The Job Will Not Save You

I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving. I did this because I’m just about to start a new job, and I thought that I would have too much to do this week. Going home, it seemed to me, would complicate things needlessly. In retrospect, I could have gotten my work done very early in the week and easily gone home. In fact, it would have been a pretty ideal time. And if I had really wanted to find a way to go, if I had made any kind of concerted effort, then this would have been clear. But I never did. In this time in my life, when so many disparate bits are rotating around and I’m trying so hard to piece them together into something solid, finding a time to return to the nest registered at the very bottom of my list of priorities. I definitely understand why. Back in school, I never cared much about going home for thanksgiving- I did it every year, sure, but it always felt like an inconvenience more than anything else, a forced removal from Northwestern right in the midst of finals (and, often, a show) when in just another two weeks I would be home for a real vacation.

In case you can’t tell, I wish I had gone home. My time in New York City is reaching a breaking point, the moment when all the excitement of living here temporarily dissipates and I find myself feeling homesick and tired and wishing for nothing else but an escape. New York is an impossible place to get sick of, because for everything you see there are a hundred things you haven’t, but it’s certainly possible to get sick of my day-to-day life here.

I’ve always had a tough time adjusting to change. This is one of the few constants of my life. When my family moved across the country in eighth grade, I spent months and months in the same miserable routine: I would wake up, cry, go to school, hate my life, leave school, cry, and then spend the rest of my afternoon watching Food Network, often crying. During my first year at Northwestern, I considered transferring to another school about five thousand times. The primary reason I never pursued this option was sheer laziness (after applying to about sixteen schools during my senior year of High School, going through that heinous process again was truly a final, do-or-die scenario). And now here I am, somewhere new once again. The adjustment has not been nearly as painful as those in the past, but it’s still new, and it’s still scary, and lord knows it’s still exhausting. Going home would have been a good thing for me. I wish I had realized this earlier.

But then, maybe I’m just being sentimental. I think about an alternate reality, one where I spent the last week back in sunny Oak Park, CA, and (as alternate realities are prone to be), it is incredible. I see a bunch of old friends from High School, and they are so taken by my new sociability and confidence that they barely even recognize me (I’ve lost a bit of weight since High School as well). I passionately reconnect with everyone I’ve ever known, and all the different versions of myself, the current and the past, somehow come together in a magical confluence. I, for perhaps the first time in my life, know exactly who I am, and my destiny appears before me in perfect, startling clarity.

Maybe, in my wildest dreams, I would find a romantic connection with one of those miscellaneous pretty girls from my High School. Some girl who considered me only in vague, platonic terms (if she even considered me at all), but who, when confronted with this new, vibrant manifestation of myself, wouldn’t be able to control herself. We would spend every night of break ravaging each other, staining all my old hangouts with new, charged memories, and I would leave Oak Park with a freshly formed legend trailing in my wake. At the same time, I would have a fantastic weekend with my parents, their pure, unadulterated love reaffirming everything I’ve ever loved about myself. All of the doubts that have plagued me the last few months would be wiped away, disappearing like smoke in the wind, and I would return to New York re-energized, brimming with passion, seeing this great, sprawling city as if for the very first time.

And, on top of all this, I would have a great big thanksgiving dinner as well as several other good meals. I would also go shopping with my parents one day and have lots of things purchased for me, including several new pairs of pants, which would be greatly appreciated.

It’s a nice thought. But in reality, none of that would happen (except the pants). It would have been a pleasant, uneventful trip, just like pretty much every other Thanksgiving for the past four years. None of these grandiose ideas about would have even crossed my mind. It’s the fact that I didn’t go, the deviation from the norm, that has made the whole “Thanksgiving at Home” register in my mind as such a hallowed, rejuvenating tradition, and has, in turn, made me feel these waves of self-pity about missing it.

In any case, whatever the circumstance, whatever the ratio of reality to fantasy, intuition to imagination, I’ve been pretty depressed the last few days. Which is too bad, really, because I was on a pretty good streak for awhile there, last weekend being an especially pleasant combination of productivity and fun. There’s just a sort of emptiness I feel inside. Not all the time, certainly, but often enough that it merits attention. Of course I think about all the things that would help, that could fill this void- a trip home is the flavor of the moment, but just as often I think that I would feel better if I did more stand up, or if I exercised all the time, or if I had a clear schedule each day, or if I had a girl to wake up next to, or, barring that, a girl to call after the sun sets and smile through a conversation But the reality is, none of those things can change me. They all of these things pass through my mind, and then they all disappear. And I’m left, as always, with myself.

I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I think I just want to be back in school, to have some sort of structure grounding my life, some clear goals to work towards. Then I think I want to drop everything and do something crazy, live in Korea, ride a bike across America, something where I have absolutely nothing holding me to the earth. But see, even that life, with its complete lack of definition, is more clearly defined than the one I’m in now. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go home. Not because of some half-baked romantic ideas about carousing through Oak Park in the backseat of a Jeep with the guys I took AP Euro with or sitting down to dinner with my family and feeling warm inside, but because it would give my life, at least briefly, some real definition. Visiting my hometown feels nothing like it used to, but when I’m there at least I have a clear picture of who I am, where I am, what I’m doing. In that context, it makes sense. When I look at myself here, in New York, does it make any sense? But then, what am I even talking about? How can I make sense in one place and not make sense in another? Why do I always feel like I need to attach these labels, these fucking definitions to everything I do? That the only way I can ever be satisfied within is if I’m able to step back and cleanly analyze my life from afar?

Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I’ll feel better in a day or two. I always do.