Facing the Future
Who can say for certain whether people actually do have clear pictures of their imagined or aspirational futures, but long-term envisioning is a one of the more popular psychological games we play with ourselves. Where do you see yourself in five, ten, twenty years? At the very least, it’s an activity that could help us crystallize our goal-setting, giving us the impression that we’re pointing our aims towards a tangible-seeming target.
But instead of a vision board, sometimes it seems like I’m staring at a memory board. Literally–the large blank canvas I have perched on my desk is filled with postcards of my favorite places, pictures of myself as a child and pictures of my beautiful grandmother as a young woman. There are, amongst these things, a few bits and bobs of visual stimuli, and then there’s an oddly blank spot at the top left corner, waiting for I’m not sure what, but maybe I’ll know it when I see it.
I have a lot of ideas and certainly no shortage of desires and ambitions, and yet I have no line of sight to any horizon, just a vast, borderless expanse in all directions and that vague sense of propulsion you have on the water. I suppose the word for that feeling is drifting, a rather apt description as I’m currently reading Kate Zambreno’s similarly-titled and similarly unmoored autofictional novel.
Drifting out on open water, you typically need some navigational tools to understand which way is forward. I consider sometimes making some sort of list or sketch or chart to help evaluate all of the possibilities, or, well, not all of them, but at least the front-runners. But this is hard to do alone, no matter how many worksheets you fill out, and I have filled out many. I come back often to the late afternoon I spent with a friend at a wine shop in London, where she asked me questions about my desired directions and simply sketched out their basic relationships. It was so clear. Honestly, I feel like that might have been the single most important breakthrough moment I’ve ever had about understanding what I wanted, at least professionally.
There’s a line from Sally Rooney’s Normal People that has taken up permanent residence in my brain:
Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.
Feeling so precisely and nakedly seen is almost unbearable. Connell similarly lacks the ability to have a clear picture of the life he wants. At various stages, he seems to envision certain possibilities, but can never quite make the connection to anything that feels real or attainable to him. Maybe he questions what he ‘deserves.’ Maybe he thinks it’s foolish to set his sights on what’s always going to be a moving target. There are the desires that he pursues that he feels might be the ‘right’ ones, and these offer some immediate, although merely temporary forms of gratification.
And there are the desires he seems reticent to acknowledge fully, to give them a name and a shape. The ones, like his writing, or his whole relationship with Marianne for that matter, that could indicate an orientation to a specific future. Is it just a kind of commitment-phobia? Perhaps to an extent, and if so, it’s the most nefarious sort, where it is the desire itself that’s feared, rather than the fulfillment of it. Because then the disappointment isn’t down to what you thought you wanted not making you happy, it’s the realization that you didn’t really know what you wanted in the first place.
Originally published on Medium.