Knowing

Note: I've been wading through the various blogs I've kept throughout the years and selecting my favorite posts -- I want to compile them here on my website. This entry, posted on February 3rd, 2016, is from the blog I kept during my year in Malaysia.  

A few nights ago, I found myself waist-deep in a nostalgic sludge that led me to sift through a bunch of old emails. Amid the silly exchanges between friends and the rage-inducing threads in which I tried to coordinate group projects with college classmates, I found a message from one of my beloved cousins. She was responding to an email I sent her in 2011 entitled “My depressing life (worst email title ever).” That title, albeit slightly dramatic, was not a shocking move by 2011 Sophie. But that’s beside the point.

In her response to my airing of woes, my cousin wrote: “You are unlucky enough to know who you are more than most people your age.” 

I remember dwelling on this line for a while when I first received the email. It made no sense to me– how could I be somehow worse off for understanding myself? When I was 19, 20, 21… I prided myself on a strong sense of self. In my eyes, it would only serve me well as I navigated my 20s and watched people around me struggle to “find themselves.”

And now, here I am: 24, back from a year abroad, and finally understanding what my cousin meant by those words. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for an understanding of who I am as a person and I know it’s preferable in many ways to the typical 20-something experience of trying on different personalities until one seems to click. But I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the burden of knowing.

I think I’ve always been this way. My career goals haven’t really shifted since I was in middle school, when I first decided that I wanted to work in comedy television. When I was younger, I had no idea how to go about pursuing that path, but I knew that I got this strange feeling of elation when I was allowed to stay up late and watch David Letterman’s monologue. The opening credits, the roar of the audience’s laughter, the knowledge that someone could make a living by throwing watermelons off a roof and putting chainsaws into water tanks during a beloved segment called “Will It Float?” I was a weird, weird human during my formative years. I still am. And it brought me so much comfort to know that my bizarre interests might someday be translated into an actual job.

Told you I’ve always been a weirdo.

The problem with knowing what you want is that you have a hard time settling for anything less. I’m muddling through the post-grad job search right now and finding myself endlessly frustrated and discouraged by the process. I know I have to start somewhere, and I know that my starting point will certainly not be a perfect embodiment of my interests and skills. But, as seems to be a common theme for many of my friends, even the so-called “entry-level” jobs require several years of experience. I have a college degree, I have internships under my belt, I have ambition– but I still don’t “fit.” I know where I want to be. But I’m realizing that I have very little control over how to get there.

When it comes to relationships, the knowing can also be painful. I’ve learned to be honest with myself when it comes to romantic interests or even just friendships. I know how I want a relationship or friendship to “feel.” I know what’s most important to me in a potential partner: kindness, sense of humor, preparedness to feign respect for John Travolta, love for family, intelligence, ability to make poop jokes that rival mine, desire to travel, creativity, confidence… the list continues. All of these elements combine to give me a “feeling” when I meet somebody. I know this isn’t a unique trait of mine and that many people listen to their gut instincts, but it’s reared its ugly head in my life several times in the last couple of years. I’ve tried to ignore the “knowing” and ended up with heartache that I could have avoided. I’ve hurt other people and I’ve hurt myself.

The toughest bit, though, is feeling that undeniable sense of “knowing” in a positive way and realizing that the other person simply can’t reciprocate for one reason for another. That’s the thing about knowing when you’ve found something good: all you have is the knowledge that it’s good for you. You’ll still never be able to control other people or assume they share your headspace. And boy, can that be a tough pill to swallow.

I want to borrow from a piece I wrote several months ago called “What I Know For Sure.” My understanding of what it means to “know” has shifted, but it helps to remember that what I know can sometimes empower me more than pull me down:

I know that I am brave. I know that I have a family and core circle of friends who think I’m pretty awesome, even when I’m not so sure myself. I know that animals and non-puking babies will always comfort me. I know that I feel most miserable when I lose a sense of control, in big ways or in small ways. I know that people are people– that my Malaysian friends and my American friends are made of the same stuff in different packages. I know that Donald Trump is one of the biggest idiots of our time, despite the fact that I religiously watched the first three seasons of The Apprentice and enjoyed it very much. I know that no love will compare to the love I feel for my mama. I know that my incessant impatience has never brought anything good into my life. I know that, outside of my family, the people who shaped and affected me the most growing up were my teachers– the good ones and the bad ones. I know that it is possible for me, as an atheist, to pray in my own strange way.

I know that pain, despite its own crippling insistence that it happens completely in vain, eventually becomes useful. It becomes useful when a shy student opens up to me about a broken heart and asks me how to make it hurt less, even for a while. It becomes useful when I can write these words out of my heart and share them with others. It becomes useful when I am hit with a whole new wave of it and I remember the way I breathed through it before. Perhaps it will be useful in my future as a television writer, when I might create a character whose pain must be convincing. It is useful because it reminds me that I’m still here.

I still know all of these things, and they are still good.

There’s no neat way to wrap up these thoughts and end this piece with some grand statement about how I’ve suddenly come to appreciate my “knowing.” That would be dishonest, because I still spend a lot of time wishing I didn’t have a mental image to compare everything in my real life to. The worst part about knowing what you want is that there are no guarantees. There is no marked path to take. There is only a result, a goal, something sitting before you with a gold tinge and an expectation of contentment.

Nobody ever tells you how to get there. But maybe nobody knows.