letter to a late 2016 self

1. Stop being obnoxious. Please -- try -- for both our sakes.

2. Year of blowing your chances with beautiful women. you'll start to notice a trend, but it's good. You'll learn from it, so keep trying. Put yourself out there, guard your heart. Put God first. (You won't at the start)

3. It's your prerogative to express the self you want others to see.  Showing people your true self - or at least trying to be as true as you can to the you you know yourself to be, or the part of yourself you recognise as being you - rather than hiding behind a mask of silence and meaningless pleasantries.

Silence as a kind of selfishness.¹ The onus is on you. You can't lean back and expect the other person to do all the work. 'You know what, if they want to know me, they'll have to work for it.' Get over yourself.² If you want to be understood - understanding that it's impossible to be completely understood by another person - but if you find someone who you think you can connect with, then make an effort to form the connection. Give them something real of yourself. Learn to give in that way, to be generous with your experience, your knowledge, your insight, your mistakes. Make it outwardly focused - and not to glorify yourself. Be interested in others, and love them enough to answer truthfully if they are interested in you. Don't resign yourself to who they think you are. When you explain you're a doctor, you can usually see them mentally revising their opinion of you - tweaking their assumptions - which is strange, you're still the person you were 5 seconds ago, you talk the same, dress the same, have the same hobo haircut. But the new information sheds light and paints a more accurate picture. Love people enough to disrupt their established paradigms. A real friend tells you when you've got something in your teeth. If someone's got the wrong idea about you, it's up to you to decide if it's worth correcting. The point is, unless you make the effort - there's no way of them finding out. And remember that this is true of nearly everyone you meet. That your first impression will almost always be wrong, or at best incomplete.³ You will change your mind about people. In your first job, you will meet a young, arrogant registrar with too much product in his hair and a handshake that feels like a snide comment and dislike him a lot initially, and by the end of the four months hold a surprising amount of respect for him.

4. You're not the smartest person in the room. You think you know this, but unfortunately you'll still believe it for a long time, and only notice it when someone smarter than you says something smart and then you feel uncomfortable and threatened. It's cool. There's always going to be someone better at you at something. You can console yourself by saying, 'yeah well, I bet I'm better at X,' but that just gets incredibly tiring - and it doesn't always work. When this kind of thing happens (it will happen a lot over the next few months, with alarming frequency), recognise and realise that you feel compelled to be better than so-and-so at X because it's where you've been mining your self-esteem. You've made it your little niche in the universe. You value yourself against what you worship: cleverness, artistic ability, nice clothes. But your self worth should come from your identity as a child of God. Once you recalibrate, you'll be able to appreciate people cleverer, more talented than you - and instead of feeling threatened, envious, belittled, you'll be inspired to be better. And when you come across someone who's not so good at X, rather than use your advantage to covertly assert dominance, you'll want to be generous and inspire him/her as well. You get to graduate from flaunting your assets for the sake of personal glory / an ego-boost. I'm not saying that's the case now by the way, I'm saying this is what to aim for.

5. there is a part of you that used to feel everything acutely, and see everything as precious, and that part has either died or is buried. Whether or not it resurrects/puts out any shoots remains to be seen.

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wanting to be honest but also not wanting to scare people off (wanting to be liked?)

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<sup>1. "I think being shy basically means self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people."↩
2. "According to psychologist and researcher Paul Wink, there are two faces of narcissism: The Overt or Grandiosity-Exhibitionism type, characterized by extraversion, self-assurance, and aggression, and The Covert or Vulnerability and Hypersensitivity type, characterized by introversion, defensiveness, anxiety, and vulnerability to life’s stressors. Mr. Wink’s research found both sides are extraordinarily self-absorbed and share a common core of conceit, arrogance, and the tendency to give in to one's own needs and disregard others."↩
3. "There’s a day in May when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere, and daffodils are asked by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes with a daffodil, you know where he’s from. In this way I have given you a primer. Let us all be from somewhere. Let us tell each other everything we can." - Bob Hicok, A Primer↩</sup>

Love far from home

There: it's great. We all have our secret explanations. You only have to reveal your secret explanation and she's not a stranger any more. We lie cuddled up together like two big dogs, or river gods.

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I woke up late today. The relentless sun entered with a maniacal intensity through the gap between my wall and curtain - its gold suffusing the room with echoes of itself. Outside, the sky was blue in an early spring in the northern hemisphere kind of way. It was beautiful in a way so wide and effortless that the only appropriate response is gratitude.

I vaguely remember my dream, which is rare. In it there is a cavalcade of us outdoors, on our way to some celebration. Beside me is a girl, an old friend from school - I have never seen her before. The rest are not far behind us, rambling, tumbling and jostling each other, rapt in their own respective parentheses of jubilation. She is wearing a summer dress and laughing and we are walking through a meadow and we are all incredibly happy for some reason. Her laugh is soundless and wonderful, like the sun, bright and mighty and full of colour, hanging high in a cloudless sky. Her eyes are shut with joy. Without thinking, I place my hand on her shoulder and pull her towards me. I place my lips on her crown to kiss her head, and as I inhale, I feel the tiny filaments of hair against my lips, and the scent of her is intoxicating. That's the thing that stays with me after I wake up, her fragrance. I don't recall the what it was, but I do remember how it made me feel - giddy and invincible - as if I had inhaled spring itself.

Recently I thought up this idea for a story, of a man who has the most hideous teeth. As a result he never smiles and speaks in such a way as to maximally conceal the contents of his mouth. I have not decided why he believes his teeth are hideous. It could be the result of a series of early peer inflicted traumas or a careless comment from an authority figure impressed upon him during the formative, highly susceptible years of childhood. Some kind of wound sustained during the development of his nascent subconscious. But anyway this causes him much distress when he falls in love with a girl, as simply being around her makes him grin, and he becomes anxious that the facial contortions that he employs to deny the girl a glimpse of his teeth are confusing if not incredibly disturbing to the object of his affection. This would lead to much drama and mental anguish and romantic frustration between the two and form the catastasis of the narrative. I also have not decided how it will end. Perhaps it ends with him revealing his teeth to the girl in an act of trust and vulnerability and he finds out that they were no more deformed than anyone else's. Or perhaps it is revealed that the girl and everyone else have all along harbored hideous teeth that the entire community have secretly, unbeknownst to each other, replaced with some kind of prosthesis. Or perhaps in the end he goes up to the attic where the toolbox and hammer are and smashes all of his teeth out in an act of defiance against their reign of tyranny over him, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital when they ask him why he did it, he simply smiles.

I am soon 25. This is uncharted territory. I have given up trying to fathom what lies ahead. Will the days begin to blur? I have accepted that it is now May. I dispense with the fluster and commotion and say, Oh, well, yes I suppose it's about time. Maybe I am now accustomed to life's acceleration, which will upset me when the rate of change plateaus and eventually recedes like a fistful of hair in the morning.

When I enter the city the sun begins its dying dance and clouds begin to creep across the immaculate sky.

I am turning 25. maybe I ought to grow out my hair. I explore the university as the evening light grows dim behind massive clouds, and pale electric orbs line the walkways. The student union building is abandoned, the stark and vacant light unwelcoming.

I am at the student bar, next to the library being served by students. Having placed my order, I sit next to a group of 4 in a semicircle, as they discuss whether the NHS should fund orthodontic procedures and speculate the machinations of the transgender psyche.

We walked past a ramen shop, then an italian gelato store. 'Everything's falling into place for us,' I said.

Things thought are different from things themselves. How to turn out thoughts more realistic, how to transform reality to be more like our thoughts. How to reconcile the two, a happy marriage.