It is getting to be that time of life when all my most inspired thoughts from each morning are showing up as 3 year old think pieces by someone who’s been in the game for longer than I’ve been alive. I cannot find originality in any of my inspiration.
I feel like I should take this as the reassurance I always wanted in middle school: I’m normal. At least real-world normal. People who were normal in middle school are the people I would now classify as “mean girls”. By this admission I’ve proved my first point, in calling it “mean girl” I am not original as everyone is calling girls who fit in with all the right and rewarded aesthetics “mean girls”.
Now, I could take this as an opportunity to explore how these girls with the “right and rewarded aesthetics” are proprietors of a benevolent patriarchal narrative- but I have nothing new to say about it. I would merely be regurgitating talking points from podcasts and substack blogs.
When I say I have nothing original to say, I am not saying it in a “there is nothing new under the sun” or a “the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing” way. My sentiment comes from a deep and purposely-left-unexplored fear that I have lost all of the marvelous and joys of my childhood creativity where I invented governments for toy animals and an entire fantasy life that I explored to fall asleep each night. I think about this in between TV shows and podcasts the way a smoker picks up another cigarette to ponder why her wrinkles are so deep no matter if she follows her skincare routine each night. It is too uncomfortable to exercise my brain in the practice of boredom and contemplation that is required in order to have even the beginning of an original thought.
My antidote is not original, but medicine hardly is. I keep thinking I’m special enough to go into the highly experimental and groundbreaking treatment for my malady. But my case has been seen twelve times today by the doctor already: less screens, more exercise, prioritize reading, and 30 minutes each day channeling artistic energy.
But who has time after work? After meals are made and eaten? After the living room has been vacuumed and the trash taken out? What about the evenings of a deep and inescapable fatigue that renders me motionless on my bed- searching for a video or article or post that will have the Answer.
Then I lie awake at night resenting that I spent my whole life waiting for the Answer to be told to me, instead of trying to figure it out for myself. Asleep, I have dreams of running away from all my life, and the street engulfed in flames behind me, and trolley cars speeding next to me carrying all their passengers away from the same flames that I am trying to out run. I resent that while I keep trying to outrun this dread that I am not the inspired-genius that I could pretend I was at 8 years old, there are some people blissfully unaware or who enjoy the community that common think pieces and style sections bring. I wake up to commute to work with people who I know must have rich inner lives, but when surrounded in a mass of young professional humanity and everyone lives in the same neighborhood, and where’s the same thing to work, and carries the same bag, and gets off at the same subway stop– it makes me think about how many of us are even unnerved by this singularity of behavior.
But I’ll push this off– I have friends to see, and projects around the apartment to finish. I even have a date night tomorrow. Perhaps my life was not made to be original the way I imagine it should. And if I try a little bit harder to meditate on a brief glimpse of an idea I had earlier, you can’t blame a girl for trying, just once more, for Halley’s comet.