Because after the grant goes in, she goes to a magical town in the mountains where church bells ring all day, where twilight catches the painted walls and bricks and turns them soft and mysterious, where locals in feathered costumes dance down the cobblestone streets, where the sunset tastes like mezcal and jicama tacos.
It’s relieving to think I don’t have to care about everything. That I, Erin, don’t have to have an opinion and honestly it won’t really matter. I don’t care enough to be informed about everything, meaning I’m not informed enough to have an opinion, meaning I’m not opinionated enough to express my views to anyone.
A story for new years if you’re not quite feeling reborn.
If all I’m doing is fighting my brain, then I have zero room for anything else.
What defines success? Is it an image of it projected to the outside world, or an internal sense of fulfillment?
We all have choices to make in life. But before we can make a choice, we need to have options from which to choose.
We go around asking each other about our careers all the time. It’s the ultimate small talk question: “What do you do?” Our culture emphasizes these roles as part of our capitalist machine: career implies a place in society, a person whose role in production and output fits into a tidy little noun. I’d much rather know what you’re passionate about, what you look forward to doing, what you’d do for free.
This is all about setting our expectations: this is the one thing we can individually control for ourselves. Expecting the world to jump back to how it was is a futile exercise. It might seem comforting, but it’s delusional, and will lead to disappointment that always comes when expectations are not in line with reality.
I stitch all the wonderful photos and stories and captions together to create a mutant Frankenstein’s monster of a person who does all the things and against whom I compare myself.
Living in the limbo of having identified an obstacle but not yet having the tools to address it.
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