restlessness
There’s this line in my book that I really like.
It came out of me quickly and without hesitation; a nice change of pace from the heavily filtered thoughts of my day-to-day.
With this line, I suddenly understood how I felt. This piece has always been my favorite part of writing. Even when you aren’t looking for clarity, it finds you.
Here’s the line:
“He was restless, in every way.”
There's nothing extraordinary or notably beautiful about it. Isolated, it’s rather mundane.
Hundreds of pages later, I wrote another sentence:
“She too is restless.”
This was another moment where the words came out before my emotions caught up. I love it when that happens.
Again, this line on its own isn’t that illuminating. But well placed and within the larger scope of the novel, the juxtaposition becomes more revelatory. You see how two characters seemingly at complete opposite ends of the emotional spectrum come together around the one thing they thought they were so different in.
I don’t want to get too heady on a Monday evening, but I can’t help but realize the similarities to life here.
If I got everything I thought I wanted at twenty years old, I think I’d be miserable now.
I always thought of myself as fairly domestic. I planned my whole life around the idealistic notion of a house, a dog, and a white picket fence. Children were always optional to nonexistent, depending on the partner and year. Mostly, I just wanted a quiet life in a cozy home.
In a lot of ways, these things are still true. I love being married, and I spend too much time on Pinterest looking up Cottage Core.
If you told me I could live in Kate Winslet’s house from The Holiday, I’d say sign me up. In many ways, I’ve been Kate Winslet in that movie for most of my life, so this would only make the whole exchange more appropriate.
Here I am after every break-up ever.
This changed and shifted as I got older, going from someone with all the naive assurances of a late-stage teen with hardly any life experience to the rebellious pseudo-punk of my mid to late twenties. Stevo may have called me a poser, but I’d like to point out that I did listen punk music 24/7 and sewed my pants with dental floss. So.
As I get older, I realize that my security isn’t as dependent on these things as I once thought. Indeed, I love the stability of a loving relationship and a permanent place in the world. Somewhere to go at night and a person to miss me. I think most of us do.
However, I suspect at the heart of it is this very simple truth:
Security and fulfillment are not the same thing. Nor do they come from the same source. In an ideal world, they complement one another. In a fragmented one, they clash.
I took this idea of restlessness a step further. I searched my manuscript to see how many times I’d used the word throughout.
It turns out quite a lot.
Before I even understood the book I was writing, this theme was everywhere.
There’s one line from a very early draft, back when it was third person POV and a completely different plot that says:
“I’m so jealous of how happy you are, how settled you seem to be. I always feel so restless. Even when I’m happy I’m restless.”
(Let’s put aside that this dialogue is clunky at best. I was still learning)
and later:
But most of all, more than anything, she was jealous that Celeste felt content. Because even when she was happy, Adelyn had never felt content. Always restless. Always insecure. But never, a day in her life, satisfied.
Oof.
All of this to say, I’m still discovering so much about myself, and writing is still my favorite way to do it.
I have no idea what your life is supposed to look like at this age. When I was younger, I was sure it would be all mortgages and playdates, high-powered offices and power suits. It’s nothing like that, and that would suffocate the person I am now. It would have suffocated the person I was then too, which I suppose is why I worked so hard to get away from it.
It’s always been so important to me that I carve my own path. Somehow though, getting older clouded that instead of clarified it. Only through writing this book was I able to tap into who I used to be, and remember all the things I like about myself. The curiosity and yearning that came with every new adventure. Calculated disregard for the way things were supposed to be, paired with a lust for something greater.
It’s all still there, I think
Am I having an early mid-life crisis? Maybe. Probably.
I just know I’m getting closer to who I want to be. One silly little sentence at a time.
Recommended listening:
Because in my head this was totally who I was at twenty-three. *Even as I said no to drugs, alcohol, and went to bed at 9pm.*