I Was Looking for a Job and then I Found a Job
This blog, in its inception, served varied purposes:
Sustaining an NYU undergraduate fueled individualistic, esoteric, and intellectual pursuit
Maintaining my top down influence upon my little sisters
Writing as a way to understand myself
And after recovering from the multicolored complexes of my early twenties, writing became estranged, as it was no longer something I instinctively turned to in times of intensity and confusion for respite. Mostly because such moments have dramatically decreased in frequency. My departure from the form also conveniently coincided with a job hunt, so removing any provocative content from the World Wide Web was undoubtedly in my best interests. But now I am in that new job. And my doting sisters long for orientation.
I haven't watched a foreign film in over a year, but I’ve seen the last two seasons of Love is Blind. I don't force myself through Cormac McCarthy novels any longer, I’ve read exclusively books by female authors this year, all with homes as central characters within the stories. Ann Patchett's titular Dutch House haunts its adult descendants and is an omnipotent force as they navigate the transitions of life's seasons. Madeline Cash’s Flynn family in Lost Lambs embraces the inherent dysfunction of a 2020s household and examines the individualities that cohabitate under one roof, three daughters all violently quirky, too familiar for my own good. And Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley estate in Rebecca is the backdrop to the plot's covert, sinister double femicide: one literal and the other conveyed through her sensational, expert level prose.
Clearly, I’ve been reflecting a lot on nostalgia, and the bridge between childhood and adolescence, adolescence and young adulthood, and young adulthood and adulthood. Where exactly do those precipices lie? All the discomfort of the in-between, paradoxically coupled with all the familiarity of growing pains.
The Alice in Wonderland syndrome describes a certain sensation that terrified me in childhood, and I incorrectly believed to be a unique, deeply personal phenomena in adulthood, up until this comment stopped my thumb in its tracks during a reels scroll:
Encountering a chorus of “there are no original experiences” lamenters in the replies, we all were amazed that there was a diagnosis for this uncanny feeling.
From the Cleveland Clinic website:
Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is a rare condition that disrupts your brain’s ability to process sensory input. The disruption affects how you perceive the size of things you see around you, the feel or look of your own body, or both. It can also distort your sense of reality.
In my case, this often occurred with my eyes closed, right before falling asleep. It was a cone of ice cream, sometimes a cup of water. There would be two identical versions next to each other in my mind's eye, and their volume would oscillate so dramatically I would panic, the sensation of rapid expansion and depletion would pulse through my limbs and I would shoot awake. I recall crying to my mom about it one night, when I was very very young. She consoled me and told me it was normal, little did I know it was literally a normal, largely precedented psychological episode and existed firmly within a medical dictionary. Nothing esoteric, nothing paranormal, just profoundly human.
That feeling, though, that tangible, disorienting sensation procured by my search for sleep, harkens to real life, everyday growth. Expansion of age, of clothing sizes, of lived experiences. That original state becomes more and more foreign, then in an instant something can suspend time and take you back, like when a sun glare reflects into your eye perfectly while in the passenger's seat on the highway, and you temporarily lose all sense of spacetime. A smell, a taste, and most often in my case, a song.
I’ll often wake up with deeply nostalgic songs stuck in my head; Jack Johnson’s “Upside Down”, or Glen Campbells “Gentle on my Mind”. The other morning was no exception:
“A shadow passed, a shadow passed, yearning yearning” crooned Jonathan Groff, accompanied by the original cast of Spring Awakening, between my ears. Likely triggered by my seeing this post on Instagram the day before, which had made me deeply uncomfortable:
It solidified my assertion that my prefrontal cortex has sealed its development. Amusement park rides make me nervous, I crave carrots, and I grimace at the exploitation of young, talented artists as opposed to feeling dizzyingly envious of it.
I no longer can be described as precocious, and yet Spring Awakening, no matter what, will always make me feel a unique sensation that evades description. But that feeling is not solely mine. And maybe I was wrong to try to stop describing it.
And here arrives what I resent about where this blog leads: its inherent self obsession. Me me me me me me. All I can write about is what I know, but what value add could that possibly serve? And I bashfully admit that it's not thrilling to be provocative anymore, I relish in my consistent comfort. Even the title of this site, “only fans of my mind” rings trite and juvenile. My thoughts are not racy, and would rather not contribute to the trivialization of the Only Fans Industrial Complex.
So I relinquish the caveats, and carry on the practice. Biblically sober and newly 25, I will work on writing because it's important to me, and fun. The new practice will arrive in pivoting from the personal. Verbose public journal entries do not fulfill me much, and I am dauntingly aware that weaving a narrative isn't a skill that's developed overnight.
