you'll start happening, too

Summer is here. There is a deep urge that always accompanies summer - the desire to hide, to escape, to curl up into myself. I was born in July, and I always believed that this cocooning was my body’s way of telling me that I need to shed my old skin and become something impossible and new. The sentiment is tempting, a glass-half-full way of looking at the periodic stabs of pain I’ve been feeling. It is so tempting that I tell myself: why not just try?

I’ve been thinking a lot about mistakes and stagnancy. Mistakes are what make us human, of course. Growing up, everyone teaches you that mistakes are a part of life, and yet in adulthood, mistakes are rarely and seldom forgiven. When you mess up, you still have the feeling that you need to hide the evidence, as if your failings are a sub-par grade on your report card that you feel might upset your parents. The human tendency to wade into what is not said and run with what is makes sense for children. Children are always forgiven. Our imperfections are etched into each hug, each smile, each pat on the back: it’s okay if you mess up. There’s always tomorrow.

One of my favorite stories from childhood, Oh, The Places You’ll Go, has a lot to say about mistakes. Through a simple, melodic rhyme scheme, I learned that I am not the product of my mistakes:

It is indeed true: bang-ups and hang-ups can happen to you. They’ve happened to me in droves. Sometimes trouble just finds you, and sometimes, blind-sided, you walk right into it, like a moth hovering around uncertain darkness, searching for a flame. This part is true as well: some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.

I think I’ve written about this before, and somehow, that makes it worse. The feeling that you constantly re-live your mistakes on a giant loop. I am like a child who doesn’t understand fractions no matter how many times I repeat them, and my report card is a reflection of that. In my naivete, I repeat old narratives, always hoping for a different ending. I think I make the mistake of thinking that everyone is like me. That everyone is wide-eyed, hopeful, holding onto that child inside of them. The thing is that people can wear masks and pretend that they are. When people put on a mask, they can look a lot like you. It can be impossible to differentiate the light from the dark.

I wonder what the solution is to this. Should I get wiser, stiffer, or should I not let the soft parts of me succumb to the pressures and evils of the world? I’m beginning to think that the answer is some other, third thing, between logic and love, softness and rigidity. Maybe the solution is to be yourself but only allow yourself to be fully seen and accessed by people who truly deserve it, lest the wrong ones steal your light.

Interestingly enough, there were so many parallels between the short story collection I just published and my real life, although I wrote it over the course of the past two years sporadically and in no particular order. One of my stories, “Rooms,” deals with a middle-aged man who hates his life and adopts escapism and dissociation by using online chat rooms. Another story, “Baby,” is about a young woman who, thinking she met the man of her dreams who somehow meets all her expectations, gets her hopes up, only to find out that there is a bitter irony in getting everything you wished for.

Both of these characters feel exhausting to read about; they were equally exhausting to write. I wanted to shake them so many times; to demand they wake up and see the world for what it is. At my book reading, so many people said that they deeply resonate with Anna from “Baby”: “she’s been through so much, and yet she doesn’t lose hope.” Suddenly, she didn’t seem so annoying and childish and pathetic. She seemed hopeful and strong and optimistic, even when she was surrounded by negativity.

“I resonate with her, too,” I found myself saying. What I really wanted to say was: “I wrote her because she reminded me of myself.”

My Snapchat memories show me photos of myself in college. I was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, with a chubbier face, bad highlights, and thicker eyebrows. The world somehow felt so small and simultaneously, like my oyster. Life turned out so differently than how I expected it to. Better in some ways, worse in others, but overall, more challenging and grueling than I could have ever thought. I learned about all that darkness I mentioned earlier. I hid from it and cried. I faced it head-on.

I think the biggest takeaway I could offer after my reflection on the past ten years is that you can’t undo your life. Things happen. It can feel so tempting to run away, to avoid those dark corners of the Earth, to forget your mistakes, but it’s futile. The world is what it is, and your decisions have been made, and it’s comforting, in a sense, to know what there’s no turning back. Things happen, but like Dr. Seuss said, you’ll start happening, too.

You will learn and make mistakes and grow and face the darkness and come out on the other side and maybe even enlighten someone. You will feel good. You will feel bad. You will slowly feel good again. Life is cyclical, complex, beautiful, grueling. Those things are not inherently bad or good: they’re whatever you make of them, whatever you allow to happen.

When I was walking in the park near my house today, I saw that they were painting over the water towers. It felt so metaphorical and guided and right. At the time I needed to see this the most.

It is never too late, I surmised, to be brand new. It is never too late to start over. The old parts of you will always be there, under the surface, but that’s for the best. It’s so that even when life gets confusing and hard, you remember all the things you’ve been through and all the times you stood up. You keep going. You light a candle in the dark.

I posted this photo of the towers on my Instagram story. Someone replied: “Samira you’re right on time!” This, too, was serendipitous. I suppose that I am.