A few notes on a new life

I am writing this wearing a big white shirt somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. I am writing this dog tired and a little drunk. I am writing this and I am moving to New York. Last summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about death and this summer, I am obsessed with change. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call this a ‘transitory period’. A change implies that I am entering into a new, stable phase. I change my shoes, I change my coffee order. But I have no plans six months from now. I have no idea where I will live, what I will do. This laptop I’m writing on is the most valuable thing I own and I’d be surprised if I got five hundred euros for it. I tell myself every morning that I am a writer but I technically (and literally and metaphorically) have received nothing but rejections for my work.

Yes, you could call this an intermediary period. An in-between phase that will end when I get a proper job and a dog and a blender. Out of the people I know from college, we have generally divided into two camps: the ones who can afford to do a masters and actually know what masters they want to do and the ones who have no fucking clue and are just trying to make a bit of money. I have no regrets about not applying to masters programmes. How can I specialise in something when I know nothing, of the world? Besides, I’m tired of being a student. Or at least a conventional one. This is the first time in twenty two years I am not obligated to be anywhere or do anything. Finally, I can be directionless. I can do nothing but work and then quit my job to write and then work again and then quit my job again.

Julie read ‘Just Kids’ and she liked it for the same reason that I did; Patti and Robert were really fucking poor but still managed to enjoy themselves.

I know that I’m going to be poor for the next few years. There’s just no way around it. It both is and is not my choice. Yes, I could do a sensible master’s programme in September and then the year after that move to a small town in the middle of Ireland and be a secondary school teacher at twenty-four. I would not be poor if I did that. But I wouldn’t be happy either. God, I wish it would make me happy and maybe some day it will. But for now, the only way for me to do what makes me happy is to be poor. I want to work no more than 30 hours a week so that I can dedicate at least fifteen hours a week to writing. I want to live in many different countries. I want to live in expensive cities with massive art galleries. There is simply no way to do this without sacrificing financial stability, and emotional stability.

I believe this to be anti-capitalistic. For much of history, humans have been nomadic. Not in a private-jet-I-have-a-meeting-with-Japan-and-then-LA kind of way, rather, we have always felt the urge to move with the seasons, to gather and then disperse. Buying property is one of the most efficient ways to store your money and become rich but it also permanently ties you to a specific place. So much of how our lives are organised is based upon the assumption that we want to make a shitload of money and then re-produce the lives we had for our kids. But I felt it was important for me to take a step back and remember that this whole way our society is organised is just ONE idea. There are hundreds others out there. And we are free, autonomous, adults. If we don’t want to participate in this unfair system, we can opt out.

Inspired by the guy who decided to swim in the Grand Canal. Inspired by the five hundred or so people who cheered him on. Inspired by how this was a completely unplanned, idiosyncratic moment. Right time, right place really can happen anywhere, anytime.

As I packed my magazines into two massive moving boxes and donated most of my clothes, I said aloud to myself, “maybe change in our life is what prepares us for death.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Leo, who was trying to sneak some of the many balls of yarn he has acquired into my carry-on.

“I mean, maybe nothing in life is permanent because life is not permanent.”

Everything is death. There is beauty in the coming together and breaking apart of every atom. Coming together, breaking apart, over and over again until the sun explodes and then those atoms that were once my body are scattered across the universe. Perhaps life is just preparing us for death, and death is preparing the world for obliteration. And after obliteration there will be more life, and still more death. And that is the nature of existence: non-existence.

It devastating of course. Make no mistake, I am not blasé about this. I wish I had a shrink-ray so I could turn everyone I love into the size of a sylvanian family and bring them with me wherever I go. But that’s always been my problem: I’m not able to say goodbye.

I have been pretending to my Dublin friends that I’ll move back to Dublin, I’ve promised everyone in Waterford that that’s where I’ll be for the rest of my life, I’ve told Julie that I’ll live in Cleaveland with her, I promised the TSA agent that I’m never going to leave New York. The truth is, I don’t want to admit that I have no clue what I’m going to do and no real desire to make a decision. I wish I knew I wanted. I wish I wanted a road map, a ‘how-to’. But being totally honest, deep down, what I want most is to throw my phone in the bin and walk around until I find something interesting and do that until I get bored and then move somewhere new.

I have tried to make a conventional life as appealing as possible for myself. Mainly, I would love a garden and a pet dog. I have tried to convince myself that I could travel during holidays, that I won’t be able to be part of a community unless I settle down somewhere. But it hasn’t worked. I can’t help but want to be in flux. I just wish everyone I love wanted the same thing. At least I found one other crazy person. Leo is sitting next to me on the plane and I can’t help but feel a wave of gratitude that the universe brought us together.

“Will we move to Bogota?” I asked him this morning, before we packed our suitcases into the car to move to New York.

“Sure, what not?” he replied as he put his ‘Whaleboner’ baseball cap because he thinks it makes him look like an American.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would wish for a permission slip. I would wish that some old, established author would call me up and say, “Libby, you’re doing it. You’re on your way to being a writer, just keep going.” Because I’m terrified that actually I am not Good Enough to Make It. That I’ll live in a small town in the middle of Ireland as a secondary school teacher and I’ll always say to myself that I didn’t want to be a writer really. Too unstable, too stressful, too much work. But the truth is, I have never wanted anything as much as this. I want it so much it doesn’t even feel like a want. It doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels cosmic. Which makes it all the more amusing to consider that fact that I might not actually be any good. But permission slips don’t exist. Or at least, not for people like me they don’t. I have only my own brazen and bizarre self-belief.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing, I tell myself as I hug my best friend goodbye. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, I tell myself when I check my bank balance and see that after rent and college fees, I will have one hundred dollars to last me two weeks in the city. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, I tell myself when someone I don’t know tells me they read my substack every week. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, I’ve known ever since I lost track of time writing a story about trees that could talk.

It is undeniably self-indulgent to try and be a writer. To decide to travel the world for a decade. I am so lucky that I have literally zero responsibilities to anyone but myself. These are the cards I have been dealt and if my track record of card games is anything to go by, I will invariably fuck it up. I will not exploit the advantages I have been given, I will not be strategic and think seven steps ahead, I will not cry when I lose. I am not in competition with anyone.

I owe the world my best self. I cannot justify another person on this planet who chose their life based on capitalist ideology. I cannot work a bullshit job that does nothing but makes money. I have to make art. I have to keep moving.

Until next week,

Libs x