Fractals
Archived from Jan 25, 2024:
“I know what I’m meant to do, who I’m supposed to be. It took a long time to figure it out, but I know now.”
Leif, Midnight Burger, Episode 28: Pockets
There is something about fractals, iterations, doubles folding in on themselves that entrance me. Mathematically, I can’t say I understand much or any of it, but in a literary sense, in a world of finding meaning in the things around us, there’s something I feel deep in my chest when I linger too long on the patterns. Like a child with a kaleidoscope, it is so easy to be lured in to the shifting, the pattern, the mirror images that barely last long enough to be considered true doubles. I look back on years past and see myself over and over and over and over, all somehow the same, cohesive, but warping, shifting, moving through time at the behest of forces greater than myself. I have never been myself since the day I was born, yet despite this, every day, I come more into whoever I am, whoever I may be. It feels impossible, but there it is every moment. How frightening, to be someone new and missing out on everyone and everything else I could have been. How paralysing, to have to choose. How disheartening to wonder if I even have a say.
I turned 30 last year, and it felt arbitrary for that to matter at all. The years feel faster, but have been marching along at the same pace my whole life. It, nor I, felt particularly noteworthy and I think this feeds into how I feel about new years as well. Of course it’s nice to put on a dress and go to a lovely party, somewhat reluctant friend in tow. It’s nice to have some nebulous excuse to buy an excessive amount of cheese and drink the nice wine, particularly in the dead of winter, but it’s really just another day, right? You don’t change. Not any more than you do when the seconds, minutes and hours add up any other day. It is so simple and so exhausting to build a life out of millions of moments. It strains me to think about how a person is just a body plus time, crashing into one another until we settle again into the world that so graciously let us be witness, if only temporarily. It breaks my heart and brings me hope; it twists my soul into impossible shapes, pushing me to what I can only hope is the edge of inspiration but is so frequently nothing more than tears.
It is immaterial, with the density to crush a soul. It is not alive but it breathes, grows, warps and slithers its way into my throat. I feel it wrap tightly around my heart. The older I get, the more I start to think it just is me, an extension, something that is to be learned and lived with, not annihilated, removed with surgical precision. The more I think about it, the more I realise it can’t be. It’s just time, isn’t it? When time wears on, adds to my body and soul, how could I stay the same? How do I know when I’m no longer me?
What kind of person am I, anyway? I find descriptors easy for others, because it feels objectively true. How can you ask me to explain the radiating beauty and kindness of my friends, as if they are not the deepest rooted truths of our universe? I am happy to elaborate, but it feels silly for anyone to doubt the joy, integrity and curiosity they have that as is sure as gravity holding us to home. Why do you need an explanation when you can just experience it, basking in all that they are?
I am the kind of person who wakes up at 3:45 AM to walk a bottle of Bailey’s and homemade cookies to my favourite bakery when they open at 4 AM on Christmas Eve. I am the kind of person who loves to cook, but more for others than myself. I am the kind of person who’s inclined to stay home, who reads sad books, who likes baths but rarely takes them. I am the kind of person who writes in threes. I suppose these actions could be simplified to adjectives, it’s just so hard to see that in myself. It doesn’t feel as evident as it does with those I love, it feels like something that needs to be proven, most likely to myself. I feel so impermanent, but like I have never once improved. I want to be excited about who I can be, who I will be. I’m trying to get to this point, but it is so hard to find that energy and excitement when I find myself so frequently immersed in disappointment about how and who I am today.
I think about Leif a lot. A fictional character, much smarter than me, written by someone more driven and creative. What a dream is that certainty amid the chaos; finding the core of yourself and nestling it so well into the compass that is your life. I wonder what it takes to get there, and I can only hope that a desire for that direction is the first step. And maybe there is some symbolism and weight to be added to the steps when they are taken on the first day of the year. Who am I to say?
I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am meant to be, but I do know it will be some version of me, as it must be; refined with a bit of support and likely more self-compassion than I’ve been known to give. I am working on it and I have been working too hard to give up on the endless versions of me there have been and can be. I don’t want to be a new me, I just hope I can be a version, ever shifting around a core of certainty and love.
Hello again! Sorry for the delay and thank you for being here friends. Being alive is a lot sometimes, but I hope to get back into the swing of writing. As meandering and listless as this one was, I promise this won’t turn into a diary, I’ll get back to writing about something more interesting than my personal existential crisis. The days getting imperceptibly longer gives me something akin to hope, and maybe even energy. How were your holidays? What should I write about in the next few weeks?
