Yesterday, I came home to a clean house and a clean bed, my orange cat lying on top of it. I had an orange candle burning in my bedroom, and the little orange lamp beside it was on. The television sits directly across from my bed, and with everything glowing orange around me, the room looked very pretty. For a moment, I felt almost like one of those girls I grew up watching on television.
Almost immediately, though, I stopped noticing it. I started thinking about work, then applications, then something else, and then something else. I suddenly sort of paused then and thought about how this was one of the dreams I'd had since I was a child: to one day live in a place that felt this beautiful.
I think I'm saying that, strangely, that beautiful home doesn't feel as beautiful as it looked when it belonged to someone else. I think we all sort of imagine what it would be like to live in the desert or the forest or the castle, to have that kind of peace, or that kind of money, or that kind of home. I get to see the shape of their life without having to inhabit all the ordinary thoughts inside it.
But if I could somehow step outside myself for a moment, I think I would want to be me too. How great it must look to be twenty-three and able to afford your own apartment. To go out for a meal without wondering whether spending that money means there won't be food tomorrow. To be pursuing dreams that you chose for yourself. I literally remember when I used to want to be me. If you told 15 year old me that life would turn out the way it did, she would sob and sob and sob for days from how grateful she is.
I remember the first time I got high. It was junior year of college when I was placed to room with this white girl I hadn't seen before that day. Over time, we both realized we were great as roommates. She was a timid girl who had bold tattoos and played bass in a legit rock band. One thing about her you should prolly know is that she is big on her weed. Multiple times a week, girls and guys I barely knew would walk through our living room and head straight for the balcony. From inside, I would watch someone hold a bong between their hands while somebody fought with a lighter that always seemed to require two or three flicks before the flame finally appeared. Then came the inhale, the smoke, the horrible coughing, and somehow everybody behaving as though this were a perfectly pleasant recreational activity.
I had grown up believing smoking was one of those vaguely evil things that people simply should not do, and I had never been particularly interested in testing that belief. Sometimes I genuinely wish I had been more of a rebellious child. I wasn't. At least not in most of the ways that would make the story more interesting. But eventually my roommate gave me some version of the standard YOLO monologue, and apparently that was sufficient philosophical justification. So we went onto the balcony together and passed a joint back and forth. I inhaled too much and immediately coughed half my lungs out. Then she inhaled and coughed almost as violently as I had, which was reassuring because I took this to mean that coughing was simply part of smoking and not evidence that I was doing it catastrophically wrong. That made me brave enough to take another hit. And another.
When we came back inside, she sat on the couch and, for some reason I cannot remember, I decided the appropriate place for me was the floor. Nothing happened. Or at least I thought nothing happened. We sat there for what felt like quite a while, and I remember wondering whether weed simply did not work on me. Then something shifted. My vision felt different—not blurry exactly, but as though there were suddenly a tiny delay between looking at the room and understanding that I was looking at it. And then I started laughing. I could not stop. That was the moment I realized, Oh. I am intoxicated. And sometime during that first high, after all the laughing and the strangeness of realizing my own brain could feel completely different while I was still sitting in the same living room, I started thinking about my younger self. And I cried for her.
Anywho, maybe perspective is everything, and when you are yourself, you are strangely the person with the least perspective on your own life. Other people get to see the composition. You are stuck inside the painting, worrying about what needs to be done tomorrow.
P.S. I think I might be getting a little dependent on THC. I've started using it almost as a reward. Once I've done everything I'm supposed to do, I can finally have it and unwind. I'm not sure yet whether I think that's okay, or whether the fact that it has become such a reliable endpoint to my day is exactly why I should take some time away from it.
I grew up in a big city. And when I say big city, I mean buses, lots of them. I mean being able to leave one part of the city, get on a bus, get off somewhere else, walk for a while, get on another bus, and somehow end up exactly where you needed to be. I mean streets that were still being used after the sun went down, people walking home, people sitting somewhere drinking coffee, cars passing, shops still lit from the inside. The city did not disappear just because it was late.
My dad and I walked a lot. We would walk ridiculously long distances while arguing about essentially anything we could find a disagreement in. Politics, science, religion, some random thing one of us had heard—I think sometimes the topic was almost irrelevant. We just liked arguing. One of us would say something, the other would immediately find the weakest part of the argument, and suddenly we had walked several blocks without noticing. We also hunted down pastry shops. We'd hear about one, see one while walking, or decide we wanted something sweet and start looking. Then we'd stand in front of the glass display case examining everything like there was a consequential decision to be made, pick a few things, try them, decide which was actually good, and eventually move on. The important part wasn't even necessarily the pastry. There was simply somewhere to go. One fun thing I remember is never knowing the actual culnary terms for the cakes, to me, they were just "the red one with the strawberry" or "the mango looking one that's brown".
I've been thinking about that lately because I don't think I realized how much the hours of a city determine the life that gets lived inside it. Nowadays, I keep wanting to go somewhere at night and discovering that there is nowhere to go. Shops close at seven or eight. By ten, even cafés and restaurants are wrapping up. It will be 9:30 p.m., and I don't want to go to a bar, but I don't want to go home either. I want to sit in a café. I want a piece of cake at 10:47 p.m. I want to be able to call someone and say, "Do you want to go get coffee?" and have the answer depend on whether they want coffee, not whether coffee as a public activity has already been discontinued for the evening.
I think we talk about cities having "culture" as though culture simply appears wherever enough people live close together, but so much of a city's culture must be built by the places that give people permission to exist outside their homes. If every bookstore closes at seven, people don't wander through bookstores at nine. If every café closes at eight, nobody develops the habit of sitting over coffee until eleven. If restaurants shut their kitchens early, there are fewer spontaneous late dinners after somebody says, "I'm hungry, should we go somewhere?" Eventually, everyone learns the schedule the city has given them. You stop suggesting things because you already know they aren't open. You stop leaving the house at ten because where exactly would you go? And then, from the outside, it looks as though people simply don't like being out late. Maybe they would if there were somewhere to be.
I don't think every city needs to be awake at four in the morning. I am not demanding that the local bakery maintain a night shift so I can contemplate a croissant at 2:17 a.m. But midnight? I genuinely think cafés and restaurants staying open until midnight would change the rhythm of a place. There is a particular kind of life that happens after the day's obligations are finished. Dinner is over, work cannot reasonably ask anything else of you, nobody is rushing somewhere because most of the things they had to do today have already been done. You can sit across from someone with a cup in front of you and talk for much longer than you intended. Maybe that is part of what I miss when I miss a big city. It isn't necessarily the size of it. I miss the possibility—the feeling that at 10:30 at night, the day has not already decided that it is over.
My worst fear is to be like my father.
I remember being around fourteen or fifteen when the question of whether we wanted children, and if so how many, started finding its way into conversations with people my age. One thing I remember, and that most people who grew up with me probably remember too, is how intensely averse I was to the idea. I didn't want children. I didn't want to give birth. I didn't want to be somebody's mother. At that age, I don't think I had the vocabulary to articulate exactly why I felt so strongly about it. I just knew that somewhere inside me there was a very firm boundary, and unlike most of my opinions at fourteen, this one did not feel particularly negotiable.
That conviction was tested when, a few months before I turned sixteen, I agreed to officially become the girlfriend of a boy who was practically obsessed with becoming a father. I fell in love with said boy, but unfortunately for him, I was also as strongheaded then as I am now. There were many conversations and several ultimatums that were carefully constructed not to sound like ultimatums. Surely someday? What if we stayed together? What if he really wanted them? What if I loved him enough? None of it worked. I was stubborn about it in a way that confused people because I was so young. The adults around me generally responded with some combination of amusement, indifference, and dismissal. I would change my mind when I got older. Apparently adulthood was going to arrive carrying a previously undiscovered desire for babies.
Well, almost a decade has passed. It hasn't.
If anything, getting older and becoming more educated has given structure to something I understood instinctively before I knew how to explain it. I can articulate now what fourteen-year-old me couldn't. I simply don't feel deprived by the thought of never experiencing motherhood. When I imagine the decades of attention, labor, worry, money, sacrifice, and responsibility involved in raising another human being, I don't see something frightening but ultimately desirable. I mostly see years of my life being dedicated to something I am simply not excited to do. That doesn't mean I think other people are foolish for wanting children. For me, it just feels like an enormous amount of time to give to something I don't particularly want.
Ironically, I think my father is one of the reasons I understand this so clearly.
My father wanted to be a father. Not passively, not because children were simply what came next in adulthood, but with his entire being. He loves his children more than anything. If something were coming toward us, I genuinely believe his instinct would be to put his body between it and ours. He was overprotective, overinvolved, frequently overexerted, and sometimes seemed to organize his entire existence around raising us. It breaks my heart to know how much he hurt us growing us just because he was unhealed himself. When I was younger, I just knew that my father cared about being our father with an intensity I hadn't yet felt toward anything.
I think he was actually the first person who taught me what passion looked like.
I watched him pour himself into something and realized that being that consumed by a purpose must feel incredible. I wanted to know what my version of that feeling was. I kept looking for something I could care about with the same irrational intensity with which my father cared about raising us, and eventually I found it somewhere completely different. I fell in love with this vague idea of a career, and over the years that idea expanded and became more specific until it grew into one of the greatest things in my life. Even on the exhausting days, even when experiments fail, even when work follows me home in my head, I am utterly passionate about what I do. I recognize the feeling because I grew up watching another version of it.
Maybe that is why the question of parenthood feels relatively simple to me. I know what it looks like when somebody genuinely wants to devote himself to raising children because I watched my father do it. I don't feel toward a hypothetical child what my father feels toward me. More importantly, I don't particularly want to. I have found the thing I want to pour myself into, and it isn't motherhood.
But there is another side to inheriting things from my father that frightens me much more.
For as much as my father tried to be a great parent, he made mistakes. Some of them were enormous. Some could have cost us far more than they ultimately did. In certain ways, I think he has been extraordinarily lucky. Decisions were made, consequences could have followed, and somehow life occasionally allowed him to walk away with much less damage than there could have been. Loving your children desperately, I learned, does not prevent you from hurting them. Wanting with your entire heart to be a good father does not automatically make every decision you make as one good.
Whether I like it or not, I am his legacy.
Sometimes I look at my life and see him everywhere. The career I am building grew from interests he once had himself but never had the resources or circumstances to pursue. Some of the ways I think feel unmistakably inherited. Even the parts of my body I find ugliest, the features I sometimes catch in a mirror and wish I could exchange for somebody else's, arrived through him. His fingerprints are all over me in ways both profound and embarrassingly physical.
There are things I inherited from him that I treasure. His intensity. His ability to become consumed by something he believes matters. Maybe some of my stubbornness. Maybe the part of me that can decide something is worth doing and continue long after it stops being pleasant. It would be dishonest to tell the story of who I became without acknowledging how much of the machinery came from him.
But inheritance is unsettling precisely because it does not ask what you would like to keep.
I can reject motherhood. I can choose a different career. I can live on another continent. I can make thousands of decisions that construct a life completely unlike his, and still sometimes recognize him in myself with uncomfortable clarity. And whenever I notice myself approaching one of his mistakes—not necessarily repeating the exact act, but recognizing the same impulse, the same blind spot, the same certainty that perhaps made the original mistake possible—my entire body recoils.
That scares me much more than looking like him.
I think my worst fear isn't literally becoming my father. It's that I reproduced the parts of him I spent my life believing I understood well enough to avoid. There is something horrifying about knowing someone's mistakes intimately, experiencing some of their consequences yourself, promising that you will know better—and then realizing that understanding where a pattern came from does not necessarily make you immune to repeating it.
You spend the first part of your life being made from pieces of other people, and then the rest of it deciding which pieces get to become you.
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