How to get worse

Joan Miró, Painting (Man with Pipe), 1925. Oil on canvas.

There seems to exist an overwhelming and almost all consuming amount of material on the internet currently about how to become your “best self”. 21 day challenges, journal prompts, Substack entries, you name it, it’s there, purporting that doing this “one thing” or changing your mindset in just one area of your life will have a ripple effect across all the other facets. Relationships, career, friendships, health, wealth, goals. Reassess, rework, refine. Maximize, maximize, maximize. Better, better, better. 

Well I’m here to tell you how to get worse. How to become someone you never could imagine becoming due to the wincing disgust that immediately overcomes your body when you so much as ponder beyond three seconds about how they live their lives. I’m talking about being an adult.

Specifically, the ones that I always pitied and despised. Yes, tender-hearted Alara is capable of despising someone, but I really only feel so because I feel a sense of grief for whatever caused them to become that way, something that they couldn’t overcome that caused them to turn callous and bitter. Their wounds transmute into fangs that they then use to bark and snarl at others. This type of adult you see, is someone without whimsy, without the ability to laugh at themselves, and without the resolve to take agency in their life. They are the antithesis to what the main character of a Studio Ghibli film is like - brave, curious, resilient, optimistic, adaptable, charitable, openhearted - I could continue at length. 

There is a misattributed quote to Kurt Vonnegut, that actually belongs to the poet Iain Thomas, that affected me greatly as a young teenager and has never left my mind since first reading it. When I first came across it all those years ago, it at once befuddled and moved me, lodging itself neatly in a corner of my mind as if some sort of sermon heard at church, which was how I viewed many books and pithy quotes due to my multireligious and ultimately agnostic upbringing. Literature was my religion, authors were my prophets, and goddamnit I was going to follow their word! 

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.” These words were relatively easy to follow at first, as your classic high school hardships are generally not unique in the form they take - heartbreak, academic failure, etc - although it may feel like the end of the world at the time. The real testament to one’s ability to follow these guiding words is when life throws unmanageable, uniquely, and piercingly painful experiences your way. Which happens to coincide nicely with becoming an adult, leaving behind the utopia that is college, with its walkable distances, constant new experiences, and close-knit in-person friendships. 

Out here, my problems are often caused by myself or are my own to unpack, not the result of some crazy professor nor solved by pouring a glass of wine and venting with my roommates. No, no, these problems are much more grave and philosophical in nature. Am I meant to be doing this? Why did this happen to me? Am I a bad person? How can I go on from here? How do I sweep up the pieces and start again? Will you still be my friend if the only thing I can do is breathe and exist? 

You see, I have become that very person that I pitied and despised just a handful of years ago. I let my pain wear me down, dry me up, and leave me barren, and when I could finally stand up to look at the damage I had suffered, I could barely recognize myself. I felt, and quite truthfully still feel sometimes, threadbare, like I could be blown away at any given moment. I couldn’t laugh at myself, as I had done all my life at my previous hardships, I could barely stand to look at  myself. I was the embodiment of embarrassment, shame, and guilt and I felt myself closing off from those who loved me. I’ve never been good at communication and keeping up with texts and calls, but this was new. I no longer wanted to talk to anyone because of how embarrassing it felt to be hurt, stuck, and confused. 

As Olivia Laing says in The Lonely City, Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, “I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.” 

I have spent so many months now trying to get back to the person I was before these issues arose; the post-grad me who felt confident, jubilant, intelligent, and hopeful, only to recently realize that there is more likely than not, no me to go back to. Rather, there is this me, the me I can work on shaping into something new and different than before who will hopefully have many of the qualities that I like but also some new ones, like the knowledge that existence and self-worth aren’t earned through accomplishments but rather exist inherently in all of us. 

I am still hurt, stuck, and confused but I now know that that will probably be the baseline for existing as a human from here on out. Rather than trying to diminish these feelings or avoid experiences that cause them, thus shrinking my world, I need to learn how to embrace them and recognize that one, others feel similarly and two, the only way to grow is from no longer stroking our wounds.

If you’re like me and find self-help cheesy to read and even cheesier to write, tend to prefer sordid and sardonic writing to chirpy and formal writing, and are still wondering how to become worse, you’re in luck. I’m no master yet, but I have a pretty stellar track record as a student in that exact area. A few ideas to get you going: blame yourself for the struggles thrown your way, constantly wonder what you could have done differently, give into anxious beliefs and habits, throw discipline to the wind and marry caution, sleep with fear and have sex with shame, make enemies with creativity and best friends with dissociation, break up with hope and get drunk with guilt. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll see me there periodically too, chasing a bout of bad luck with some fresh squeezed self sabotage.