This publication is part of Waypoints, an editorial series exploring what it means to grow up. Like its namesake, we hope to offer readers a meaningful pause along their journey.
I am having the kind of Sunday that takes a person all the way back—back to the garden, back to God who made the Sabbath for man and not the other way around. Outside, my neighbor’s stereo plays on, usually too loud and too early, but not today. Today, it is absolutely perfect in its gauchy, provincial simplicity.
When sunlight hits the living room floor, it reminds me of a butterfly lowering itself onto the flower for nectar. I wish I could find a better assortment of words to capture how this morning feels, but as with anything that is pulled too close into the orbit of our most intimate experiences, the brain short circuits and my language fails me. Sometimes I think the true mother tongue is eternally lodged in one’s throat, caught in the middle of everything a person feels but cannot utter.
In a world where nonchalance is celebrated as a virtue, where no one wants to be seen trying too hard or caring too much about anything or anyone, Chalamet did something rare.
Weeks ago, soundbites of Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Awards speech surfaced on social media. Edits were made in the spirit of #hopecore.
In a world where nonchalance is celebrated as a virtue, where no one wants to be seen trying too hard or caring too much about anything or anyone, Chalamet did something rare by bringing to light the neglected, not-so-shiny aspects of victory within the craft—a quality long unseen in celebrity culture. HE MAKES TRYING HARD COOL AGAIN is the public consensus.
I like to think it was Chalamet’s earnestness that struck me. To admit something like that in front of a crowd and risk sincerity is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability demands a certain amount of courage. But beyond that, I think he laid bare a kind of hunger that’s alive in each one of us. Chalamet wasn’t giving a speech. He was confessing. “But the truth is,” he says, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness.”
157 years before this moment, Louisa May Alcott would write, “I want to be great or nothing.”
In the shifting light, Alcott’s words could either be read as a declaration or a death sentence. But the truth is, I, too, am in pursuit of greatness. I want to write, and I want to do it well. I want to create good things. I’m inspired by the greats—Shelley, Didion, Maddie Mortimer, Vuong, and Godin. And yet, sometimes, I feel like I’ve missed my cue. That I should’ve stepped off the bus that was heading nowhere a long, long time ago.
If I know anything about being a young woman, I know that our days are eaten up by thoughts of all that we think we must become (and not become) in so little time.
On any other day, I would have let the worry simmer, would have battled it out in the coliseum of the mind. But it’s a Sunday, you see, and I’d much rather lay on the cold tiles like a cat, cozy in my small triangle of sun.
I often make the mistake of looking at myself too long in the mirror.
The Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa once asserted that man was never meant to see his own face. “Nature gave him the gift of not being able […] to stare into his own eyes.” Nevertheless, a distorted rendering of man’s divinely endowed image meets my gaze through the glass. And even though Pessoa thinks it’s an abomination, every time the mirror reflects my self back to me, I feel for her. If I know anything about being a young woman, I know that our days are eaten up by thoughts of all that we think we must become (and not become) in so little time. The urge to rush is ever-present and tantalizing. We are all too eager to prove we were worth the trouble it took to bring us into this life. So who can blame anyone for trying?
Of all our possessions, it is dreams that make and break and remake us. We are haunted and buoyed by the size of our desires.
I have no idea where the next act of our lives will lead. The road is long and bumpy, and the mythmaking oracles have fallen out of style. But once, someone from my class invited me over to their house. In the dining room, a lady with kind eyes and weathered hands pointed to the box of fortune cookies. I cracked one open. Inside, the slip of paper read: The answer to everything is yes.
“What’s your biggest fear?” I ask my best friend. In my memory, we’re sitting on the grass. There are families at the park, and the air smells like it’s about to rain, though it never does. “Forgetting,” she says. I say I’m afraid of everything going to waste.
Here’s the thing about fortune cookies: they have a way of making the most nonsensical thing sound so revelatory. I probably tucked that slip of paper into my jeans, forgot it was there, and later annoyed the lady at the laundromat for not cleaning out my pockets. I normally don’t care for the fortune—I prefer the cookie itself.
But not today.
On this Sunday of stereo music and journal entries from the young, floundering, and in despair, I write, and I try not to forget that at one point of my life, the answer to everything was yes.
