Moving Feels Like Sinking

Finality is a choice observation. The end of an era. The next new thing. At what point do we stick? When is the next thing the last?

I don’t know if there is an answer to it that will ever fully satisfy. But I do know, that when you have to finish the journey alone it wounds you. And that wound is carried with us. It took me years to become grounded by the idea that there is something to a ceremony and a celebration at the end of a long road. I never had to think about it because I was always surrounded by the people who supported me and helped me make major decisions. And I spent years, after Covid, wondering what felt like it was missing. I worked here and there, taught in a few different states, a few different subjects, and listened to a thousand guru podcasts.

I remember while I was teaching thinking, “these kids are different, they don’t seem to have whatever spark I recall.” And I think that was it. Everybody needs a buddy. A buddy at work who you talk with about how much you hate the job, a crush from the gas station when you get your morning coffee, a comrade to lock eyes with after you just stormed the castle and made it out the other side. But not everybody gets that and what happens when you don’t? Solitude is when you are working on something by yourself, for yourself. Loneliness is when that choice is taken away from you. It’s a collective grief and not the frustration that burns it away.

It’s something that lingered in me.

Relationships don’t ever exactly end. We always live in a relative proximity to the influences of our lives. What I’m seeing now is people pushing away from the false narratives of social media in order to reevaluate. It’s a type of wisdom that is earned upon years of reflection and it’s not something I had at that age. Some journeys will end with a totally different cast of people but the memory of those who started will always be there with you. For me, that was a group of friends who I don’t even know anymore. We were a bunch of art kids who were smoking cigarettes and eating Little Caesars at the lake. And here I was teaching a group of art kids who were smoking cigarettes and eating Little Caesars at the lake. There were maybe four or five people whom I wanted to call and most of them were out my life or dead. I wanted to live in that moment of before and after simultaneously.

What I had that these kids didn’t wasn’t anything special, it’s just experience. You will mourn every loss but you will also honor every kindness and blessing that your past brings you.

I wanted to celebrate the crossing of that bridge from student to teacher, fledgling to professional, becoming what I set out to, with those same people where I started. The irony is of course that I grew around the person I started out as. The core is unrecognizable to who and what it was. Those are his friends, that was his ending and now I am what comes after. Everything I make now, everyone I meet, there is a vacuum that draws us together.

I don’t stop moving or growing but I feel the weight sometimes and the heights of every achievement. What keeps me going is knowing the things that comes next. So do celebrate and push ahead.