In my sophomore year of college, I worked briefly at Starbucks. I did this because I needed a job during UW-Madison’s month-long winter break (I suppose they figured better to get everyone out of town during subzero January so they could stay into beautiful northern May?), and I really wanted to visit my mom in Seattle, where she’d recently moved.
Guess what’s in Seattle? All over Seattle, on every corner, actually, with a kind of maniacal, mushrooming madness? The Madison store said they could transfer me to a store near my mom’s apartment, so I could keep on working seamlessly through break and hang out somewhere other than – womp womp – Ohio.
This is how I found myself waking up at 4 am to crank out some of the most insane shifts of my barista existence, during which I often did not stop pulling shots and blending sweet milky liquids for hours on end, and after which I walked dazed and energized (I was 20!!) back home through the bleak Seattle winter.
At the store, one of my coworkers loved me and another strongly disliked me. The one who liked me was a runner, chatty, outgoing, vibrant, a few years older, who lovingly mocked me for my aspirational bohemian intellectual energy. The one who disliked me was much older – maybe late twenties or early thirties – and seemed like an actual bohemian.
She was quiet, serious, somber, with long hair and no makeup and a kind of ceramicist or painterly vibe, like she’d rather be in a garret somewhere refining the brushstrokes on a broody masterpiece than listening to your insufferable twenty-year-old self blabber about how enlightening your Ethics of Pet Ownership class was. She was named for a freaking Leonard Cohen song. She was so much cooler than I was.
The significance of this story for this essay is the following: at the time, I wasn’t bothered at all by her disliking me. I could tell she didn’t, I felt it, and maybe I made some half-hearted attempts to win her over, but really, I didn’t care. I was cool. I was funny. I was a great person to hang out with if you had to earnestly call out “Skinny vanilla extra hot double shot tall latte for Veronica!” every three minutes and wanted to retain some sort of a soul. The other woman loved me and was so happy to see me every time I worked. I didn’t doubt myself, and I didn’t question myself, either.
Now, at age 42, I am both ashamed and envious of this person. For better and worse, over the course of the intervening two decades – and mostly due to the birth of my daughter – I have become much more self-aware. I have taken an eight-week meditation workshop. I have listened to podcasts about healing ancestral trauma and relating to difficult emotions and the evidence-based justification for loving-kindness. I have become familiar with the term “witch wound” and the mental health significance of the vagus nerve, and I have led a group of women in forcefully exhaling while saying “VOOO.” I have kept a moon journal. I have read The Body Keeps the Score. I have worried about being a good person.
With all of this comes a very mixed blessing: self-awareness. It turns out that becoming a “good” person – “good” meaning more thoughtful, more sensitive, more attuned to others and the world, less held hostage by overreaction and certainty – involves being acutely aware of all the ways in which one sucks.
In the past decade, I have cooked many dinners for my parents. I have called my mom on most days. I have taken care of friends’ children and homeschooled my kid and built community and fed my college student niece delicious food when she was stressed out and exhausted from exams.
I have also recognized all the ways in which I can be judgmental, righteous, overly certain, dogmatic, excessively extroverted, and on and on. One simple glance at my moon journal will reveal how often I have the same “intention” (“Try to exercise calm boundaries instead of shouting irritation when Elena throws a tantrum about not being allowed to eat marshmallows for breakfast!”) for about seven months on end. I have become aware of what gets in the way of me being a good person, and I care about it, and I work on it.
But sometimes this can lead to such an acute awareness of my flaws that I lose the confidence I used to have. Like most people, what makes me an interesting and compelling and attractive person who is good at what she does can also be what makes me a tedious and insufferable person who struggles! And this creates a paradox: how to retain that energy and vitality while also being aware of its shadow?
The twenty-year-old me didn’t care about being liked. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her dress or her opinions or her sense of humor or her desires, she was fully and completely herself, and the people who loved her, loved her, and she loved them back, fiercely, and the ones who didn’t, who cared?
But she was also not very interested in being a good person: she wasn’t very attuned to her own habits, reactions, patterns, some of which were destructive and self-centered and self-defeating. This 42-year-old version is highly aware of all that – but also, at times, so much harder on herself. So much less able to see what makes her, in all her quirks and difficulties, a beautiful person.
Bittersweetness, my friends, it’s the bittersweetness of growing up, always, all the time: you do it better, with more thought and nuance and care and sensitivity, and you also see all the ways you’ve messed up and continue to mess up. Please purchase my self-help book coming Spring 2025: Self Awareness Sucks!!!
It is this I’m thinking about as we roll into the Autumn Equinox on Sunday: the bittersweetness of becoming. The gift of it – sitting with difficult emotions, relearning our bodies, building community, seeking repair, doing intuition work, parenting and reparenting, whatever it may look or feel like for you – is the gradual deepening of integrity, self-knowing, love. A huge gift. And the difficulty is the regret of this one life being so short, so fraught, so full of human error.
Once you’ve committed to that path of awareness, you can’t un-commit. Can’t unsee yourself doing the same stupid things you’ve done for a long time that make you miserable, falling into the same behavior traps and patterns, flailing.
But also: can’t unsee the zinnias and the marigolds and the globe amaranth you’ve grown, which you give up forty-five minutes of peak afternoon productivity to cut and arrange; can’t unsee the choice to wait for a calm moment and not descend into blind rage with your husband about how the air conditioner window units are still in the window mid-September and are hideous eyesores blocking precious sunlight and he still hasn’t removed them despite many instances of polite asking; can’t unsee the network of neighborhood friendships you’ve built through exchanges of chores and eggs and flowers; can’t unsee your child reflecting back to you all your own longing and vulnerability. Can’t unsee the moon you choose to look at every morning, now in a diminishing gibbous on the cusp of fall, waning toward new.
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