ANOTHER WORLD

thoughts on dreaming, longing, and career-ing

Hello everyone.

I am mainly writing this because I have a huge project for school due this Friday, and I don’t even want to think about it. Hence, I am rebirthing this little concept from this summer instead.

I’ve realized that the only thing I know how to write about right now — either directly or indirectly — is myself. I think one of my goals this year is to learn to write for other people, because soon I won’t have a choice. Nineteen is a very odd age for me, and I could not say I like it. I won’t have the justification of financial dependence on my parents for much longer. Some of my friends are acting the same they were as younger teens, playing Animal Crossing and smoking weed, and some of them are getting into insane collectives, collaborations, and independent projects. Some of them have started to use the word career as more than a hypothetical. More than the image of a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase, more than faraway burdens of children and household that would give them a cause for one. Career? Now? By God, since when?

I think eighteen was a terrible, awful age to be during the pandemic, and thus nineteen is equally bad afterwards. Last year, none of my friends left the house. Life was like a sitcom, where people learn lessons sometimes but are fundamentally stagnant as characters. They always fulfill the same archetypes, to push the same comfortable narrative again and again. I think a large part of me was very, very happy with this. The wounded part: it meant people couldn’t leave me behind.

It also meant I didn’t have to think about career or opportunities or… networking.

I’ve never thought of myself as a career person, mostly because I don’t take initiative. I am a pillow princess in life. I simply let things happen to me, whether good or bad. I don’t like “pushing” myself at people, especially through the form of consistent attention or care. I realized recently that this is less out of consideration and more about power, and protecting my power. I don’t like being left. I would rather leave. And while the whole concept of a career is quite imbued with neoliberal capitalist narrative, the spaces I inhabit are quite interdisciplinary and free flowing. They are spaces I want to learn from and participate in and create for. And as I am still a student with upper middle class parents, there is no real pressure to select projects based on monetary compensation. So why do I feel so trapped and lost?

When you’re in art school, especially in a space like CSM, the lines between social life and career begin to blur until they are almost one indistinguishable frenzy. I don’t even get drunk or do drugs at parties anymore because I’m scared I’ll say something stupid to someone I want to impress so I can work with them when I sort out my shit. I feel like everyone else has something they’ve done or made, something to show for themselves. I don’t really have this external thing I can show. The most clear signifier of my work is me — my diaries, my appearance, my way of living itself. And so I feel like I always have to be on my best behaviour, so I can perform this romanticized version of me.

Everyone else seems so defined on their Practice and their Career, so able to label themselves. There is what’s inside their practice and what’s outside of it, that they deal with later. They work and they stop working. What happens when you can’t pick a label? When you want to be your practice? Is that what leftist liberation is — when you have enough leisure time to fundamentally be your main lifelong project — or is this narcissism to an almost sublime extent?

I would like to be a writer, and write things sometimes that people enjoy. But when I think about my dream future, I think about learning things forever and ever, because by god, there is too much to learn. I would like to travel many places, to talk to many people that will keep me growing and changing. I would like to participate in talks and lectures and courses and projects until the day I die. I would like to write about what I learn in small blips and speak about it to many people. Just to reflect and understand what I’ve read. It bewilders me that people at my age write things beyond themselves, things that are productive and cohesive and important. I feel like I know .0000000001% I need to know before I can write something that’s actually important, and I write only to progress by a small morsel on my life reflections and to understand what I have read and witnessed a little bit more. Nineteen. I am only just realizing the extent of what is available to me and what is possible. Career? Insane. Somewhat irking.

A submission from a long time ago to the Ask Ester survey (which, by the way, I soon regretted even considering because the I Know Nothing feeling washed over me almost immediately after my arrival back to London, but you know what, I’m going to try and tie in responses to my monologue-ish style of writing anyhow):

dear ester,

sometimes I think I might be happier in another world, even if that world is worse or more dangerous than ours. I dread the economic framework of our society and the relative purposelessness of this life - in fiction, there’s always an objective, a goal to achieve, the promise of a better whatever. I don’t know how to feel ... I feel guilty (all my friends and family are here) and stupid (it’s not possible to travel to other worlds, and even if - there would be no plot armour to protect us and no set design that hides the ugly parts of each world) and kind of sad that I feel this way. But I can’t let go the thought ... What do you think about this, Ester? Does my explanation make sense? Is there anywhere you would feel happier than here?

— icarus

Dear Icarus,

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as well. I used to dismiss the ontological uses of dreaming and escapism, mostly because I saw many friends use it to waste away and ignore the mental issues they needed to face and heal. I thought that although this longing for other worlds is a core symptom of the alienation from ourselves and others this economic puts us through, it’s just something we need to fight off in order to stay focused on what’s possible and real. But I think this — this obsession with the real and immediate — can be not only tiring but inhuman. Literal dreaming is the best example I can think of. When we are still and resting, our minds do not dwell over our circumstances and go into intense problem solving mode. They summon series of improbable scenarios and combine multiple worlds of stimuli. Sure, they may carry consistent themes — perhaps lust, grief, regret — but they encourage us to align with the near impossible. With the, what if? of life experience.

I’ve been thinking about other worlds and how incorporating visions of utopian places, aesthetically and in praxis, can actually be something that brings morale. Icarus, you seem politically aware enough to have some leftist sensibility, and i’m sure a lot of this feeling is common anticapitalist fatigue to be honest. I think when you become aware enough, you just start to see the emptiness and lack of care with which the objects of this world are made and with which people are treated. But I don’t think your visions of other worlds need to be the antithesis of action. I think their shapes, their glimmering swords of truth and sweet-fruited orchards, can be your grace. They can be the way you stretch out your hand to someone else in greeting. They can also be the images you look to when you write, create, talk, or dance. The practical parts of fighting against this society, like protesting or blockading, are so important. But that doesn’t mean your political awareness can’t also blossom through how you treat other people and yourself. The knowledge that we all carry the same burden of a likely dark future doesn’t mean it’s not human and good to carry beauty and offer hope. I hope since you wrote this you’ve made some progression on your thoughts. Please, if you see this, let me know.

I myself would definitely like to live in a different world. A world where I could fulfill my visions of eternal intellectual play and sexual escapades without thinking about money. A world where my ADHD, which gives me core tendencies of grandiosity, curiosity, and sponteneity that I am actually quite in love with — is not something I have to spend vast amounts of energy on subduing. A world where I don’t have to decipher if someone actually likes my presence or just likes me as an artistic concept. And more importantly, one where I don’t have to feel so much guilt that I get to sit and write this in the CSM library, so wrapped up in myself that my weird constant metaphysical crises of self and other, while there are millions of people left behind due to the continuation of colonialist systems and ways of thinking.

But I think that the most I can do with all these things is to incorporate it into the way I live and just the way I shake people’s hands. I like being someone who makes people question things but also makes them laugh. I want my presence to remind other people of other worlds, of better things for them. And the pain of transformation is the most human thing out there, and the only safety you can find in life is the one that’s in falling in love with that pain itself. I just want to offer that possibility to everyone. But I’m nineteen and anxious and generally operate on the margins and I don’t know yet how to say that in words to someone, let alone a handshake. I introduce myself in one jumbled pronunciation Hiimester and awkwardly jump up and down when they talk about their lives to show my approval. Neurodivergent people in media have always been shown to not be “people person”s and absorbed in private obsessions and dreams. But quite frankly, I feel like one of the main objectives of my love of learning is so I can touch people better and share my world with them in a more natural manner. I like the idea of dreaming publically and sharing my dreams.

I am obsessed with this tension between the isolationist nature of capitalism and a surreal focus on the collective. Because a better future, in which people have the means to spend time talking to each other, really talking, really loving, is otherworldly and somewhat surreal. Maybe we should all give each other glimpses into this other side. Be a little bit surreal….