today’s letter comes a day late — jayne has given me a much appreciated extension as I come back to reality from the holidays!
Between graduating from college three years ago and going back to in-person grad school this August, I lived at my parents’ house for all but 4 months. At first out of exhaustion, then prudence, then circumstance (pandemic). My parents’ (frankly) shoddily built house in the exurbs has always been a respite from the elements — Mid-Atlantic humidity, rush-hour traffic, small talk. It’s a respite, even though it’s part of a motley of low-key racists, high-key Trump voters, and affluent people of color. Even though the whole house rattles when it’s even a small bit windy. It’s at least a 20-minute drive from where most of my friends live. At one point the highest rated restaurant in town on Yelp was the Sheetz downtown.
I am so lucky — I have a very good relationship with my parents, and they live in a big house in an idyllic gated community in a town my friend Sam described as “a fucking norman rockwell painting.” I have lots of space to stretch and eat and weep. It’s always stocked with the things you need, and I’m rarely excited to leave it; only for vacations, and maybe when I briefly moved into a townhouse in Arlington two years ago, because it meant I could spend less time commuting and more time in the city. Even then, I drove back to my parents’ house every weekend. And then the pandemic hit, and I went back home.
I feel like I have relived every day of my childhood since then, either in small manic and depressive episodes, or in the process of hanging out with my now nine-year-old cousin, who goes to the same elementary school I did. Right after I graduated, I insisted on teaching myself to skateboard, “despite” being 21, which at the time felt like the oldest age there was. Once I started work, I drove idly around the suburbs with my high-school friends, eating diner food and hanging out in each others’ basements. At some point (maybe during the pandemic, after we all got tired of hanging out in parking lots) we gave up and started to meet up again at the big outdoor shopping plazas where we’d go as teenagers, when we were feigning adulthood, even though we now understood they were uncool. I tried so hard to run into my crush from high school. At 22, I spent a year watching One Direction clips and crying more often than I’m willing to admit because I thought I wasn’t skinny enough to ever date Harry Styles. (Arielle talked me down matter-of-factly by saying “Harry Styles will never date you for many reasons, but your weight is not one of them.”)
I’m back now, for winter break, and the cloud of having my entire extended family in America stay with us for a week has blown out. Being back home feels, once again, like a fever. I think more than anything that being here makes me feel like things are possible, because while I’m here I haven’t yet grown up. Is that sad to admit? I’m not sure. Whenever I mention not living at the university next year I’m asked where I’m going to live. There are attractive possibilities — but for some reason I insist on coming back here, to my lime green bedroom decorated with trophies from academic competitions and YA novels.
I’ve been looking for evidence that I’ve grown up. I read my journal entries from middle school a few days ago — I had initially intended to make them the subject of this letter before I went off the rails a bit :) . Whenever I re-read them, I turn it into some comedic performance, sending my friends photos of funny lines or doing dramatic readings on private Instagram stories. I was, after all, melodramatic and earnest and obsessed with boys, and it’s so funny, it always is. But I wonder now if I’m no longer reading them just to reminisce but to prove to myself that I was here, and that I had good things inside of me that are salvageable. That I was precocious and funny and thoughtful, that I held people and things with clear-eyed, pure care. That I lived through the world as it was ten, fifteen years ago. Can you believe it?
My journals then chronicled either the quotidian or global politics, with little in between. One of my entries noted that I was “pwning” in French class the line after mentioning that Kim Jong Il had died. At some point — probably in eighth or ninth grade — I went back and edited parts of my journal, redacting words and phrases from sentences I’d written about my crush (a boy genuinely named Chad) because I thought I came across as too obsessive and boy-crazy. I was afraid someone would find my journal and expose me to Chad, perhaps, but also I think I knew I was writing to myself in the future, and was keenly afraid of sounding like an insane loser. I wrote in a later entry years later that I’d wished I hadn’t done that; I wanted to see my young perspective in all its myopia.
I despise the idea of growing up — probably why I am attached so much to my parents, to this stupid house that my dad says he regrets buying. Something gets lost when you do, and then you spend all this time looking for it again. Optimism? Pluckiness? Fervor? I’m not quite sure.
A few things:
writing about these journal entries was originally inspired by this Substack letter by Haley Nahman from last year:
I finished Minor Feelings yesterday, like a year after everyone else in the world, and it was one of the best things I’ve read in years.
My 2 resolutions this year are (1) to have a romantic interest (doesn’t need to be reciprocated, just need some sort of romance-related arc) and (2) to self induce some sort of plot change in my life (dropping out of grad school perhaps..?)
A 21 year old called me a millennial in my tiktok comments and I DELETED it because it hurt my feelings so much
I started doing the Yoga With Adriene “30 Days” series she does every year (this year the theme is “move”). She is seriously the smartest woman in America and I wish her all the best + a MacArthur fellowship or something.
Please kindly play me in Boggle with Friends @jaynesrival
Cheers all, and happy new year. See you in 2 weeks. - PM