I went to the beach yesterday and all I got was this overwhelming sense of serenity.
and I stole two sea shells
In All About Love, Bell Hooks says the following:
“The need for instant gratification is a component of greed. This same politics of greed is at play when folks seek love. They often want fulfillment immediately. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment. […] ‘dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling. […] More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands.”
In the past few months I have stumbled into a romantic endeavour. Stumble and endeavour are inherently oxymoronic — but that’s kind of what it was. I always view love as a demented treasure hunt. I believe every folly and foil actually gets you closer to the mythological prize at the end that may or may not exist. But I’m not really writing about love. It’s just that since I’ve entered a relationship with a promising amount of healthiness I have been semi-obsessive with reading and gathering information on how to love properly.
I’ve been doing so because I’ve decided I am genetically predisposed to terrible relationships the way you can be predisposed to heart disease or high cholesterol. So rather than eating cheerios I am scouring the most embarrassing sections of the bookstore and sandwiching books about boundaries and attachment theory, between interesting memoirs and essays so that the inevitable girl with blue hair and a septum ring at the checkout doesn’t think I’m a total loser.
So far though — the result has been, that all of this research is largely changing my relationship with society and modernity than it is romance. Learning about love, reading opinion-based, science-based, and artistic expressions about the concept, which every author, scientist, and guru has struggled to define in under 10 words or less, has made me look around at the world around me and realize the deficit of meaningful connection everyone is currently having with everything.
A few weeks ago I started getting this feeling that everyone was screaming at me. I would open my phone and scroll on instagram and consume the content my friends and strangers were creating — when I turned the sound off it all just began to look violent — even though the content is usually something adjacent to “WHY HE GHOSTED ME AND WHY I’M THE ONLY ONE TO EVER EXPERIENCE THIS ALSO BUY THESE LIFE CHANGING SPANX/PURSE/BODY WASH”
Every ad, sketch, reel, tik-tok, GRWM, aesthetic post, BUY THIS FACEWASH, LIKE ME! LIKE ME! LIKE ME! — it all felt violent and drenched in irony and I began to feel fatigued by the never-ending assault of content. Even outside of my phone, walking around Manhattan, everyone began to look like an aggressive billboard of self. But there is no self anymore — there is trend — and we are all at the mercy of trend. And trends change every second and the city began to look like a bunch of people flailing helplessly to the next trend.
I don’t think I’m above any of this. I wear Sambas, I wear Glossier You perfume, I make tragically cringe reels. But taking in so much information regarding love - one of the most authentic experiences we can partake in when done properly has colored my relationship with the experience of being a human in 2024 — where everything is grotesquely immediate.
Yesterday I did a show in Long Island just a few blocks from the beach. I was so eager to see the ocean because large bodies of water always give me what I need. I sat on the jetty in solitude with only the sound of waves crashing in front of me and looked at the very real ocean. The very real and tangible water and let it sink in that yes life is short and fast, but authenticity and truth are slow grown and hard-won.