We all have things we tell ourselves about our lives. Maybe it’s that we were destined to be a certain way or that we are hard workers. Perhaps a teacher, classmate, or friend changed our course in a material way. It was that camp you did or didn’t go to, the exam you aced or failed and so on. When I think back on my years following high school, I still cringe at my non-linear path into adulthood. I left college after one trimester, worked at a pizzeria/gas station, waitressed for half a year, and enrolled at a school in my hometown before ending up graduating from college in Washington, DC. No matter how much time passes, I continue to treat twenty-year-old me as unlikeable, undesirable, lost, embarrassing. What was it exactly that I was doing? And why couldn’t I just go with the program like everyone else?
It’s always bothered me that I feel that way though. Perhaps it’s the whole Didion “keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be” thing. After reading Satya Doyle Byock’s Quarterlife, I have so much more respect for and understanding of what was happening.
“Quarterlife is not a sterile journey. It demands the gathering of experiences—messy, embodied, unchartered experiences. Fully psychological development cannot be accomplished without complex relationships, failures, risks, longings, and adventure.”
I remember questioning a lot at the time—as in, what am I even doing in college? What is the point of all this? I also recall feeling deeply unmoored, caught in a liminal space between the safety and comfort of home and the lure of adventure in new places with new people. Overall, I was terrified of making the wrong decision, of racing down a path I hadn’t really interrogated. And so, I stopped racing.
Byock suggests that developing into adulthood requires more than hitting wickets of achievement, and that when we don’t take an approach focused on wholeness—a marriage of stability and meaning, we set ourselves up for failure at one point or another.
“When the social and psychological discourse on Quarterlife development emphasizes only external markers of achievement—college, job, marriage, house, children, financial safety—and not the fundamental process of becoming oneself, a great deal is lost. Lives are reduced to ups and downs of successes and failures.
So, yes, all those nights out, the winding path, the frustration I caused my poor parents—that was all about trying to become a whole person. More or less. (Sometimes less.) And now that I’m a parent, wow, do I feel for them. This is no easy task to watch your child fail, adventure, or take risk. I can barely allow that narrative for myself twenty years ago.
New motherhood hit me similarly, although with way less adventuring: Who was I now? What did I want from these years? I was practicing law and parenting two young children. So, I was no longer on a winding path but a linear one that garnered me a lot of external validation. And yet, I longed for more creativity in my life, for more time with my children; but initially I didn’t listen to any of that. It really took grappling with my brother’s death to examine what was going on. According to Byock, “if stability remains the focus of one’s life long after daily survival has been achieved, life is likely to start to feel empty sooner than later.” I think this is how I started writing and why I keep going.
Byock has me thinking about things differently—my own wandering path into early adulthood, motherhood, and beyond.
[books]
The Girls Are All So Nice Here by L.E. Flynn (this one was a bit dark for me)
Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (almost done with this—been highly recommended and I can see why)
[things that caught my eye]
Stephanie Danler, author of Sweet Bitter and Stray, recently started a newsletter called Write What. She has an interesting take on Joan Didion and her meme-ification. I think I might feel this way about the now-ubiquitous Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stone t-shirts.
Ugh sorry to be the bearer of bad news but social media and children don’t seem to be working out so well. I’m absolutely terrified to confront this era with my own kids. A friend recently wrote to a group about her concern on this topic. She had such an interesting call to action: let’s be the parents who stand up to this challenge rather than merely shrug and say meh it’s the way things are now. More specifically, it’s our job to keep life off-line interesting and engaging for our own kids, including having groups of kids who aren’t face-down in their phones. Of course, this means, at least for me, that adults will need to fix their own phone behavior first.
Joanna Rakoff wrote a stunning essay on living a more authentic life: The Moment I Knew the Man I Truly Loved Wasn’t My Husband.
Amil Niazi made me smile with her piece on the good parts of parenting. It’s true we often bond over the hard parts and for whatever reason keep the good parts close to the vest.
[something new]
We’ve been doing “slow Saturdays or Sundays” also sometimes called “salon Saturdays or Sundays” where we try to slow things down and learn or do something new together. Usually there’s food involved. We’ve listened to Nina Simone, Dave Brubeck, and BB King. We’ve read exactly one paragraph of The New Yorker, a few Mary Oliver poems. We painted with watercolors and wrote our own poems (message me for some real classics my husband wrote about ice cream and cats). Have to say, I highly recommend!