Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.

i am 25! I am surprised I made it this far. Genuinely surprised. I have planned my death in varying ways since I was 12 years old - I don’t know if I ever told you guys about it, but the same time I discovered I loved writing was around the same time I wrote my first plans down. It’s funny to me that writing keeps me alive. I’m very grateful. 

Last year was the worst of my life. But today I am sitting in a beautiful apartment alone with a bottle of wine with the chapter structure of my book laid out in front of me, and I have tens of thousands of words behind me. It is absolutely in no way close to finish and I will tell you approximately zero percent of what it is, but I am really……grateful, to have been given these ideas by the way the world has shaped me, by the people who have loved me and even the people who have done me harm. I stopped mourning my other possible lives some time ago - not a long time ago mind you, but still. So much of my life has been about just surviving. Just proving that I could, that I would, and that I would find love on top of it. I think I did - I am sitting in the chair of someone I love, waiting for them to come home, while I work on the thing that matters the most to me, that I have been working on - thinking about - for years. I have traveled the world for this thing. It can all fit into a box. A thing that has been the only thing I have stayed alive for most of the time - it fits into a box! It’s so small, this thing. That’s okay. I’m small too. But the thing in the box, it can outlive me, and it is my present to myself, all the different versions of me. I’m nowhere near done with it, and I am sure it will undo me plenty of more times until it is done, but it’s still a gift I’m giving to myself. I am trying to write it like it’s the only thing that I have ever written that has ever mattered, but also consoling myself with the fact I have value outside of it, that even if I fail at doing the perfect thing, because I will, that it will still have been worth it. This is….extremely hard. But it’s also like: well, of course. The things you love require work and great care to keep alive. They are breathing too. 

I think a part of love is being undone by the things you love, being able to stay curious and open and letting things fill you up in ways you didn’t know you could be filled before. and having faith in the deviations as much as your belief the end result will be worth the bother. I have a pattern of travel I have tended to stick to - around the holidays, around my birthday, also, I’m never at home. I try to be traveling for work research, for the thing in the box. I want to be undone by the thing I love at the time I was born, like a return to my originator. Saying hello to my own personal god. There’s that Simone Weil quote about the beauty of the world being the mouth of a labyrinth. I’ll let you look it up. 

Anyway. I don’t have much to say about what I’ve learned so far. I’m just surprised I get to say anything at all. I’m glad I get to. I’m glad I sat through it all. It keeps breaking me, and filling me up, and I am very grateful. But I am also grateful I am learning to put it down. To get this far I have bargained with myself as a stalling mechanism - do this by this time and you get to fuck off. Do that by then and you’re all good. I actually have done lots of the stuff I promised to my depressed former selves. But having done so, I don’t want to hold up the end of the bargain where I fuck off. I just want to bargain harder. I know how this all ends anyway. I don’t have to rush it. It is pretty arrogant to think I know the only good ending, or that I really have control over it at all. I want to see how far I can go. I don’t have any answers, just a kinder way to travel to find them now. 

What a view to wake up to - Sapa, Vietnam

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- he was Hispanic

- he was seen trying to sign at the officers to explain what was going on

- he had no criminal record whatsoever

- neighbors reported that he always carried the “weapon” police felt threatened by, a pipe, because of the stray dogs in the area

- he showed no sign of understanding the officers’ verbal warnings not to get any closer, and it’s likely that he was advancing in order to read their lips