hey sylvia, can we choose to be happy?
convening with miss plath in the great beyond
hey y’all,
today i’m sipping on an iced lavender honey latte from oak house in downtown durham. it’s a little too sweet, and i’m going to have to admit to myself one day that i just don’t care for iced espresso.
it’s going to get a little flowery in here today. i decided to write this week’s newsletter in my usual creative nonfiction style. i need to flex some writing muscles, i long for feedback, and i must externalize my existentialism in a container that feels…intimate? controlled? in any case, i seek agency for my suffering. thank you in advance for your indulgence.
i want and i want and i want and i want.
it is yawning;
it is bottomless;
it is guttural and cloying;
i want, endlessly.
is it possible to choose to be happy? can we decide to be satisfied right where we are? i wish i had that much control. i’m sitting with sylvia plath today and wondering what it is we both seem to be infected with. she captured my agony so well.
when i was young, my father instilled in me the inability to quit. he has great regrets about what his life could have been, and he never wanted me to suffer the same fate. “never quit”, he always says. so i never do. i never quit relationships, jobs, projects, hobbies; i make them quit me. i try and try and try, striving to squeeze everything i possibly can out of the experience to ensure i uncover every possible scrap of excellence.
i have spent a great deal of my life in proximity to greatness, but never quite great myself. and as i continue to interrogate the fall of imperialism, the shackles of white supremacy, and the realities of living under an oppressive colonial economic system, i’m beginning to wonder what greatness really is. i was raised to believe that money, prestige, and power were synonymous with greatness. i have believed my success must be legitimized by the masses via the transient property of institutional validation. in other words, if i had a ritzy, high-profile job that pays me well i will have made it.
well, i did that, didn’t i? head of people & culture at a national human rights organization? niche and vulnerable, still, but ritzy all the same. and what has it gotten me? next-to-nothing fulfilling. i am a punching bag, professionally. i keep myself up at night oscillating between a desperate need for escape and incessant self-punishment for wanting more than i already have. so many people in this world have so little, how can i be so ungrateful?
i’ll be 31 this year. i can no longer deny that i am terrified of an indifferent middle age. i want to have legacy. regardless of systemic marginalization (of which i am surely a victim), legacy requires relentless pursuit. it requires a self-assuredness and a determination that i fear i do not have. irrespective of all the -isms which might hold me back, the actual barrier is me.
i want to be one of the great writers of our age. i want to have an award-winning coffee shop that is also a bastion in the neighborhood. i want to be a master ceramicist who has his mugs in museums. i want to single-handedly liberate and stabilize the local food systems in north carolina. i want to live on a houseboat and in a penthouse loft. i want to spend every weekend with my grandparents and also go on a culinary tour of southeast asia. i want to be the perfect husband, an amazing friend, a proud and dutiful son, a reliable yet fun uncle, a pillar in my local community, and on and on and on. i want to do and be everything i can possibly be in this one whimsical life without sacrificing my principles or any other human being. i want to make it, and then spend the rest of my days bringing others up with me.
i wonder if these desires are real, or are the echoes of unmet needs. i find it more and more challenging to unearth my truest, deepest desires. what do i actually want out of my life? would i be happy spending the rest of my life working a modest job with the man i love in the state where i grew up surrounded by friends and family? would i long for adventure and prestige someday? would i be able to answer that longing in a way that doesn’t uproot my foundations? or is there something hard-wired within me that prevents happiness? can i will contentment into existence?
over the years, i’ve plateaued in therapy. i always seem to reach a point where they just don’t know what to do with me. how can you help someone so chronically dissatisfied for no discernable reason?
i’m frightened by it. i feel trapped in a maze that i built myself. i don’t want to be validated by institutions that are built on a foundation of colonial violence; yet i don’t know how else to achieve success. i don’t know how to redefine it in a way that feels genuine. in a world where greatness is gatekept by patriarchy and white supremacy, what is the criteria for being “the best”? who must you appeal to in order to be legendary? what must you sacrifice to be seen?
i want to live out the meritocracy myth, where the substance of my work speaks for itself. wanting that is not sufficient to achieve it. i lament about how far i’d be if i hadn’t spent the last 10 years of my life chasing the wrong kind of success. i know it isn’t too late, but the level of stuckness i feel seems insurmountable.
i’ll leave you with this meaty excerpt from slyvia’s journals.
it’s a bit scathing, and not at all culturally competent by today’s standards. yet she’s so forthcoming here, in a way that i think cemented her as one of the greats. she wasn’t afraid to be imperfect, to lament out loud, to put the worst parts of herself on display.
i wonder how different she would have been in the age of tiktok. would she have been as brave if she knew just how many people might have an opinion about her? or would she be monetizing her vulnerability, thus devaluing her words entirely? would she be making a ukulele apology as we speak? are any of us capable of true courage under these conditions?
i don’t have any answers, save for this: her words have comforted me over the years, and without them i would feel significantly more singular (read: alone). isn’t that why we write? to stir the heart of even one other person? i believe what she’s getting at in this last passage is what i’m getting at: i have the opportunity to live a full and purposeful life and it is agonizing to me that i’m not. further, i don’t know how to do anything else. i wonder if sylvia ever unlocked it for herself or if despaired until the end.
xoxo,
kuya von
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