6:27 a.m.
Homemade Latte.
Safari Browser.
Epistolary Blog.
2020.
Dear Friend-de-plume,
People in my orbit have always been fond of measuring success with rulers they happened to inherit: a respectable job, a respectable family, respectable morals. Respectability, as far as I can tell, is mostly a neighbourhood consensus.
I have never trusted consensuses.
Perhaps that is the skeptical postmodernist in me speaking, or perhaps I simply enjoy being professionally unconvinced. Either way, those grand narratives have always struck me as elaborate stage props. What is a job if the mind slowly atrophies in exchange for a salary? What is family if affection becomes a social obligation with annual reunions? What is morality if its genealogy is little more than a centuries-long debate over who gets to define "civilised"?
No wonder I missed the road everyone had paved for me.
Curiously enough, they still insist on filing me under successful. I appreciate the compliment, though I suspect we've been reading different maps.
Truth be told, I am not entirely innocent either. Narcissus receives terrible press, but I understand the temptation. I, too, have occasionally fallen in love with my own reflection, though thankfully not to the point of drowning. Vanity is far more manageable when accompanied by self-awareness.
I tried to become the version of myself people wanted. I genuinely did. But somewhere along the line it became a fait accompli: I could either disappoint them or slowly dismantle myself in their honour. The former seemed considerably cheaper.
I have long accepted that meaning is not something we discover neatly folded beneath a rock.
Love, for instance, is probably dopamine, oxytocin, electrical impulses, endocrine trickery, and a remarkably successful evolutionary marketing campaign. "It's just hormones," says Rick, and biologically speaking, he is annoyingly difficult to argue with.
Yet I remain perfectly willing to be fooled.
If someone offered me the Lotus of forgetfulness or a sip from Lethe, I would at least ask whether refills were included. I know enough endocrinology to distrust my emotions, yet not enough to stop enjoying them. Perhaps meaning is simply a story we tell ourselves until it becomes furniture.
And honestly, I have grown rather fond of the furniture.
So yes, I invent symbols. I collect metaphors. I baptise ordinary moments with unnecessary grandeur because reality, left unattended, can be dreadfully underwritten.
Still, one sentence continues to haunt me more than most. Fanon wrote, "To speak is to exist absolutely for the other."
That line exposes me every time.
For all my declarations of glorious independence, I still want to be recognised. Not by everyone. Heaven forbid. Universal approval sounds exhausting. There exists only a very small republic of people whose recognition matters to me, and I can be embarrassingly needy when it comes to them.
If they did not exist, this letter would never have survived until 7:18 a.m. on Blogger.
So there lies the contradiction.
I believe everything is ultimately futile.
I also believe futility deserves good prose.
If you're wondering whether I still tread carefully along the Yellow Brick Road, the answer is yes.
The difference is that I laid the bricks myself.
Sincerely yours,
Emed.
* Futile /ˈfyo͞odīl/ like this (lol)
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