All Quiet on the Sundress Front: Last Part
I was talking to a friend a while ago about what it means to be 27. We were both precocious children, and learned early to get along on the thrill of impressing adults by what we could do at a certain young age. 27, my friend said, is the age at which you realize that precocity is no longer possible. You can be a young author, a young artist, a young entrepreneur or homeowner at 27, but your youth isn’t going to knock anybody’s socks off. Nor is the fact of your youth going to compensate for shortcomings in whatever work it is you’re offering up to impress the world. You are just…a person among people. It’s kind of wonderful and kind of terrifying.
Maybe the drive to be impressive is part of the problem. It lasts. It tides you over, through your childhood, into your teenage years, into the dreams you dream between the pages of magazines. But the conditions under which you were precocious don’t last. You aren’t a child anymore, and you aren’t surrounded by teachers and judging adults.
I’d like to find my way into a mental economy that isn’t founded on impressing others. Or maybe I have and I’m just trying to find my feet here. There are other currencies now, ones I never counted on. I’m more and more fascinated with my ability to do ordinary things, like work and have relationships and hang on to old friends. I want to do things I would have dismissed, when a teenager, as heart-breakingly quotidian and not nearly fascinating enough: be married. Have children. I want to take care of my parents as they get old. I want…to do something good. I’ve become a little bit anxious about that. OK, fairly anxious.
I had coffee today with a different old friend. A really old friend, somebody whose house I snacked, practiced the use of make-up and busted a gut at every week in middle school. We haven’t seen each other in a year and haven’t been really close in ten years, but we used to be like sisters. She’s married now, settled down in Oregon, gardening with her husband, training to be a midwife. She seems happy and super together. Clear-eyed, clear-headed, and in control. And we had a good laugh about her being a midwife, now, because that’s what she always wanted to be, I mean, it’s probably one of the first confidential things she told me when I came over to her house after school in the 7th grade, probably just a month or two after the start of the long Seventeen magazine dream. She would have spread us out on the floor of her room, post-snacks, and told me about hippies and the commune where she was born and pulled down from the shelf her copy of “Spiritual Midwifery” and told me that this was damn good stuff. And how great is that, doing what you wanted to do when you were twelve? Living the dream! And then we realized that at least a few of us, the people we knew back then, are doing what they dreamed of—Rebecca, who used to want to make chocolate chip cookies with me meticulously after school, and hold elaborate four-course dinner parties, and who interned at a restaurant during her high-school summers, really is training to become a chef, or a cookbook-editor, or something; Laura who used to sew her own underwear and everything else really is working for a fashion company that has a store in every mall you’ve ever been in, designing miniskirts and baby rompers. And me, I’m doing my writing thing, after a fashion, though I do envy Ellie somewhat that her dream-fulfillment thing seems so clear-cut. Then again, she says, it’s not glamorous. She tells me about catching babies, about blood, about 9-1-1 calls and physically holding and moving women around with the super-human strength that one gets in extremis. When she gives me a hug, her biceps are strong.
I wish, then, that I had the same kind of certainty about writing, or whatever it is that I’m doing. I’m pretty sure that fashion magazines, like television and rich food and alcohol, are an indulgence that’s OK in moderation, and that can become an addiction in a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. I don’t think I was addicted and I don’t think they hurt me any—just provided fodder for something that my teenage brain would have done anyway. But I am feeling this late-summer, back-to-school-time need to re-evaluate things. I work at a magazine now; it’s not a fashion glossy but a science magazine. Still, I wonder: what’s this line of work that I’m in? Do I use my powers for good? I find that I’ve changed since those Vogue-reading days: my vision of a good life has changed. I still want fabulous, sometimes, but it looks different now that it’s closer to me. What’s fabulous? Enough money. Travel. A family. A chance to express myself creatively. Meaningful work. It’s less about impressing people, though I’d be lying if I said that wish was completely gone. It’s just that I’m starting to feel that the world I’ll have to do things in is this world, not some other, and that’s scary but exhilarating too.
And these are the thoughts I’m thinking as summer browns into fall. I wish that I could think them once, reach a positive decision, and then lay them by the way, but I know that isn’t going to work. Just like the endless lists of the ingredients of the perfect wardrobe that both leads to and reflects inner excellence, the task is not as cut-and-dried as it would seem, and it’s never done. Some piece or other is always lacking. And after it all, you’re still you, a person with dimensions that cannot possibly be represented in any magazine. So I’d like to say I can ‘finish,’ i.e. decide on the plan that meets all my needs and wants, and that the bringing it to fruition will be the easy part, but I can’t and it won’t. I can only keep correcting and re-correcting and trying not to wait, too hard, for the day when it all falls into place like a fashion plate shilling a back-to-school day without self-consciousness, without nerves, without vulnerability altogether.
Maybe the drive to be impressive is part of the problem. It lasts. It tides you over, through your childhood, into your teenage years, into the dreams you dream between the pages of magazines. But the conditions under which you were precocious don’t last. You aren’t a child anymore, and you aren’t surrounded by teachers and judging adults.
I’d like to find my way into a mental economy that isn’t founded on impressing others. Or maybe I have and I’m just trying to find my feet here. There are other currencies now, ones I never counted on. I’m more and more fascinated with my ability to do ordinary things, like work and have relationships and hang on to old friends. I want to do things I would have dismissed, when a teenager, as heart-breakingly quotidian and not nearly fascinating enough: be married. Have children. I want to take care of my parents as they get old. I want…to do something good. I’ve become a little bit anxious about that. OK, fairly anxious.
I had coffee today with a different old friend. A really old friend, somebody whose house I snacked, practiced the use of make-up and busted a gut at every week in middle school. We haven’t seen each other in a year and haven’t been really close in ten years, but we used to be like sisters. She’s married now, settled down in Oregon, gardening with her husband, training to be a midwife. She seems happy and super together. Clear-eyed, clear-headed, and in control. And we had a good laugh about her being a midwife, now, because that’s what she always wanted to be, I mean, it’s probably one of the first confidential things she told me when I came over to her house after school in the 7th grade, probably just a month or two after the start of the long Seventeen magazine dream. She would have spread us out on the floor of her room, post-snacks, and told me about hippies and the commune where she was born and pulled down from the shelf her copy of “Spiritual Midwifery” and told me that this was damn good stuff. And how great is that, doing what you wanted to do when you were twelve? Living the dream! And then we realized that at least a few of us, the people we knew back then, are doing what they dreamed of—Rebecca, who used to want to make chocolate chip cookies with me meticulously after school, and hold elaborate four-course dinner parties, and who interned at a restaurant during her high-school summers, really is training to become a chef, or a cookbook-editor, or something; Laura who used to sew her own underwear and everything else really is working for a fashion company that has a store in every mall you’ve ever been in, designing miniskirts and baby rompers. And me, I’m doing my writing thing, after a fashion, though I do envy Ellie somewhat that her dream-fulfillment thing seems so clear-cut. Then again, she says, it’s not glamorous. She tells me about catching babies, about blood, about 9-1-1 calls and physically holding and moving women around with the super-human strength that one gets in extremis. When she gives me a hug, her biceps are strong.
I wish, then, that I had the same kind of certainty about writing, or whatever it is that I’m doing. I’m pretty sure that fashion magazines, like television and rich food and alcohol, are an indulgence that’s OK in moderation, and that can become an addiction in a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. I don’t think I was addicted and I don’t think they hurt me any—just provided fodder for something that my teenage brain would have done anyway. But I am feeling this late-summer, back-to-school-time need to re-evaluate things. I work at a magazine now; it’s not a fashion glossy but a science magazine. Still, I wonder: what’s this line of work that I’m in? Do I use my powers for good? I find that I’ve changed since those Vogue-reading days: my vision of a good life has changed. I still want fabulous, sometimes, but it looks different now that it’s closer to me. What’s fabulous? Enough money. Travel. A family. A chance to express myself creatively. Meaningful work. It’s less about impressing people, though I’d be lying if I said that wish was completely gone. It’s just that I’m starting to feel that the world I’ll have to do things in is this world, not some other, and that’s scary but exhilarating too.
And these are the thoughts I’m thinking as summer browns into fall. I wish that I could think them once, reach a positive decision, and then lay them by the way, but I know that isn’t going to work. Just like the endless lists of the ingredients of the perfect wardrobe that both leads to and reflects inner excellence, the task is not as cut-and-dried as it would seem, and it’s never done. Some piece or other is always lacking. And after it all, you’re still you, a person with dimensions that cannot possibly be represented in any magazine. So I’d like to say I can ‘finish,’ i.e. decide on the plan that meets all my needs and wants, and that the bringing it to fruition will be the easy part, but I can’t and it won’t. I can only keep correcting and re-correcting and trying not to wait, too hard, for the day when it all falls into place like a fashion plate shilling a back-to-school day without self-consciousness, without nerves, without vulnerability altogether.
posted by katherine | 10:57 PM
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