Inhabiting
A 30-year old woman's mind
What do you want? What do I want? Do you want more? Do you want less?
These are questions I have been asking myself. Not directly, but indirectly. Sometimes in a passive aggressive way.
Like, really? Are you still doing that? Do you want to do finance all your life?
A career you did not really choose. But it chose you, and it taught you. Numbers, discipline, above all being clear as day. And you are on the cool side… helping companies, talking to founders. That is cool, yeah.
But what about the voice?
What voice?
That little flutter in your heart.
But everything is so new.
This city. The absence of a desk that expects me. The strange freedom of a Tuesday afternoon. I am not sure I know how to inhabit it yet. I close the laptop and feel guilty. I open it and feel like I am giving up.
There is no winning.
I started my own thing, which I am not going to lie, feels like standing at the edge of something vast … but mine.
I face my fears constantly. So I have looked for things that stabilize me. Little rituals: lighting a candle (Figuier by Diptyque), buying healing crystals, selling my clothes, reading, cooking (even though I need to get out of my egg, tuna, and burger rotation). Music on the disc player. I move my body but exhaust my mind.
I need to see beauty and feel beauty to be grounded. So I went to see the Schiaparelli exhibit. I stood in front of the glass and I cried. I wanted to be one of the women who wore these things. I wanted to feel the fabric against my skin. Not to have it, to be inside it. Aesthetics are a way of life. I am tired of hearing people say “oh that is so aesthetic.” Is it? Really? Was there discernment involved, thinking, context, a creative pursuit?
To be “aesthetic” you need to understand your core. What you are looking for, what you want. If you do not know what you want, if you do not exercise your discernment then I am sorry to break to you, your aesthetics are merely following the crowd. It is owning and not inhabiting.
I put a record on. For the first time in a long time, I am not asking what I want. I think I know.
And I will tell you about it in the next pieces.
Do you want that?
