Wonderful piece. It's something a lot of people I know experience as they get older, too. Having kids is one way you find a way back into your actual life instead of your head. I did philosophy grad school in my 20s, and felt like I was also chasing something. I might have called it Truth at the time, or critical consciousness, or awareness, or authenticity, and it seemed like it had to be opposed to everything that "normal" did. Because if a lot of people do something, it has to be conventional and uninteresting.
But I realized I was living in the shadow of an idea of life. I was quite deliberately acting and thinking in a way that anything I actually did couldn't be "real" because it was achievable, available, "normal." It was a hopeless situation, and in my case it led to a lot of mental health problems.
When I got married and had kids, though, I came back to myself. I lived within my own life out of necessity rather than being disengaged and observing it from the outside. And what I really didn't expect was that whatever kind of "liberation" I'd been looking for came from being enmeshed in my own life. It was the opposite of what I'd thought I was looking for. And it was healing, in all the ways you so wonderfully express here.
Now... be aware: life is never "solved." There will be next steps. You'll find different ways back to that edge-lord drive when your kids get older and don't need you quite so much. The trick is finding a way to keep changing without feeling like you've lost something again. Except that it is losing something, but in a good, important way. That's the even deeper lesson I took from that big change. It's not that I had been living the "wrong" way and my kids showed me the "right" way. I became more aware of how to be recognize how what I thought I wanted actually made me live. And I still love philosophy (and horror and weird fiction and edge-lordiness). But I have a different relationship to it all, and it only works for me when it's livable, when it doesn't completely separate me from myself in some tragic emptiness, which of course can only end in one way.
In other words, enjoy this experience of normal. It's a great place to rest. But you'll probably find that rather than walling yourself off in it, you just want to keep it in your arsenal as something to return to when necessary. You don't have to live in one mindset alone. I found that I needed both, even and especially when they seemed most contradictory.
(Oh, and thanks for Mishima! I didn't know that piece. Now I'm in love.)
Wonderful piece. It's something a lot of people I know experience as they get older, too. Having kids is one way you find a way back into your actual life instead of your head. I did philosophy grad school in my 20s, and felt like I was also chasing something. I might have called it Truth at the time, or critical consciousness, or awareness, or authenticity, and it seemed like it had to be opposed to everything that "normal" did. Because if a lot of people do something, it has to be conventional and uninteresting.
But I realized I was living in the shadow of an idea of life. I was quite deliberately acting and thinking in a way that anything I actually did couldn't be "real" because it was achievable, available, "normal." It was a hopeless situation, and in my case it led to a lot of mental health problems.
When I got married and had kids, though, I came back to myself. I lived within my own life out of necessity rather than being disengaged and observing it from the outside. And what I really didn't expect was that whatever kind of "liberation" I'd been looking for came from being enmeshed in my own life. It was the opposite of what I'd thought I was looking for. And it was healing, in all the ways you so wonderfully express here.
Now... be aware: life is never "solved." There will be next steps. You'll find different ways back to that edge-lord drive when your kids get older and don't need you quite so much. The trick is finding a way to keep changing without feeling like you've lost something again. Except that it is losing something, but in a good, important way. That's the even deeper lesson I took from that big change. It's not that I had been living the "wrong" way and my kids showed me the "right" way. I became more aware of how to be recognize how what I thought I wanted actually made me live. And I still love philosophy (and horror and weird fiction and edge-lordiness). But I have a different relationship to it all, and it only works for me when it's livable, when it doesn't completely separate me from myself in some tragic emptiness, which of course can only end in one way.
In other words, enjoy this experience of normal. It's a great place to rest. But you'll probably find that rather than walling yourself off in it, you just want to keep it in your arsenal as something to return to when necessary. You don't have to live in one mindset alone. I found that I needed both, even and especially when they seemed most contradictory.
(Oh, and thanks for Mishima! I didn't know that piece. Now I'm in love.)
Excellent read