Trying Too Hard

It’s been a year and three months now in LA–enough time that it’s supposed to be close to feeling like home.

And it is. For the most part. Sometimes more than others.

One of those essential things for making a home in foreign–one of the things I have biggest problems with–is putting yourself (your real self, not the “oh isn’t that interesting, fake smile” self) out there.

Trying.

In my head:

Trying = Trying Too Hard

Trying Too Hard = Fate Worse Than Death

It’s like exposing your soul to the world, letting them know that you are actively and publicly trying to obtain something.

My equilibrium doh deal up in that kinna ting.

I’ll just be a wallflower and stick in my corner and wait for people to approach me, thankyouverymuch.

Right after Oscar Wao I read Prep by first-time novelist Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s about this young teen from a middle-class family in Indiana who gets accepted on scholarship to a ritzy boarding school in the North-east. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, but is so in awe of this new prep school life of wealth and glamour (to her) that even though she’s miserable, she’s exhilarated just to be there. Any time another student makes an attempt to bring her into the fold, she screws it up, because she’s made herself believe that she’s too different to ever really fit in. It kind of got to me how much I related to a 14-year-old girl…

This particular passage was like a chapter out of my own book:

This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything. or worse, going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault. When I graduated from college, my father told me he was concerned that I didn’t express enough enthusiasm in job interviews, and the comment shocked me. Enthusiasm was a thing you were supposed to show? But wasn’t it a little disgusting, didn’t it seem the same as greed and neediness?

It’s my exact first reaction to actively putting yourself out there.

It’s vulgar. Base.

And self-defeatist…

Passion

I act stand-offish and I’m not the most socially ept, but what I like, I love (books, Broadway, dancing) and what I dislike, I loathe (Sundays, dusk, less than 90 degree angles). And when I’m passionate about something, I can wax on for hours.

But living in foreign, being around people who you don’t think “get” you is tough. And you don’t know… you don’t know if even after you explain yourself (and who can really explain themselves) that they’ll understand you any better. You don’t know if they’ll understand that everything that is normal to them is foreign to you. That you’re different from them and you want them to understand and accept that but not think of you as different in a bad way. Because you’re really not thaaat different. And it’s a bunch of circular, overlapping arguments that you use to torment yourself and in the end it’s just easier not to give anything a chance to and to pretend and to be generic and to just sit there and smile and nod.

See but that’s what makes LA so great.

The City of Dreams

A random after-hours conversation a few weeks ago with the bf and a couple of friends strayed to passions: Having a job versus doing your life’s work and fulfilling your dreams. Most of the people he knew in LA, the friend said, are doing just that.

Moving on their passion, working towards bigger and greater things than paychecks and 401Ks.

And he was kind of right.

Even for the people like me who are still figuring it out, we’re engaged, trying out different things, trying to keep up that forward motion.

Well, work-wise at least.

And none of these people have any qualms about putting it out there.

This is my passion. This is what I’m working towards. This is my dream and it’s a big part of who I am. Take it or leave it.

What I see in LA is that it’s so much easier here to dream. To go for it. To put your all into it.

And it’s because everybody else is doing it.

You know, start your vegan food service, become a director, build your dreamhouse.

It’s all good and it’s all attainable.

In Miami, it’s more like:

What is he thinking? That’s never going to happen. PIPE DREAM.

Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s all just in my head but I swear I never saw the world of opportunity in front of me until I moved to LA.

Passion begets passion. Dreams beget dreams.

Between reading Prep and being disgusted with myself for not having progressed past a self-defeatist teenage mentality and a random conversation about doing what you love I feel like I made a bit of a breakthrough.

Stickin in a corner… it’s a really easy, safe way to be when living in foreign feels too overwhelming.

But safe doesn’t get you anything and easy is no accomplishment.

And I’m a goal junkie.

Done.