arriving where we already are
This Week in Reading
How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti
How Should a Person Be exists somewhere between essay and novel and nonfiction. Written by Sheila Heti, it centers around a protagonist named Sheila as she contemplates the titular question of the book. It includes recorded conversations between Shelia and her best friend Margaux, Heti’s real life friend, to whom the novel is dedicated. Though it follows a linear timeline, it is less of a novel and more of a meditation on being, art, and friendship.
Is a self a thing made or a thing born? Or is it, as a framed TJ Maxx quote might propose, a thing found? I never know where I settle on the matter. To state the obvious, I have a very strong personality. Sometimes, when I am being particularly stubborn and Minnar is feeling a little bit less generous, she will tell me that I have too rigid of a sense of self. I tend to speak in absolutes, present personal truths as a five paragraph essay that comes with a tidy conclusion. Some people bend to fit their surroundings, allow themselves to be shaped by the things around them. Other people assume that the world will bend around them. I fall under the latter category. At my best, I create shapes that other people enjoy fitting into, make spaces that allow them to feel like funnier, better, sharper, versions of themselves. At my worst, I am at odds with my environment— too loud, too mean, too much in general.
At the same time, I am unwilling to cede agency, to forsake the idea that I cannot mold myself into whatever future vision of self pleases me best. There is no excuse to not be your own favorite person. Yours is the only identity you are allowed to control. If there are things about yourself that annoy you, you can change them, if you are faced with a personality quirk that irritates you, fix it. You like the same things as yourself, and hate all the same things. There is no one in the world you have more in common with.
If you wish you were a different kind of person, becoming that person is as easy as doing the things that type of person would do. I wish I were the type of person that could pack up their car and move across the country, I wish I were the sort of person that does roller derby, or could go to the movies alone, or woke up at 6:30 in the morning everyday. But of course, the only difference between being the kind of person who does a thing and the kind of person who doesn’t, is simply doing that thing. The second you slam the trunk of your car and drive across the country is the second that you become the kind of person that does.
I have a strong sense of self, but moreover, I have made strong choices about who I am, am unyielding in those decisions. I have always carried myself with a great deal of certainty; for better or worse, I rarely go back on my decisions, I am here to go down with the ship.
I talk about this dumb lifestyle-y thing I do a lot, but bear with me: a couple years back I identified 3-5 main priorities in my life, and wrote them on a post it note in the front of my planner. (Mine are: art, friendship, learning, and money). When I write out my planner for the week, I include a task every day for each of these categories. They can be as small as texting a friend that lives far away, or ordering art supplies online, or reading a book or dealing with my bank account. I rarely get all four done in one day, but sometimes I do, and regardless, it is more of an exercise in trying to become the person I want to be.
Heti writes that she has friends that “like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.” Sheila Heti wants to exist solely in her active state. She wants to be defined by her choices, by the things she has decided for and about herself, rather than simply being known and accepted for what she is. More simply, she wants to be the one defining her character.
I too, am always striving, am always trying to become. It is exhausting to constantly be pushing for more. What if-- I already am? Ambition is a form of imposter syndrome, a fixation on moving up and stretching forward, built on the assumption that we are currently down and back. The concept that we are what we do, that we are an extension of the things we create, is simply a symptom of capitalism. We don’t have value until we prove it. You are not a person until you decide what a person should be.
At its best moments, How Should a Person Be is neurotically brilliant. At its worst, it is shapeless and self-indulgent. The novel starts off promising but ends up baggy and how do I put this— grotesquely heterosexual— in a way that was meant to be provocative but is instead merely crude.
How should a person be? Is that something we even get to decide? Near the end of the book Margaux accuses Sheila of assuming that she wasn’t someone already. That because she had not yet decided how to be, she was not yet anything, and therefore her actions did not affect other people. To assume that we have not yet become is to assume that we do not cast a shadow, that we do not leave behind a wake as we move across the world.
We are what we choose to be, but we have made a hundred thousand choices already. Choosing to choose is a choice that already exists in the past tense. At 25, most of my peers are grappling with the realities of adulthood. I am still waiting to be an adult, I often hear, I’m not grown up yet. But of course, we have. This is it. We are waiting to arrive at the place we have been the whole time.
Studio-ing
I’m going to be in a show in December! It’s called Present Tense and it is being put together by the Good Company collective. Its up for just one weekend: December 1st-2nd. I’ll share more details about the opening closer to then.
Further Reading:
A very different sort of meditation on being: Upstream by Mary Oliver, one of the most tender writers we have left.