glass half empty

Early in May, it seemed like my life started to come apart. I often feel like it’s all haphazardly stitched together anyway, a feeling that is exacerbated by my financial precarity, my ambivalence about my career and about living in New York, my flight instinct, my tendency towards self-sabotage. I like reading stories about people who blow their lives up in spectacular ways, often for nothing. I think they do it just to feel something, as people say. And although there are a lot of things that concretely hold a life together, love and friendship, personal responsibility, feeling grounded somewhere, an idea of higher purpose, a lot of the things that make up our lives are also artificial. That doesn’t make them less real. You have to live in the life you’re in after all.

I was thinking about this because I saw Past Lives in June, which I really liked and also found devastating. There’s a lot of narrative threads to it about immigration and about destiny and being an artist. But the cor…