I have a kind-of-sort-of inside joke with one of the employees in the building where I live. Each time we run into each other, I tell him that I don’t have any good news to share with him, at least not yet. I can always count on him to say in response that there’s something coming. There has to be.
I’m a few days late to posting this because of that lack of good news. I don’t feel like my voice has anything worth speaking. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking about switching my line of work, making a career shift, yet it’s been slow going. I’m trying to strike a balance between affording the necessities that keep me alive and having some wiggle room for the extraneous stuff that make life worth living. I keep getting close, but I’ve been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I might seriously need the services of an Etsy witch or ten.
All rejections are not equal, which is to say that some sting more than others. I’ll sink months into preparation just to be told that it wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t good enough—and I know it’s not always personal, but sometimes it is, and that’s the most frustrating part.
A couple of years ago, when I was living elsewhere and going through a romantic breakup, my doorman was one of the first people I told. That guy who’d stay over for days at a time, who usually accompanied me home at 2 in the morning with a box from the Joe’s Pizza around the corner—yeah, him, he’s gone. He won’t come back. I’d known my doorman for three years by then; he was working through a rough patch with his girlfriend, and he might have sympathized with me. Maybe he was already aware of my separation since, by virtue of his role, he was privy to certain insight into my personal life.
“Keep going” is what they say. Persevere. Something my way comes from just around the corner. Everything happens for a reason, and you could do everything right and they still won’t want you and it’s not your fault but it is but it isn’t but, really, it is. My anxieties worsen by the day; melancholia is an old friend returned, camping out in my apartment.
Beyond merely being a little bit of social interaction to sustain the human creature I am, my inside joke also serves to keep me accountable. I hate having no good news for him. I want to be able to tell him about the wonderful and amazing happenstances in my life. I can’t let him down too.
I have these recurring fantasies where I sell all my belongings and use the proceeds to fund my escape from the United States. I’d rent a tiny apartment in some city with enough diversity of cultures (Hong Kong? Paris?) to mimic the experience of living in New York, albeit realistically with a much better quality of life. But—even in my dreams—I can’t imagine easily finding employment elsewhere because I’m a skeptic, and that puts an end to the idea.
As a seventh- or eighth-grade student, I had a mathematics teacher who once presided over a philosophical discussion, more or less, during class about the United States being a sinking ship. She was rather aghast at hearing a few of us talking about leaving the country should things deteriorate to the point of emigration being a serious consideration; she reasoned that we citizens should stay and fix the issues that plague them to improve the nation since, after all, it’s our home. I surmised that she spoke from the perspective of a voting adult during the final years of the Bush Administration, but I remember disagreeing with her. I might have been a kid, but I already knew nobody in power would listen to a gay Chinese boy. Whatever “patriotic” dissent I might have was immaterial.
I want to say that this is an arbitrary rule that I’ve invented, contrary to reality, because it’s not palatable. I want to believe that society can improve. New York is on the precipice of electing its first South Asian and Muslim mayor. (Early voting has already begun—please vote for him on the Working Families Party ballot line.) I guess I’m just not in a good headspace. Toni Morrison famously pointed out that the function of racism is distraction, and she also extolled us to never lose our sense of shock at such depravity. I can’t help that the choices I’ve been making are informed by, tethered to, a lifetime of experiences shaped by discrimination, I’m doing my best to stay focused and to operate with an open mind, but I’m afraid that I’m becoming extremely jaded. There are silver linings everywhere, yet I’d like for the clouds themselves to dissipate.
I should step outside for a bit. It’s not good for me to make a habit of being miserable; I’ve already done enough of that.
So, I took a break from writing this to go beyond my front door. I rode the 7 train into Queens and met up with some new friends at one of the year’s final instances of Queens Night Market, which is also New York’s largest night market in general but doesn’t hold up against the famous night markets of Taipei and elsewhere. Here, the food is somewhat middling and monotonous despite the cultural diversity on display, and I would attribute that simply to the constraints of doing such business in New York: lack of adequate space forces this to be held in a parking lot, costs of produce limit the variety of “affordable” options available to attendees, etc.
I don’t want to sound spoiled or unappreciative. I think it’s undervalued that Queens, famously “The World’s Borough,” is home to such a dizzyingly wide array of people and cultures, and equally appropriate that Queens Night Market makes some of the resultant food easily accessible. My friends and I wandered each row, meandering without urgency, and picked out options from Trinidadian, Guyanese, Native American (the nation/tribe wasn’t indicated; make of that what you will), Jamaican, Chinese, Mexican, Burmese, and Uzbek vendors, all in one night. Then, instead of returning to write and meeting my self-imposed deadline, I encouraged them to follow me back to my neighborhood, where we split a pair of ice cream sundaes and played some video games (Overcooked 2) together.
It’s been difficult and not, simultaneously, to exist in this weird limbo. I have all the time in the world to do what I want, despite being limited by the little numbers displayed to me by banks and credit card companies. There’s much that I strive to accomplish, but I recently rolled my ankle as I traipsed down some stairs and so I’ve been trying not to put much weight onto it for the time being. I’m balancing tension in many different ways, chief of which is the struggle between who I want to be and who I need to be.
“No good news yet.” I’ve taken to avoiding the lobby of my apartment complex, preferring instead to sneak out through the back exit. November approaches with as much certainty as the Sun sets and I’m sick of myself. I hate feeling like a disappointment, like I’ve disappointed myself, because the only voice in my head with which I’ll forever have to live is my own, because the only person who has to live the life I’ve fashioned is myself. Every decision at every juncture leads me to the only road I will walk.