Last night, over dishes of hand-pulled noodles and crispy anchovies in Chinatown, a friend asked how life has been. Maybe for the first time, in a long time, I answered: I’m happy. I didn’t doubt it. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t just say it as a cover of some deeper, more complicated unpleasant feeling. It was true. I was happy. And, I’m lucky to be so happy.
I used to obsessively plan my life. I knew where I was going to be in five years, in ten years, in twenty. I knew every step I’d have to take to reach that goal. I was afraid that if I didn’t plan everything out, I’d miss out on opportunities. Timing had to be right. Experiences had to follow a sequential path. I was in control of my fate and my destiny. I grew up in circumstances I could not control, but I knew, that if I worked hard enough, I can be the master of my future. The past may have belonged to others, but the future, I could make it what I wanted.
I succeeded, for the most part. I timed my college courses and credits to make sure I graduated early. I researched post-graduate options the summer before my senior year. I read the JET application as soon as it had opened, emailed professors weeks in advance, and had all the paperwork set neatly on my desk. I lined up an internship between graduation and leaving for Japan to make sure I’d get precious teaching experience with ESL students before making it my full-time job. Even arriving in Japan and loving the life I was leading, I kept thinking about what’s next. I was unable to live in the present – despite how much I told myself that I was.
My feelings felt generational. We’ve been taught from a young age to be mindful of what we want to be when we grow up. I’m not going to go into how we’ve been optimized since birth to lead lives intended for capitalist production because I feel like others have done a better job than what I can do. But, what this mentality has created is a lack of imagination. A lack of belief that you can go about life exploring and trying new things before settling down with something that feels right for you. Many people do it. When you ask people how they’ve gotten to where they are, most cases it’s circuitous.
When interviewing, the first answer to the first question sets the tone for the rest of the interview. It’s the first impression. You need to nail it. It’s an elevator pitch about yourself. You’re asked a non-question intended to be a question: “So, tell me about yourself.” For a while, I struggled to define my serpentine work experience to something that makes sense for an employer. I wanted to erase all doubt that the interviewer might have about me. I wanted to connect the dots for them. Point A went to point B because of X, Y, Z.
Eventually, I got good at it. I distilled my previous five years of life into its barebones. Here’s how my skills built upon each other. Here’s how it makes sense. Here’s why the specific combinations of my experiences will serve your particular workplace. In a lot of interviews, they asked me about my career plans. They wanted details. They wanted me to think of each step I’m going to take and how I’m going to get there. I resisted. I wasn’t interested in doing that.
I told many of them: I don’t have a plan. I want to explore. I want to figure things out. The tech industry felt opaque to me as someone who sent the majority of his career in education and academia. How was I to know where I’ll be if I’ve never had the experience to make those connections? I understood where they were coming from, though. Hiring is expensive. You’re making an investment on a person who you will think will succeed at their job and then some. You don’t want someone who doesn’t have an idea of what comes next. You don’t want someone incapable of thinking two steps ahead especially in an industry culture that thrives on the hustling mentality where you work every minute of every day to get to a goal you made for yourself. You devote yourself to that goal.
When I planned my future, I was not controlling my future. I was limiting my future. I was envisioning a myopic lane of which my life was capable of going down. I planned and I achieved and after all of that hard work I put in I was unhappy. I had everything I believed I wanted, yet I had this deep sadness. I knew that if I stayed where I was, my path would continue to be limited and my self-deception as someone in control would widen.
Within James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, you will find this meditation:
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.
I wanted to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to plan it. But, ironically, I found that to reinvent myself in an unplanned way, I kinda had to plan it. I had a vague idea of where I wanted to be. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I had a vague idea of how to get there. I put my faith into the unknown, powers beyond my control. My decision to let the fates decide confused my parents, ironic for Greeks whose livelihoods were based on mythological fates and superstition. They worried, of course. I did too. But, I held strong to my faith that things would work out. That if I willed it hard enough, things would fall into place. I didn’t have to control my destiny, but I had to have faith that those who did would lead me in the right direction.
Things did end up falling into place, quickly and then all at once. Before I knew it I was hired. Within a week, I had moved to New York to live with my brother and had started my new job. Within a week of that, I found a place of my own. I was settled and secure in my new life in New York quite effortlessly. When I let go of my control, I found that new paths opened up. I allowed myself to follow my instincts. I allowed myself to receive help. I allowed myself to live in the discomfort of the unknown.
I love New York. I feel a childish sense of wonder every day as I board the subway. The intimacy of being so close, body to body, to my fellow New Yorkers. The solidarity that we’re all in this together, propelled forward through the tunnels to our destination. Sometimes, I stop on the sidewalk and look up at all the illuminated buildings in the dusk towering over me. I’m never intimidated by them. I find them comforting. I marvel at their design. In the six short weeks that I’ve been here, New York has felt like home. I belong. I know that I have a place here. I don’t have to fight for it. From here, all I have to do is continue to blossom. I have to trust that fate will continue to benefit me. That the path I’m down is open and free and limitless.
I started this newsletter a year ago. When I started it, I didn’t think much of it. I had a habit of starting things and stopping things when I got bored, or if they were too difficult, or if I just didn’t have time. But, beyond the odds, I kept it going. I wanted a space to be more public about my writing. I wanted a space to think a little deeper about things that I was experiencing every day. I felt like my brain had started to rot thinking in only 250 characters at a time, unable to really dissect or analyze or critique what was going on. I named it The Anchor because a lot of people have described me as one – someone who holds everyone together, someone who’s stable, someone who’s grounded. But in reality, I wanted to anchor myself. I felt unmoored. I was in a period of self-delusion trying to piece together the parts of myself that were real and parts of myself that had become part of an elaborate fantasy.
I have embarked on a journey through unknown terrain and rocky seas. I’ve reached my destination. I’m anchored. I’m present. I’m happy.