lights other than my own

discovering new selves

Whenever people ask me how the move to New York has been, I always respond with whatever I’ve been thinking about most recently. It must sound like the ramblings of a madman: It is cold and beautiful, but I wish the radiator would stop screaming or The trains are attempting to drive me insane if it’s one of those days that the C train has let me down, or maybe a way-too-detailed description of the last person I met, how exciting it was to have met them at all. I think most of the time, they just want me to tell them that it’s been good or bad.

But living here doesn’t feel like living here yet. It still just feels like I’m on vacation, even as I spend hours in meetings and continue to do my job as usual. The novelty of everything around me feels so transformative and energizing that every day, every week, seems to last for months and years. How are these the same hours that I had before in California?

What did I lose to gain all of this, time stretched into eternity? In San Francisco, I was much more comfortable, I think. My desk chair was ergonomic, my monitor at the perfect height for my neck to be painless. Now, I take meetings from the edge of my bed with my laptop perched upon a chair. I no longer have a beautiful bathtub under a skylight, a place I would spend long hours curled up in. Even though my body doesn’t appreciate them, these changes don’t affect me much. However, I return to an empty apartment most nights instead of a loud house full of friends watching football. I meet new people constantly, but the people I tell about my day live nowhere close to me. These losses are harder to swallow.

But I’ve surrendered myself to change for a while. It’s inevitable, it will always happen, and I will always be changing. I hardly believe in the shape of myself, so convinced that I’m molded so wholly by my environment, friends, family. This is a strength, this is a weakness: the man isn’t overly swayed by big changes, but the man wonders what is his essence and what is just external influence. Maybe the better framing is that I am all versions of the same being, only revealed by the right people or set of conditions.

CS Lewis says it like this: “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.” This is true for friends and for every person, but there are also parts of the self that are revealed by everything — like a city, or the weather, or a bed frame that is too close to the ground.

There are selves that I’ve left behind in my friends who once surrounded me. I don’t know when I’ll see them again, but this scares me less than it did before. Even if the previous context is gone, we will see each other again, and we will bring out the parts of each other that only we can. I know this from experience — even as I’ve met many new people in my new city, I’ve reconnected to old friends at the same time, discovered how some things don’t change.

During my senior year of college, I would walk 15 minutes across campus to my friend Delaney’s apartment every week for a sacred ritual. We would drink tea in her apartment, talk about our weeks, our dating lives, chat with her roommates, laugh as freely as any two people could. It was simple but essential, a mundane highlight of my last year of school. But when I graduated, we lost touch a little, growing older and wiser on opposite ends of the country: her in New York, me in San Francisco.

And then I moved, and we live within walking distance again. Every Sunday, we grab coffee together, back to our ritual. Instead of her apartment, we visit a different coffee shop in the neighborhood each time, but the conversations feel the same. We laugh a little too loudly, get a few glares. We’ve resurrected our younger selves in this way — the parts of ourselves that we had forgotten, returned without missing a step.

Knowing how these selves can return is calming. My mind, less concerned with the loss, wonders about the new selves waiting to be met, through the strangers I will encounter, the eccentricities of the big city and my unfamiliarity with it. I hope I will meet people who will unlock the parts of me that are better. A part of me that fills all the empty notebooks in my room, a part of me that doesn’t get annoyed when I arrive early and everyone else is late, a part of me that doesn’t lose faith in myself every time there’s a minor inconvenience.

A part of me that seems so true and clear that it highlights the outline of my self until I can see where the world ends and I begin.

---

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Do Your Angels Start to Sing by Asi Kemera - cool album by a friend of a friend

• POEM - “Daylight Saving” by Grace Q. Song - Small and lost hour, you give everything / a new reason