app – they’re things I do to fill my time. And while I enjoy it more than the scrolling and swiping, I don’t necessarily look forward to hanging at the bar – though it’s a decent fall back option when I need to feel mildly social.
In this frame of mind, and maybe because I was ruling out potential dates based on geography and traffic, I was reminded of how nice it was to have boring shit to talk about. “What do you want to do this weekend? Want to check out that new Mexican place down the street? I can’t believe Steve in accounting is having an affair. Work sucked. Work was great. What did your dad have to say?” In some respects, I’ve been regretting all of the times that I let the dumb commute or the inconvenience of schedules get in the way of my own enjoyment of those simple things so easily taken for granted. Yet, I think it was precisely because I was looking forward to those end-of-day connections and rituals that deviations and setbacks became over-exaggerated and outsized disappointments.
There are lines later in the Gibson poem that spoke to this true sense of self, this blend of alone-ness and crowds and intimacy with others:
The world seems perpetual
only to those fortunate enough
to be lost in its crowds,
and yet, the expression on your face
when you mistake yourself
to be alone is the truest you.
It’s the face you make now, off duty,
the one that I love most.
This is why I sometimes feel
the need to “bother” you
for what seems like no reason.
I’m trying to set us both free–
this is my holy distraction.
In the absence of a holy distraction, I’ve substituted many minor distractions (bars and park benches and scrolling social media). The one constant seems to be my inability to find a natural balance, to more aptly handle my self-reliance. And maybe that’s ok.
This is a topic I revisit often: how one (how I) fit in the world. How one finds their balance. How to distinguish between self-reliance, desire, and distraction. A few years and many blog posts ago, I wrote about not needing alone time. I won’t link to it mostly because I think I’ve evolved from that place – to where I’m not quite sure. Yet, despite having made deliberate efforts to cultivate a more internal self, I have moments, many of them, when I’d like to be a little less self-reliant, when I’d like the distractions, holy or otherwise, to come from someplace other than the familiar grooves I’ve carved out for myself.
Of course, that’s not how the world works. We don’t get to choose when, where, or in what manner our orbits get knocked and wobbled – how our phonograph gets bumped and our record skips a beat. No, I suppose the best most of us can do is to lean against the walls of our own habits, tap lightly at our comforts to find out where the cracks might widen in to doors, and if we’re lucky, we’ll be brave enough to have faith in something other than ourselves, listen to a tune from someone else’s collection of well-worn favorites, and step through that door to something new.