logical fallacies

As I turned onto the street that would lead me home, the first few bars of Karma Police filled my car and in those thirty seconds before lyrics kicked in, I had to decide whether or not this was really a good idea. I took a deep breath and sang before I could decide not to and suddenly, this too-familiar small-town Ohio street looks just like the Newport Bridge and my whole world’s upside down. Once I pulled into the garage, I sang one round of “for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself” before I couldn’t take it anymore, hearing that meek, fragile voice that his was that night and feverishly rushing to shut it off. While I’m sure there’s quite enough that is lost on me, timing certainly isn’t.

Over coffee maybe an hour before Radiohead decided to swim in my stomach, I told Lauren that this identity crisis I feel isn’t the kind where you forget or don’t understand who you are, but the kind where you understand yourself maybe too well and don’t understand why who you are now is more like who you were a few years ago than who you really mean to be.  We talked for a long while about how clearly we see our 20 year old selves and while we were so much happier then, we were also so misguided, so unformed, as she said. While we couldn’t see it then, we were so very susceptible to wanting to feel a certain way and so deciding to feel that way. We believed misery (in truth, anything unstable) to be more interesting than happiness mostly because we didn’t understand true misery. We believed ourselves to be authentically who we were–we were confident in who these kids were, in the ways we believed the world worked, in our place in it.

As it turns out, we were pretty dreadfully mistaken, but then, we were also happier. Or a particularly uncoagulated brand of happy, anyway.

Since, it’s been nothing but a series of uprootings–shall I list the cities I’ve moved to/from/to/from in the past 5 years?–that has begun to make me feel like maybe I’ve happily left the “old” version of myself back where she was happiest, but like I’m still waiting for the next revision. What I imagine to be the most difficult part of this whole endeavor is that with the exception of Lauren, no one around me is interested in those conversations that help me to reinvent and/or solidify my ideas, to help me discover new points of view and learn things that should become part of my way of thinking. I lose my confidence much too easily when I spend so much time alone–mostly, I believe, because I constantly see how my life should be, how I should be, and how neither of those things are coming true at the moment.

However, when I woke up this morning, the sun was coming in in such a way that reminded me so instantly and so oddly of Chicago, the kind of city I think I could love if made to, but the kind that’s beautiful even if it is a degree off. Why Chicago, I do not know, but in my sleepy haze, I was struck simply by the beauty of a world. I don’t know what that means only that I need to be a part of it again.

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

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