wherever you go, there you are
Dear Chuckry,
You’ll get braces next year, and soon after that, you’ll get those baby rubber bands to clamp your jaws together. Your mouth will remind your peers of a miniature UFC arena. Don’t feel bad about this, just keep it in mind. Also, prepare to smile with your mouth closed and to brush all three dimensions of your teeth.
Not to shame you, or anything. Sorry. I’m sure you’re happily swinging your lightsaber at imaginary villains in the basement, but I’d like to interrupt for a moment to perform our routine Check In. Hopefully, some of the advice that I’m here to give you will change your future and lead to a different me, one with a more fulfilling life.
I hope eighth grade is going well. Now that you’ve finally gotten a decent haircut and have shaved your juvenile scruffstache, you should be off to a good start. However, if I recall correctly, by now, you will have developed an uncanny talent for deducing other students’ class schedules based on your knowledge of when each eighth grade teacher has class. You will have used this knowledge to peer into the lives of classmates you don’t know personally, imagining their classroom experience, like whether or not they liked the Bunsen burner experiment that Mr. Lalko showed your own class in first period. Maybe just write your findings down and silently discard them instead of sharing them with your soon-to-feel-unsafe peers.
Anyways, there are parts of eighth grade that you will enjoy, like memorizing Lil Wayne songs and there are others you’ll detest, like lacking friends who truly understand you. Over the course of this year, you’ll build certain expectations about your future before realizing they were wrong and stomping them out like a dying campfire.
For example, you may expect that high school will be scary, and that you’ll find it hard to fit in. This isn’t quite true. High school is a weird sort of jungle. In high school, students are really just animals pretending to be people. They aren’t yet fully developed and all have gaping insecurities, so they behave more formally than they really are so that no one will laugh at them. Everybody wants to fit in, but nobody ever really does. There’s nothing really to fit into.
You are no exception. You’re sort of like a panda hyena pretending not to be. People think you’re kind, shy, patient and also a little erratic, silly, and energetic. In a couple of years, you’ll develop a crush on a classmate, and you two will eventually watch Hop together and often send each other (you guessed it) rap lyrics vaguely describing your moods. It’ll feel like something romantic is a-blossoming. Unfortunately, she’ll make an excuse to power walk away when you ask her out after the last class is dismissed. Maybe she really doesn’t like hyenas, maybe she has internalized racial standards for attractiveness, maybe she just power walks to improve joint health. Who knows. You two aren’t meant to be together.
College is a little different. It has a looser structure than high school, so you get to make your own choices. You will think you’re free when you’re in college. It’s not so easy as that. You will participate in your college’s culture as well, sucked into the institution’s gravity. I know you don’t and never have cared about sports, but you’ll learn that it’s instrumental to your school’s reputation. At your huge school, everybody drinks for a whole day to support their favorite ball players. The ball players unfortunately won’t know exactly how many of their fellow students intoxicated themselves for them, but legend has it that a higher power communicates this in the form of turnovers and Hail Marys.
And you’ll actually be a little bit worse off, because you’ll participate in the celebrations without tuning into the game. Many people do this, leeching off the festivities without really showing up for them, and soon you’ll realize that it’s really the other way around, that the ball players are supporting us, sacrificing their time and energy to create something that us spectators can be a part of.
It’ll go this way for other events too outside of ball playing. There will be so many celebrations coming your way. Anything can become an excuse to celebrate heavily, like the end of a week of school, the first day of spring, the day that your old friends come to visit, the night after a project is due. Some of these will feel empty, while others feel earned.
You have the opportunity to change your Certain Futures. I also have some new Experiential Wisdoms for you to learn from as well. As always, I’m legally obligated to let you know that these rules will not benefit me personally—your reactions to this advice will cascade forward and help another Chuckry from some alternate reality instead of me. I hope you find it valuable.
Play air guitar for longer than the recommended time frame. I remember when we were in like second grade and we went to the planetarium with Amma and Daddy for some fancy science show. We got there super early. Music played as people got seated, and kids were dancing on the center stage area near the edge of the dome where they’d project images during the show. After feeling torn on whether or not we wanted to dance, we got down there and bopped around with the rest. We air guitared well after the introductory music stopped, after all the other kids left to their seats. I don’t remember people’s reactions. In that moment, it didn’t concern us, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we received a standing ovation and rose bouquets rained down at our feet.
Never let other people’s reactions deter you. They may just not understand you. There’s no reason for you to get discouraged from dancing and singing in the hallway after school’s dismissal bells ring, even if your future English teacher gawks at you in shock.Listen to death metal for a week. You’ve got your own taste, but you don’t explore it as often as you should. Spend some time going to clothes stores other than Kohl’s, watching different shows and movies than your friends, and listening to different kinds of music. Right now, Amma and Daddy are your real only channels to the outside world, you sibling-less hermit, you. After (far more than) enough time, you’ll tire of her religious hymns and his classic rock. Try listening to something crazier. Freak people out a little bit with your edginess. You will be surprised at what you really like.
And about that—there’s something you should know in advance. In about six years or so, you’ll develop a massive crush on hip hop music. Amma and Daddy will still get scared when I mention it—they shake their heads and wave their hands in the air at the existence of such a vulgar expression of heart (or something like that)—but I’m working on it. You can help me out now by placing headphones on them while they sleep and playing low-volume Ja Rule for a few hours until they wake. They will wake up anew—open minded and always on time.Challenge your friends to YuGiOh duels. Share your weird hobbies and jokes with other people! Play lightsabers and card games and Harry Potter with real people instead of with imaginary bad guys that you invent to maximize drama. You’re too young to be a recluse. Or at the least, you’re too young to be a good recluse. Most underage recluses get cocky and think they can out-recluse their elders, like practiced swamis and jobless adult only children.
Don’t be afraid that people will think you’re weird for the things you like. You have so many people in your life, but you keep them at a distance. Invite your classmates over to play video games or watch a movie together. Talk to your parents about what made you angry today. Or ditch that and ask them what they want to do. Invent a new dance. Cook something with a secret ingredient and sell it online. Boil a few eggs, draw faces on them, and glue them to the front of your shirt. I don’t care. Just have some good old-fashioned fun with other people.Boycott Rotten Tomatoes. I’m warning you that ahead of you are years of reading the AV Club’s reviews for every episode of every TV show that you dearly love. If you don’t yet know what the AV Club is, it’s a website that tells you opinions you should have on shows, movies, and music. Don’t absorb too much of this critical energy, even if everything is ratable online. Create something of your own instead of treating somebody else’s work like a pincushion. Write your own song and play it on oboe instead of lamenting your favorite artist’s decline.
Treat your life the way Brian Jacques wrote Redwall. Finding your place in college will feel like endless red herring after red herring. You’ll often feel like you’ve reached a natural conclusion about what your life will be like until something new comes up, changes everything, and ends up being a similar journey to the one you just finished. It’s sort of like those Redwall books that you read. The first book was great, with action and adventure and schemes and plots. But then they released a sequel, Mossflower, that was great, but it was sort of the same story as Redwall set in a different time and place. It was hard to feel as enthusiastic when the formula repeated itself. Then, Brian Jacques released twenty-something more books that all borrowed from each other, and while it felt necessary to read all of them, it became a chore.
What I’m saying is, at several points in high school and college and beyond, you’ll feel like you’re complete; you’ll think that you found your group, your interests, and yourself. You’ll study computer science and will travel across the country on a competitive all-male Bollywood Fusion dance team, and then one day your sophomore year, a group of outspoken nerds will announce during your morning algorithms course that there’s a technology fraternity open house event next weekend and then you’ll scratch your chin and narrow your eyes and realize with a snap of your stubby fingers that no, you thought you had it all figured out, but these godsends, these reddit-lurking geek evangelists showed you that there’s a whole community of technologically savvy dudes and dames that were missing from your life, and you’ll eject yourself from the dance team after joining this new group, finally content with your life, until you break down about a year later at a party when you realize that you miss writing and you want to make fiction, so you add a Creative Writing minor with only three semesters left in school and thus have less time for your new geek friends.
Your story will constantly change. Don’t stop living it just because you think it’s become too predictable, or because you think you’re repeating the same mistakes. You are not a three-act play or a Coca-Cola advertisement or a soap opera. You are a lifetime of a man, and you will grow.
Sorry to get all heavy on you. I just want you to know what’s in store for you. You can do all the things I’m telling you are valuable and skip the hard parts. Join the technology geek group and the dance team as soon as you enter college. Don’t party so hard to fit in with the rest. Choose a Creative Writing minor within the first month of college. You’ll check all the main to-dos off your list so fast. It’d be awesome! You can live a life that both of us will want, without wasting time pursuing things that ultimately prove fruitless.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s…a little too easy. Anyways.
As for me? I’m doing well. I’m doing much better than you could have imagined. There are some changes coming for me. I’m starting a project here in Seattle in the next few months. I want South Asian middle school kids to learn to express themselves through writing. Not to get better at English class, or to get published, but to have fun. I want to set up a recurring writing workshop that teaches kids how to process their own experiences and share it with others. Imagine if we had that! I’d have my own show on Viceland by now.
I’ll also be moving to New York City some time this year. Seattle is too rainy and lonely for me. What’s crazy is that I realized I don’t have to stay there. Isn’t that funny? At your age, you probably feel like you’re stuck wherever you are. I remember feeling like I couldn’t change my own life. That will go away soon. Don’t you worry.
You don’t know much about New York yet, do you? It’s okay—neither do I, honestly. I know that there are more people there, more activities, more color and diversity, and more friends there. I think I like not knowing much about it. It’s exciting to throw myself into a new situation, especially since I have good friends in that area. Do you feel that way? When was the last time you threw yourself into something new? I know you can’t respond, but the question’s been on my mind.
Okay, I’ll admit something before I check out. I’m a little afraid that things won’t change when I move to New York. What if I bring my discontentment with Seattle with me? Sort of like how you expected middle school to be this automatic upgrade from elementary school, but in many ways, it was the same problems just shuffled around. Same annoying people, just bigger; same underwhelming teachers, just more of them. It’s just a thought, though. I’ll make it work. Send me some positive energy.
I hope that the alternate version of me that you created by following my Experiential Wisdoms feels happy and fulfilled. Maybe you’ve hit a different set of hard choices and will write the eighth grade me a different letter detailing your alternative missteps. Or maybe you didn’t follow any of this advice, and you will become me, writing a letter to yourself from twelve years ago. Do what’s right for you, and don’t worry too much about me. I’m happy exactly where I am.
Love,
Chuckry