Summer is here and the woods are alive.
I made an impromptu trip back to Rochester this weekend, one final exhale before summer submersion, and I rifled through old journals as I often do, thinking and dreaming and remembering a past me. I found a bucket list I’d made in 2012 with items such as, visit the temperate rain forests in Washington, get something published, and go skydiving. Of the eleven things listed, seven of them I’ve already done (I’m coming for you, Alaska). It is a strange and lovely feeling to be the person you always wanted to be, to see mile markers so clearly staked behind you in the rear-view mirror.
On Twitter Esmé Weijun Wang posed the question: what song, if you were driving at night down a dark & quiet road, would immediately transport you back to an adolescent Mood should it come on the car stereo. I scrolled through the thread, curious to see what songs were listed, while simultaneously thinking of my own haunted melodies.
Smashing Pumpkins, Simon and Garfunkel, Alanis Morissette, the songs were ripe with memory. And then there was this:
…closure is a lie, we never get over, we just get on, and we are all of us inside every age we’ve ever been.
That right there. When you find a line, a word, that encapsulates everything you are feeling but didn’t know how to describe. Sometimes I think art is the only thing that can lift us up from ruin. Art, connection, I don’t know the difference.
I played around with watercolors the other night before I got tired of my own ineptitude and switched to writing in cursive with my new fountain pen (which is one of the most soothing, aesthetically pleasing feelings ever). I am bad at visual art. I am bad at a lot of things. I am bad at knots, and making fires with wet wood, and reversing into parking spaces with a trailer attached. Working in the outdoors has alerted me to all the things I am subpar at.
Which is an interesting feeling because I thrived in academia. I am good at time management, and writing, and test-taking. I am a traditionally smart person.
When I reiterated that I was bad at knots to a coworker, she said that I was being too negative about my own abilities. And I see the advantages to phrasing it “knots are something I can improve upon.” But saying I’m bad at knots is being honest, and I think society has created the expectation that being bad at something is a negative connotation, which I’m tired of believing. Being bad at something means you have room to improve, more to learn. And isn’t that a gift? To learn more, to see yourself grow by an observable metric?
I have a couple outdoor trips this summer that are stretching my confidence thin. And that’s good. Instead of feeling overwhelmed or nervous, I am excited to improve my skills. I dreaded lifeguarding because I hate holding my breath underwater and look who’s a goddamn lifeguard? (Please don’t suffer a spinal injury in deep water.)
It’ll be a good summer. I am excited to be away from the internet, to look forward instead of backward, to make new bucket lists, to write more and share less, to be outside, to be physically engaged, to be away from humanity for a bit, to feel power within my own body and my own mind.
I hope you have a good summer, too. I hope you do things that you are bad at because you are bad at them. I hope you get outside. I hope you are easy on your 19-year-old self in memory and that those songs haunt you less. I hope you do things that a younger you would be proud of. I hope you read books and create art and are brave enough to be vulnerable with another living soul. I hope there’s at least one day that feels like magic.
Happy summer, friends. See you on the otherside.
People in Parks 