Where are we going and where do we want to end up? I’ve been haunted by that question and have been thrown around by a mixture of fate and awful decisions. There is a sort of vague comfort in giving yourself up to the wind, to be buffeted here and fro, endlessly, but it’s not a natural state.
Eventually, we become numb and to defeat it, we take determined direction, either to rise sky-high or to have an intimate meeting with the ground. It’s a delicate balance and the smallest impulses seem to have the greatest long-term changes. It’s hard to say what we want and harder to say what we need but to discover oneself is absolutely vital to survival.
It threatens to smother you, to bury you in man-made, man-high waves that will overtake you with commitments, with debt that threatens to lock you down in place, metaphorically shackled by very real circumstances. And afterall what’s the point if here feels as bad as anywhere, and anywhere feels as good as here? It’s a desire to feel the possibility of a better future that guides me and throws me from place to place and sometimes for brief instants I find some momentary satisfaction in not my future possibility but in my current state.
Feeling almost overwhelmingly ecstatic, riding on the wave that threatens to break. Like a surfer, riding a wave, finally forgetting the undertow, the undercurrent of pervasive sadness.
I feel hopeful about the future, and scarily definitive positive emotion of the present. The feeling is almost alien after months of prevailing all encumbering sadness. Like a man free of the endless Sisyphian task of trying to stay positive, the stone of the task now defying gravity, and pushing itself upwards utterly independently. I don’t feel overwhelmed, I feel simply right. I suddenly find happiness from the everyday, from the very regular events of interacting with others, finding humor and positivity from it. I feel genuine joy. I don’t feel superhuman at all instead I feel intensely human, a belonging that I’ve feared that I had lost.
Zella Day feels distant from typical humanity, not chained down by her circumstances but not exactly running away from the either. A rare success story in a burgeoning sea of moderately significant indie starlets, Zella Day has began to ‘make it’. And inevitably when we stand upon the cliff of success, we look down and see our past, the now seemingly distant failures. Zella Day recalls her Arizonian past in desolate, endless space that seems inevitably romanticized when reminiscing but is an actively awful reality when it’s being experienced in the present by someone even moderately metropolitan, culturally inclined.
She manages to escape her backwoods roots and to begin to establish herself independent of them in Los Angeles. Likewise, I although trapped in the reality of living in a no-man’s-land of farm country, and failed tech startups; a place absolutely void of any cultural landmarks. No fountains, statues, monuments, museums, fashion shops here. It’s not a place where artist venture for concerts and its a town that is firmly asleep by 9pm sharp except for the Greater Student Ghetto. As a person that was born and raised in a city, I feel Zella Day’s cultural suffering: the displacement of a naturally cultural person to a place that seems to at best not comprehend its importance and at its worst actively loathing it. Givenchy sweaters go unrecognized, musical artist unknown, and art unappreciated here. It’s a place to run from, to escape, a place where the biggest motivation to carry on is the thought of how horrible it would be to die here. It’s a certain creative creature that seeks to suck creativity out of your soul, to make you one of those people who do not and cannot care. It wants you to “quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.”. It’s only my overbearing stubbornness that keeps me dreaming of now distant stars of monumental cultural centres, of Paris, New York, Milan.
And yet in this moment I finally feel at peace and at home, confident of myself and my future, in control in short. I am aware of my challenges and the difficulty that lies ahead as always but I feel genuinely able to deal with it. With the past and its related miscellaneous mistakes, I feel at peace as well, understanding that I’m not to blame for every little thing, and that those things are a fact of life, unexpected pitfalls hand in hand with the unexpected leaps forward. Zella Day exploded onto the scene virtually out of nowhere, propelled to stardom on the power of an EP, shifted to Los Angeles first, and from there, the world seems to be within reach. It is better to live in a shitty apartment in a city than in a luxury one in a lurid town, painted in cracked brown, monotone grey and expanses of swamp green. And yet we must not dwell.
I finally feel comfortable and right with the decisions I’ve made. I do feel slightly giddy but not overwhelmingly so, I feel normal only in the sense that I’m no longer trodden down by things out of my control. I’m finally taking responsibility for myself and my actions, seeing that although I’m currently alone it’s for the best for my own growth. I feel like a man that’s had a life changing epiphany. He feels ecstasy but it’s rightfully his. Why shouldn’t he celebrate those little victories especially when they’re so right and obvious?
I see those positive things that had already occurred but couldn’t previously recognize as anything but strokes of luck as truly mine. I finally feel like a person. feeling hopeful, optimistic and downright almost happy. Sure I’m a little alone but at least I’m not poisoned by negative people who cut me down and choose themselves to wallow in misery. I feel genuine joy and interest in other people and the happiness of interaction, feeling interested in the specifics of other’s life. I feel a happiness of belonging, a feeling of mutuality – laughing, joking, feeling relatable to people, and finding absolute solace in that.
It is a definitive sense of everything being alright which is almost worrying in its strength and suddenness. Not unlike a long drowning man that’s given up hope of swimming out of the overwhelming undertow that’s let go and is now buoyed up by the very same waves, headed up, up, up to the surface and firmly breathing air not water and surprised at that fact.
And so where does it leave us, Zella Day and me? Zella Day and the rest of us endlessly hopeful non-teenagers and non-adults. In-betweeners in between eras by choice, we choose the purgatory of ill-definition in place of a decisive location. Are we doomed to endlessly retreat our mistakes and previously carved out loops? Will we suddenly reach a defined failure or a success? It feels impossible to tell where we’re headed in the moment but in retrospect it was always evident. Good things do not come to those who wait, but action is just as dangerous; unknown results from choices and actions that feel right. None of us really know what we’re doing. Best we can do is throw ourselves into the ocean and hope for a benign current.
