Illusory Cheddar

Flying over the Missoula valley, its golden belly punctured by the frosted Bitterroot mountains, a hum of familiarity rose up within me. After over 30 hours of jumping from airport to airport, paroosing the same magazine stalls and munching the same bland breakfast burritos—from Mumbai to Newark to Denver to Montucky— I was officially home.

            Upon exiting the plane, I was enveloped with that ever-familiar brisk mountain air. It filled my lungs harshly, as if the atmosphere could foreshadow the social adjustment to come. I waiting at baggage claim, in Chacos with mehndied toes and a tribal throw from the Nilgiris bundled across my shoulders, praying that my backpack caught all of its legs from the journey. Pack and mangled goat-leather carry-on in hand, I slowly exited the airport, half-expecting my girlfriends to run up to me, shrieking and giddy, champagne in hand. Instead I watched a young family greet their father, a rogue college student hail a cab, and an elderly couple cart suitcases towards their Subaru. I shivered and passed back through the automatic doors, finding a seat inside next to a Big Horn Sheep, fresh from taxidermy. 

            I will admit, it was an anti-climactic arrival home. I patiently waited, observing my surroundings with foreign eyes, overwhelmed with the recurring thought, “this is it. I am home. India is over.” It didn’t stick; it felt like a dream. I am sure most people can attest to this— the feeling of emptiness after you pour yourself into a grand plan, quiet and mounting as falling snow. For months prior to my journey, all that was on my mind was graduation and India. Quite frankly, given the tasks at hand that accompany graduating college a year early, and traveling around to a developing country for 6 months, if I did plan beyond that, I wouldn’t have made it. Self-imposed myopia was my saving grace.

I have been conditioned my whole life to plan, plan, plan. Because whatever cultural script running in our young brains tells us that to have a plan is to have success. We should always be yearning for that higher branch, the better bite, the most impressive lens. Like ropes these expectations constrict themselves around our psyche— from the moment we understand the concept of the self, we are already envisioning how we can morph it to fit into societal ideas of ‘the good.’

As kids, we devour any and every cultural message we can get our hands on, internalizing Manichean representations of the world: good and evil, fat and skinny, liberal and conservative, smart and dumb, right and wrong. In turn, we start to categorize ourselves in relation to this ‘Hollywood’ milieu; the sad thing is that our culture grossly promotes unachievable ideals, which children and young adults will never be able to live up to. And so an entire generation checks themselves into the box that says, ‘I will never be enough.’

            And so we make plans, we set goals, we bite, bite, bite for that illusory cheddar, programming ourselves out of today in search of a glamorous tomorrow. Perhaps we don’t bite our nails; we run five miles at 6am every day; we don’t have that 4^th gin and tonic and have sloppy sex with a stranger; we drive an Audi and decline cheese products with ease. Whatever your platter of insecurities, in this vision of tomorrow you are a better, more desirable person—a worthy person.

            I believe this doctrine of insufficiency to be the nascence of quotidian neurosis in my country. In India, I had to lie to rest this optimal version of ‘Kendall’ and rewire my brain to be content with and also appreciate my present. In surrendering, it was as if two decades of pressure released from my mental shoulders. I became more loving and patient with myself and with others. I recognized the blessing and opportunity in every encounter, however frustrating and menial. Most of all, I learned to listen to myself—to conjure the silence in my soul and open the space for self-exploration and growth.

            “Kenny Strauts!” Katie yelled from her dilapidated red sedan, dubbed ‘Diane.’ Jess jumped out of the passenger seat with pastel balloons as I hobbled with baggage across the street to meet them. We embraced with the ease of friends who’ve abandoned disclaimers in the wake of college drinking antics and went straight to shooting the shit.   

            “So, Jesus Christ girl,” Katie remarked as she manually rolled down her window and lit a cigarette, “you’re back.”

            “I know,” I smirked and nodded, “it’s fuckin nuts.”

            And that is the feeling I had all evening as we shared stories over box-chardonnay and bowls, lamenting over how much we missed each other. I retraced my steps, my belongings—where I left my life 6 months ago, neatly packed in soccer bags and hat boxes. I ceremoniously donned a familiar pair of tights with a statement necklace and hopped on the bus downtown. It was as if I had never left.

            We strolled into our usual watering hole, sat down at our usual table, and ordered our usual drinks. I made a toast to reuniting with my two favorite ladies; they repeatedly welcomed me back. I was truly grateful to be in their presence again. It is funny, how you long for something while you are alone and abroad. At times, there was nothing I wanted more than to just spit-silly-profane-nonsense with these girls over whiskey drinks in a crowded bar—where we pretend the door to the smoking lounge is a veritable catwalk fit for judging other ladies’ attire and/or possible men to bone.

They bear witness to my 20s-hot-mess state and ask no questions. This support network, however flawed and filled with too many substances, is what I craved when I was at my depths in India. Because it is the ultimate comfort— to be out with your friends who will have your back no matter what ill-thought-out rabbit hole you choose to plunge down. So this is was the solidarity I envisioned coming home to.

            “Kendall, you’ve really gotta stop fucking around,” Katie interrupted my welling nostalgia as she clicked a selfie whilst sipping a cucumber marg, “and get snap-chat already.”

            I rolled my eyes in the stench of déjà vu and irony. We had done this merry-go-round many times— her enthusiasm always met with my adamancy to never join another social media cult. My relationship to the twittersphere is the usual love-hate-mesmerized-obsession as my 20-something contemporaries.

I feel like it is an essential part of operating in society in this day and age, while at the same time I lament its alluring velvet vortex—where responding to an email can turn into ‘gypsy-blog-envy’ spirals or morally condemning every female which shows up on your ex’s ‘new friend’ FB scroll. Before I left for India, I had a (in the words of my father) ‘come to Jesus’ moment in which I concluded that Facebook is nothing but a source of negative energy and therefore, vehemently deleted it (Malbec in hand).

            It literally felt like mental shackles had been lifted from my brain; I had unplugged from the matrix. Creating that space made me realize what a toxic crutch facebook is for me—that I have to ‘upkeep’ this Internet version of myself. And in doing so, either radically boost my self-esteem via ‘likes’ or condemn my being due to a wrongly filtered photo without a ‘skinny arm’ pose. I am recognizing ever more how social media fragments my existence and my understanding of myself in the world.  

Back at the ever-lively Tamarac Brewing Company, I was glowing, thankful to be in a setting where I could merely blend in, the music, the language, the clothing, the whole vibe—I was certainly no longer an outsider. But in the strangest sense, I felt like a new anthropologist on assignment. I was observing my surroundings with keen eyes, highlighting cultural nuances with my Indian programmed psyche. Overwhelmed with the social dynamics of a place where most individuals present were born with every luxury, it was hard to reconcile the fact that two, so completely different social biomes could exist on the same planet. And I checked my watch, imagining what my dear friends Devi, or Rishi, or Selma were doing at this very moment and how they would react to this alien realm of privilege and facade.

It was at that moment, in my spliced cultural state, that I realized how tuned out my companions were. After the initial cheers and ‘OMG, I miiiisssed you!’s, everyone unlocked their iphones and plugged into the matrix with feverish intensity, as if every second they were missing an opportunity to document a faux pas of extraordinary proportion.

No one was present at the table; they were plugged in. My mind wandered to bonding with my Indian girlfriends, whom were all ears and eyes and handholding when we were together. When I sat silently at a train stop waiting for the ‘Loco to Chennai Central,’ I did just that—sat silently and waiting. I didn’t fill the space with music, or photo streams, or digital scrabble.

That night at the Tamarac felt anything but genuine compared to my interactions with friends in a (developing, mind you) country unpolluted by selfies and statuses and check-ins’s— Oh My! I can’t help but wonder what this constant buzz, this unremitting influx of advertising, relationship critiquing, and societal messaging is doing for our psyche. What kind of illusory connectivity are these ‘networks’ building? Was I witnessing the truth of Western solidarity in friendships—expressed through snapchats, and FB likes, and tags instead of face-to-face investment?

After a month or so in India, I reactivated my Facebook, obviously to spy on my friends and family whom I missed so much. But there, it wasn’t so much of a problem because there were a limited number of times when I had access to internet or Wi-Fi. When I could, I scrolled, typed, liked, tweeted, grammed to my heart’s desires, but then I would leave the internet café and be done with it. My realm of real-life and social media were kept separate, with the virtual world encompassing a miniscule part of my day-to-day thought patterns and interactions. This was manageable for me, and I enjoyed it.

The difference of being back here is the extent of connectivity. Literally everywhere you go, you can be plugged in. With Wi-Fi practically being a rudiment to any thriving public (and private) space, why wouldn’t you want the latest updates? It seems the line between real and simulated social interaction is blurred immensely; many of my generation are so consumed with their online avatars that they literally end up viewing their lives through the filters on their instagrams instead of experiencing some truly awesome memories in their raw, coherent state.

It is clear that a new age has dawned with a whole generation growing up on iphones and macbooks. I am extremely curious as to how psychological research is responding to such societal changes. Whether you call it a smartphone addiction, social media angst, FOMO (fear of missing out), mobophobia, the like thereof—we have to admit there is something seriously going on. Allow me to spit off some stats.

According to Psychology Today, on average Americans check their smartphones for messages 150 times a day—that’s about once every six and a half minutes. Based on Digital Insights data, Facebook has 1.15 billion registered users— mind you that is over 1/7^th the population on the entire planet— with 23% of that 1.15 billion who check their account at least 5 times per day.

Daniel Sarewitz, in an op-ed from The Oregonian, gives some riveting opinions,

“So what if your attention span has been fragmented into nanoseconds, if you measure your social life by Facebook friends, your professional worth by Google hits, and the worst words you can imagine are “airplane mode”? We are all one-marshmallow OCD narcissists, granted by our devices the magic of comprehensive instant gratification, of self-reinforcing worldviews, of control over the daily minutia of our fates and fortunes. To not be irrevocably addicted to our smartphones would be senseless.”

Okay so we admit it, we are all logged in all the time. Why—because we can! But how does this affect us psychologically? A 2012 study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, for example, found that the longer people spent on Facebook each week, the more they agreed that everyone else was happier and had better lives. Clinical Psychologist Craig Malkin described similar observations in an interview with NPR, commenting that the incessant consumption of projected and idealized images from social media results in rampant envy, social distress, hinders self-understanding and forecloses real-life intimacy.

It is well known that social media provides us with is a false sense of community. Even Abraham Maslow included ‘belongingness’ in his (ever-holy) hierarchy of needs, among the instinct for food, shelter, and self-actualization. Pre-google-circles, we satisfied this need through kin-networks—close friends and family in our immediate existence whom we would get personal acceptance feedback from in everyday life. The Internet has expanded this realm of feedback to infinite bounds, such that our brain feels the need to retain acceptance in the same style of Hollywood stars and highschool classmates who you never liked but ‘made it big.’ If you don’t have their sprawl of following and attention splattered across your feed, the message is, once again, ‘you are worthless.’

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “comparison is the thief of joy.” I couldn’t agree more that what is most damaging about social media is in fact its very purpose: to peek in on others’ lives. While the intention may be ‘staying in touch,’ one can’t help but internalize those images of perfection or perhaps a lack of ‘following’, even if underneath we know that no one is unblemished and airwave fanbases are superficial. 

Elliot Panek, of the Universit of Michigan, says of Facebook, "It's about curating your own image, how you are seen, and also checking on how others respond to this image. Middle-aged adults usually have already formed their social selves,” while the y-generation looks to this media for answers about ‘who we’re supposed to be.’ Perhaps my generation is more vulnerable to the dark side of social media, seeing as we are not fully formed humans.

Carl Rogers is one of my favorite psychologists—a humanist who believed that a fully functioning being had to have a coherent sense of self. He believed that all suffering and neurosis was a result of the gap between our actual selves, flaws and all, and the ‘self’ we wish we were, our perceived self. The key to content and fulfillment in life, according to Rogers, is addressing the whole landscape— thorns and all— and showering what you encounter with radical self-acceptance.

Personally, I have found this technique of, what I call, ‘loving your uglies,’ to be extremely transformative. But the catch here, is that you need the gift of age and hindsight to fully explore the dimensions of these multiple self-concepts we brew up. I fear that social media engenders the creation of selves beyond Mr. Roger’s dichotomy, which is tough enough to navigate alone.

Back to Panek’s comments: "social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users,” ever-widening the gap between the real and perceived self. Malkin also argued that young individuals who get into the habit of always ‘touching-up’ their image, hiding their flaws, may develop a reticence towards intimate relationships with others and themselves. If we are constantly refraining from acknowledging our vulnerabilities, our humanness, how can we ever grow into a flourishing, whole human?

I was very quiet the first few weeks home. My internal dialogue-cogs were incessantly grinding as I observed those around me— the way they approached life, problems, desires, needs. I have been wrestling with multiple selves for a long time. During my self-exploration in India, there were delicate layers of my Americanness that I shed, which I wasn’t made aware of until I came home and had the urge to put those covers on again. So with each day I confront engrained neurosis, at times feeling like a conditioned rat pulling the lever in response to the pressures of society. And so it is my task to unburden each reflex through that every-god-damn-day self-awareness I always talk about. Starting with monitoring (and stopping) my interaction with the social media realm.

As of now, the jury is still out on whether or not my reunion with my beloved Mac is a blessing or a curse for my spiritual wellbeing. The most I can do is acknowledge this presence and, as with everything, it will be enmeshed in my lifelong sojourn to find that alluring notion of balance.

One of my favorite quotes from Mr. Emerson goes something like this: ne te quaesiveris extra—translation— do not seek yourself outside yourself. When I look to others for approval, or for comparison on how I should be living, I will only recreate an inauthentic vision of what my life ‘should’ be instead of simply glorifying what it ‘is.’ 

Photo-cred--Dust lookbook

                      

Minor Cause

 

Minor Cause from rainbowstraut on 8tracks Radio.

A reflection of the melange in nature's moods during this season between freeze & fall.

Shrinking Women-- Lily Myers

 A fellow female friend who struggles with the classic melange of body-image-food-guilt-shitshow shared this slam poem with me; I think it is raw and empowering.

Be Ourselves

I must first say, however American and idiosyncratic this sounds, that it feels amazing to be back on my laptop, my generation's source of identity--where we filter the abstract influx of media messaging with our tabs and bookmark bars. That said, I am once again excited to share a post from one of my favorite sites, Brain Pickings, talking about 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson's advice on living an authentic life and basically, not giving a fuck. Enjoy.

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. 

-----Hunter S. Thompson

A Reflection:

            Why is it that us creative types feel so much more inspired when we are in the midst of turmoil or ‘newness’? Coming home I am faced with ‘the OTHER EYE’ and all its buzzing questions grounded in our societies’ idea that plans equal wellbeing.

The only hard part is that I spent all of my time in India denying plan making, surrendering to the wave of life before me—and it worked. So the part of me that found peace in not knowing and simply living is being marched to the guillotine by those American scripts, “What will you do next? What is your plan? School or work or boyfriends or babies?”

 I feel like this urge to ‘have our shit together,’ makes people negate the space for confusion and the unknown in our lives. No wonder artists drink. I welcome this space as a transition, but also as a progression. I believe that unknown is powerful, surrendering to it opens yourself up to the possibilities of unexpected beauties. While in India this perspective was respected by my fellow comrades and travelers, in America people just think I am smoking too much weed.

            Before I got on the plane from Mumbai, a friend of mine quelled my worries, “Kendall, you are going home, there should be nothing scary about it. Everyone has to at some point, its good for the soul. If you don’t go home, you’d be running away from how you’ve changed.”

            And I realized, without going home, the baseline of living, how else would I be able to measure and appreciate the growth?

            Amidst all of this readjustment, I can’t help but wonder, ‘are we so preoccupied with ‘who’ we will become that we forget to BE OURSELVES?’