everything is romantic…right?
CHARLI XCX: I’m trying to shut off my brain. I’m thinking ‘bout work all the time.
CAROLINE POLACHEK: It’s like you’re living the dream, but you’re not living your life.
CHARLI XCX: …Am I in a slump? Am I playing back time? Did I lose my perspective? Everything’s still romantic…right?
Everything is romantic, isn’t it? Last year I spent most of my weekends in the woods, on the coastline, walking downtown streets. I think I became a serial monogamist. I idealize the people I love and turn them into sad romantic figures in my poems and stories. It’s not fair to anyone to be so thoroughly idealized. I write about everyone I have ever loved, but I never showed it to any love until last year. When I did, I never got the reaction I wanted, but I really don’t know what kind of reaction I wanted anyway. If someone wrote a love poem about me one month into knowing me, I’d be kinda freaked out.
Point Lobos in Carmel, California is the most beautiful place in the world. Spring break of last year, on a sunny Monday in March, I hiked the coastline alone. I was falling in love with someone much older. I still had service out there and I listened to Radiohead while texting the man who would soon become my boyfriend. In the beginning we mostly just talked about music. Early on he asked me, “Were you looking for someone else who is really into music?”
I wasn’t really looking for anything. I told him that and we ended up together anyway.
But like I’ve written on this blog already, I have a nasty habit of jumping from person to person. It’s never healthy but it’s always such a whirlwind that I don’t have time in between to dwell on past connections or get over any of the baggage. For a long time, I was alone. For a long time, I had woes and sorrows galore and could only imagine that I would just end up hurting a potential partner.
When I moved to Monterey County in 2020, I embarked on an era of healing. I did a comprehensive dialectical behavior therapy program and as the days and months went by, I let go of the heavy grief caused by my father’s passing that same year. For a while I had a job that I hated, but then I found a job that I loved. I moved from the rural suburbs of south Monterey County to the peninsula proper, where I roomed with five undergraduate students who were attending Cal State Monterey Bay. I felt drunk on independence and sober living, no longer drunk on late night frat and co-op and roommate parties.
The Central Coast of California has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. It was impossible not to love my life when I could see the bright blue ocean on my drive to work every day. And every weekend, I could retreat into the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the coastline of Big Sur. For a while there, I even had someone else with whom to do all of this.
I don’t know if I have ever had a real dream job until I found school counseling. I hated being a teacher, and if I could make enough money writing novels, I guess I would just be a novelist, but it’s like of one my creative writing professors said — you need to live life in order to be able to write about life. I’m not sure I would have much to write about if I didn’t also have a career from which to draw inspiration.
I moved to the South Bay Area for a lucrative job. No, I’m not in tech. I’m a middle school counselor and sometimes it feels like all I really have here is my job. It’s a job that I wanted for so long, and I worked so hard to get the credentials to do it, but lately I’ve just been thinking that there has to be more to life than work. It doesn’t help that most of my friends are long-distance. Even the medium-distance friends are not so easy to see regularly, especially on weekdays with Bay Area traffic. Phone calls and text messages never really feel like enough.
I’ve also been thinking that there has to be more to life than romantic connections. I think I became a serial monogamist, or at the very least a serial yearner, because I have literally no other vices besides emotional intimacy. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke (any type of anything), I don’t drink caffeine after 12 pm (this is a recent development and I’m sleeping so much better), I don’t really do anything reckless at all except fall in love so wholly and dramatically with people who can’t give as much as I can.
Lately it has also been difficult to deal with the fact that publishing is one giant waiting game. When I was writing tons of short stories two years ago, I sent hundreds of submissions and was always hearing back about decisions, whether it was a rejection or, often enough to boost my ego tons, an acceptance.
Nowadays I’m still taking writing seriously, and it does help and feel therapeutic to throw myself into the process of writing fiction, but novel writing means delayed gratification. I started querying the final draft of my second young adult horror novel (we don’t talk about the first one, it has too many Lana Del Rey references) and waiting to hear back about decisions from agents is lowkey agonizing.
I think I underestimated how lonely I would be because I moved to a new city, an entirely new geographical region where I don’t really know anyone aside from coworkers, all on my own. Living alone has more pros than cons, but it still gets lonely. There’s only so much time I can spend sitting on my couch watching Catfish and getting angry that the people who go on that show are so stupid. I always think that it could never be me, but I’m pretty stupid when it comes to love even if I’ve never been catfished, so who knows?
But everything is still romantic…right? I can listen to my sad breakup songs — “Apartment Song” by Jesse Detor is on repeat right now, check it out, it’s like she knows my exact current situation — and then immediately play “Diet Pepsi” by Addison Rae and “Girl, so confusing” by Charli XCX. I faked Brat Summer all June and July, but summer is over. It’s Sad Girl Fall now and I’ll wake up tomorrow, and it will be a new day. I can still hide in the woods and roam coastlines if I want to. Wake up tomorrow, start anew. Then again the next day, and over and over.
