Inner Worlds

I have been thinking almost continuously about inner worlds, about who has access to ours and how they show up in the world.

I have always thought of myself as someone with a very rich inner life. It is very present to me, as present as the real world. Clearly it is my real world. I don’t know if anything can be made to count as much as our inner lives do. I have expressed mine in varying ways across the almost three decades I have been alive. I have written a lot of poetry, tried to write some songs, made some music, penned countless blog posts like this one on a wide variety of websites and apps and whatever else. I have talked so, so much about my feelings. I have paid one person to listen to me talk about them, and my mother has paid three others. All these things I think and feel are what I hold onto most sincerely, the core of me. When my mother asked me about a month ago what I most value, I said the ability to identify and express emotions. I don’t know that we do much else in life, aside from engage in forced labor under capitalism.

It is sort of magical to have access to something as interesting as ourselves. In all my life I will never sort through it all. I look forward to the changing experience of being me. And I think it is important to me that my inner world belongs only to me. I make choices about who gets to be part of it—and which part they get to be part of. I am aware of the pieces that stay behind in side me, or that get dispersed in conversations with the people I have allowed to see those specific pieces. Having that control, and feeling able to share the parts I want to share when I want to share them, is it. It is all of me.

It is so normal and natural to wish we could gain entry to other people’s internal worlds; we obsess over the idea of mind-reading. Yet when supernatural mind-readers are portrayed in narrative, we seem to forget that other people’s thoughts are as messy and complex as ours. I am reminded of the restaurant scene in Twlight, where Stephanie Meyer in her desire to differentiate Edward and Bella from the rest of human(oid) kind has Edward relay the various thoughts of other diners. In my memory, they’re all things like money, sex, and cat (?). Our thoughts are the extensions, part and parcel, of our inner worlds. And the other diners’ inner worlds are plain. They are not the windy and disastrous and evil and funny and nice things that make up our real inner worlds. And Bella, of course, is impenetrable to Edward (and “impenetrable” has a lot of meanings here). Her mind is unreadable, which I think is to say that it is not like the other minds in the room. She is somehow more complex; her inner world is sprawling. It certainly can’t be distilled down to “cat.” In Stephanie Meyer’s writing, Edward sees Bella as the exception. Hers is the only inner world that he recognizes as the mess that it probably is, the same kind of mess he knows his own to be.

Why do we place these limits on other peoples’ subjectivity? The inner worlds of us, however we happen to be defining that at the moment, are much more complex than theirs. And either way, we want access. We want to believe that there is something to be gleaned for us from another person’s internal self.

My core belief is that there is no translation for the inner worlds of other people other than the ones they offer. We cannot project our thinking onto those worlds. We cannot mind-read—not just because we are not in the Twilight or whatever universe, but because human thoughts cannot be distilled in that way. They are utterly subjective and when someone lets you into theirs, you must take it at face value. Don’t try to put it into Google Translate. They don’t have a setting for that, and you don’t know what language it is anyway.

As I am thinking about who has wanted access to my inner world, as I think about how I am feeling all of my fragmented selves coming together this fall after a year of scattering, I am thinking that there is power in that lack of translation. It is beautiful to have something that only belongs to me.

Time’s Gone Inside Out

I knew this period of my life would end and at times I willed it into existence. I have been a constant surveyor of “normalcy.” I have seen it in this blog over and over; it is clear it is on my mind. At the same time that I feel a sense of normal. I feel time slipping past me in the way it always does in spring. I am reminded of my senior spring, when on the first warm day I sat outside on a bench with the boy I liked, drinking Jack’s Hard Cider. Those kinds of days passed very quickly. In some ways, I wanted them to (so I could enter the big, confusing rest-of-my-life I had been promised after college). But in retrospect, they ended and I missed them. I think I get this feeling every time it gets warm. Living is a very cyclical thing.

A few weeks ago, I biked to Fuxing Rd. and drank a beer outside, completely without cares. It is the epitome of springtime to get a little drunk in the sunshine. Before my friends showed up, a very little old lady approached me and asked me something about Russia in Chinese. I am often mistaken for Russian, so I told her that I am an American. She nodded knowingly and started singing a little song. I believe it to be a tiny Russian tune. Now there is covid all over Shanghai and these kinds of interactions feel less likely.

When I say there is covid “all over” Shanghai, I mean that there are like 100 cases or less and they are extremely contained by all the policies and infrastructure that China has built over the last two years. But yesterday afternoon our whole university was called to return to the building and get covid tested onsite. We were afraid we could be locked in the building for 48 hours or more if it was discovered someone was a close contact (or worse, a covid case), as many people have in the last weeks and months. But all 1800 tests came back negative. We scanned a QR code to view our own results, stamped in red by the Chinese government. It was the kind of beautiful bureaucratic situation I have come to expect from living here.

There has been a real panic in the building. Classes have voluntarily gone online and our office will be alternating in-person and remote days. The risk is still incredibly low, but the logic is that if only half of us are in the building when it is locked down, then only half of us will be trapped. Not sure if that is exactly the mode of thinking we should be going with, but it is also characteristic of my experience in this institution. It feels a bit like March 2020 again, and these are feelings that I had a) forgotten and b) hoped to never feel again. Yet this time it is not the virus that is unfamiliar to me, but the government that is tasked with containing it. This is a very interesting time to be here and in some ways, time is really all I am thinking about.

Things Left in Closets

Recent events have put me back in my old Philadelphia house. I often think about former homes in terms of their requirements for cleaning. I know the scratches in the floor of the Tulip Street house because I used to Swiffer mop it every week. I know the corners of the room I came of age in because I used to sweep it. I know the weird floorboards and fireplaces of my Bryn Mawr life because I was constantly battling 1880s dust bunnies. I’m not quite sure yet how I will remember this apartment. Maybe the wad of hair that the washer exposes every time it spin-cycles itself out of its nook.

In the Philadelphia house, there was a thin sheet of metal that reinforced the right edge of the closet, some quickie renovation blemish. There was a very small crack between the sheet and the doorframe. When I first moved in, I shoved a bunch of discarded wall art and a loose shelf from my IKEA desk in there. Every time I vacuumed the closet, I’d make a mental note not to forget those things were there. When I gave away my desk when I moved out, I had to run up the stair to grab that leaf of particle board: and here’s a shelf! I think I remembered taking everything out of that crack when I left, but my move was chaotic and full of grief and my mother was determined to make good time to Pittsburgh. I never really got a chance to sit in that room and thank it for the two really messy years I spent growing up there.

Now that there is just a spring ahead of my move back to America, I have been thinking a lot about the process of leaving. I have accumulated so many belongings here, mainly the twins of things I had in the US. There is no reason to bring these duplicates back: they’d be expensive to ship and once back, what would I do with 3 IKEA lamps and a giant blanket? They are relics of this time. They won’t fit in a future life. I don’t know what to do with them. I think of them like the items left behind in Pripyat, Ukraine. They won’t decay for 35 years, but somehow that possibility seems more comforting than the image of a hotel staff member coming across them and disposing of them.

I am looking for connection. I try to remind myself that this is human, part of this experience. Sometimes it just feels weak.

Consistency

I refuse to have New Years resolutions, for a thousand reasons. More interestingly, though, I can’t make any resolutions because I am stubbornly always going to be this person.

Tonight Cheng Mun and I Zoomed with some potential fellows for next year. Afterwards, she read some of her old application essays aloud. I hadn’t saved mine to my computer, so I had to log into Interfolio to see what I had written for my own. Just under a year later, it is interesting to see what I was thinking at the time and what I thought the application readers would want to read from me. I wrote those essays in a few hours in early January, at the kitchen table on Tulip Street, a glass of sour beer next to me. Reading them again, I could’ve written them now. Some lines are slightly more cogent versions of sentences that appeared in my PhD applications. Some pieces of that application were eloquent (and at the time, I felt certain that they would be well received) and I am glad I got to read them again. At the same time, I am filled with a little bit of sadness about what I thought would be desired of me in this job and how horribly it contrasts with what has actually been expected. All of the things I wrote, the things I thought I was hired for, have been received with confusion when I have voiced them here. In my IEP, I have had to spend a lot of time explaining why the things that I am knowledgable about are true and real and important. In the application process, I thought the fact of my hiring was proof that those things were also valued here.

I knew I would be hired for the job. I said many times that I did not know how it would turn out, but that I would be very surprised if I did not end up with a job offer. Now I wonder what about me seemed desirable. Did I seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t try to put up a fight or try to change things? My mother says that her best friends always says that when you get a job or acceptance, it’s also a little bit of an insult. They see something in you. You can’t always be sure the thing they see is your talent. Maybe it is just your willingness to go along with some idea they have about the world.