i am a collection of dismantled almosts

postcard 26: on childhood dreams, former gifted kid disillusionment, and nostalgia as a souvenir shop

A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

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[This post gets cut off on email, so read it in the app or on your desktop <3]

prelude

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

I imagined them all thinking it was worth it. Telling me how much they loved me. All my life, when I thought of my future, that was what I pictured. Not a career. The things I thought would come with it. Happiness, love, safety. And that dream had been enough for a long time. What was school if not a chance to earn your worth? To prove, again and again, that you were measurably good. One more deal I struck with a disinterested universe: If I'm good enough, I'll be happy. I'll be loved. I'll be safe.

—Happy Place, Emily Henry

I grew up listening to my entire family telling me that I was a child prodigy.

According to my parents, at seven months old, I would crawl and bring my mom her glasses and hair tie every morning after watching her do so. By eleven months, I could point out every letter on the alphabet mat when I was asked. I was reading long classics by the time I was nine and every standardized reading test I took placed my level ‘out of bounds’, as in I quite literally didn’t fit on the scale. When I was eleven, I memorized 183 digits of pi in two days just because my math teacher thought I couldn’t.

All of this is not to brag about how much of a smart kid I was, but to explain the before and after in my life. It’s actually not that dramatic and thinking about it like that is perhaps incredibly juvenile. But the older I get, the more this lingers behind me like a sempiternal shadow. It feels like my entire life, I’ve just almost been measuring up and competing with this version of myself that I don’t remember being. Someone who I could have been if everything had gone my way.

I’ve been saying “almost” for as long as I’ve been conscious. I almost could have done this. I almost had this. I almost could have been this. And it’s been haunting me. Almost may seem like an abstract form of measurement, but measure it out to the inch, and you will find that it’s equivalent to the gap between never and reality.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

And what good is it to know how close you were to reality? In the most cynical paradigm of life, there is no “almost”, there is no spectrum. It’s always a binary never and reality. I am not an optimistic person, but I don’t think I’m a pessimistic person either. I know that all of those almosts in my life have amounted to something new, something maybe even better, something I could have never gotten if things had gone “right”. But in my least optimistic days, I convince myself that my life would be so much better if my original plan had become a reality.

I’ve always been a stickler for planning, maybe even to a fault. I plan my life down to the minute. I own three planners, the Apple Calendar I share with my friends, and a journal diary. I like the security and absoluteness of mapping out my life the exact way I want it to look like, and everything I want to do in it. I do love changes when they are good, but I love routines more. I’ve never really been a ‘go with the flow’ kind of person, no matter how much I wanted to be when I was younger. I think this used to bother me a lot, that I wasn’t “cool” or “chill”. But my hypothesis was that if I planned every inch of my life, it wouldn’t give any room for error. I’d get to have everything I wanted go my way.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Much of my growing up and getting older has been centered around letting go of this notion that there’s this alternate version of me somewhere out in this world, someone who is my exact replica but without anything bad that happened. Maybe I still hold onto this because I’m subconsciously convinced that every detour and curveball of my life has been an external circumstance, although I’m sure that a deeper self examination will reveal that is not true at all. Sometimes, a lot of my actions revolve around trying to prove that I’m still that very smart kid that people remember me being.

It is sort of laughable, in a way, because it just sounds so childish when it’s all typed out like that. Because why have I spent my entire life thinking that I hit the peak of my life at eleven when, in reality, I have barely just started to live? Why am I constantly thinking back to my childhood, things I know only because I was told, and picking out bits and pieces I want to keep just to compare myself to, like a dilapidated souvenir shop? In this metaphor, the shop and town have all started falling around me, a cloud of dystopian ruins, and I’m still there. Trying to fix it all, trying to rebuild it, trying to make it whole again.

I think I know deep inside. I know that my life, my personality now, has nothing to do with the fact that I was a gifted kid. Maybe I like labels and things being cut and dry, and there’s no such thing as a ‘gifted adult’. You’re just an adult.

Or maybe it’s because I was never truly treated like a child when I was younger—who treats you like a child when you’re two and speaking in full sentences? When it felt easier to talk to adults than to talk to people your age growing up? Retrospectively, I feel like the only person that knew I was a kid was me.

In my twenties, I am learning how to reconcile my childhood dreams and subsequent disillusionment with my current goals in life. Because externally, not much is different. I am going to law school next year to be a lawyer—something I knew I wanted since I was six. I am still reading, still writing in one form or another. All of the things I pursued seriously and competitively in my childhood and teen years—writing, painting, swimming, piano—have all manifested as hobbies in my adulthood. And I am more than content about that.

But I am also making sure that I am cognizant of the fact that I’m a different person, making sure I don’t spend my entire life mourning for someone I could have been (because doing too much of that, breathing in too much nostalgia is noxious). Memories are just that—nostalgia and fondness— and they should never equate to something more. They should never be prioritized in my life, so much so that it clouds my judgment of who I want to be in the future. I make sure to remind myself every now and then that I am still smart and driven and ambitious; that one way or another, I have never stopped pushing myself to be my best self.

A late discovery for me is that being the best version of myself does not necessarily just mean being academically or financially successful. I think I always placed a heavy emphasis on academic success growing up (and recently, financial, because a girl’s gotta eat) because those are quantifiable measures and instantly noticeable. Whenever I feel a sense of imposter syndrome, I can look at the 4.0 on my transcript and know that I did a good job; I can look at my bank account and know that I’m working hard. If there are numbers involved and I get the maximum amount of numbers possible, it means that I’m doing fine in life, right?

Those are the parameters for validation, for affirmation. This is a way, as

Emily Henry

writes in her book, to be measurably good. And perhaps it acts as a mirage, to the rest of the world and to me especially, that everything is perfect, everything is the way it was supposed to be. No almost. But thinking of success as a quantifiable measure, whether in grades or the number of zeros on a paycheck, is incredibly myopic and a disservice to the word itself.

About Time (2013)

My parents have always told me that being happy was more important than being smart, being successful—being happy is the same as being successful, they’d tell me. I didn’t quite understand what they meant until this past year. Of course, academic and financial success are still such an important part of my life. I will continue to work hard at the caliber at which I have been doing so because I owe it to myself, and because I need to pay my bills.

But I have also been placing a much heavier emphasis on other outlets to gauge my happiness. Trying to better understand myself over the last few years has allowed me to be measurably good in other ways. And this has helped me to overcome the bouts of what-ifs and almosts because this is the happiest I’ve been about my life, externally. I get to live with my parents and sister for a bit, which is something I hadn’t done since I was fourteen. My close friends are all the most wonderful people. I get to talk and write about the things I love and get financially supported from it along the way. I have an incredible wealth of people and information around me, and that might be even better than the disillusionment I’ve been trying to reverse all my life.

Maybe I would have been happier if every single thing had gone to plan in my life. And maybe I’d be miserable. The point is, I’ll never know what it would have been like because that’s not my life, it’s someone else’s. Some other version of me. So I try to treat nostalgia the way it should be treated. Through looking at old pictures, seeing how much I’ve changed, and appreciating that simple fact.

And at the end of the day, there’s nothing more useless and futile than grieving over a hypothetical, a could-have-been.

interlude i: what i read this week

I finally updated my Goodreads! You can see all the books I read in 2024 here. I’ll start doing some mini reviews (maybe in quarters, so Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec) on Substack, because I’ve just been writing down my thoughts in my physical reading journal instead of typing them up on Goodreads this year.

I read two books this week: Woolsgathering by Patti Smith and Crudo by Olivia Laing. I love all of Patti Smith’s books and think that her writing is phenomenal, but this one fell a bit short for me. Maybe it was the length? I still love her longer memoirs (Just Kids is one of my favorite memoirs of all time). I really didn’t like Crudo, which I think is Laing’s first venture into fiction. I really like her nonfiction, especially The Lonely City, so disliking Crudo was a bit of a disappointment. I think her strength is in nonfiction, so I’m going to read more of that instead.

Here are ten articles & essays I read this week:

1. Make It Awkward! by Alexander Plakias

   Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script.

2. Ways of Seeing by Jon Berger

   (This is a book; I reread chapter 1) Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

3. The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in September by Emily Temple

   Lithub’s literary film & television show recommendations.

4. Are You Normal Or Are You The Eldest Daughter? by Faith Zapata

   “Reflections on how being the eldest daughter has affected my romantic life and how I knew it was time to leave an unhealthy relationship.”

5. Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog by Aaron Schuster

   Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations.

6. Ripping Ivy by Mary Childs

   “When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much.”

7. Later by James Surowiecki

   Procrastination and the limits of rational thinking.

8. The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart by Eva Holland

   Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their cabin first. Eva Holland investigates the mysteries and meaning of an adventurous couple who charted their own way out.

9. On the Endless Parade of Literary Dead Girls by Zefyr Lisowski

   "The dead girls are speaking everywhere"

10. The Challenges of Animal Translation by Philip Ball

    Artificial intelligence may help us decode animalese. But how much will we really be able to understand?

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I watched two movies this week: The Devil Wears Prada (rewatch) and Beginners. The Devil Wears Prada is one of my favorite movie (and my mom’s!), and I love watching it every fall because of the title sequence. I love Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt (and Stanley Tucci), so it’s always such a fun time. I also loved Beginners, which was just so beautiful. My favorite genre of movies is anything having to do with humans being humans, and this was just it.

I am going to update my Letterboxd this week, so here it is if you want to follow me!

Here are the video essays I watched this week: this video on Clara Bow, this video on Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, and this video on the Twilight Zone.

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postlude

Autumn by Helmer Osslund (1907)

things i love: reading essays on substack, taking morning walks in the slightly cooler air, kilian’s angels’ share perfume, fall scented candles, my ralph lauren bear mug