whimsy-maxxing
how inevitable is a fall?
is what I have been saying lately as my friends and I enjoy the last (not-so-last! there is still August!) bits of New Haven summer, relishing the sweet balance of a bright sun with just enough of a breeze to lessen the beatdown of the heat. Whimsy being the stand-in for whatever activity we have planned, or the spontaneous stops in our day, or the unplannedness of nothing at all.
The maxxing trend, obviously, began with the popularization of looksmaxxing, and maxxing refers to the maximization of something for purposes of productivity. To reach the full potential of something, for maximum output. Become the hottest version of yourself, get the most out of your one-hour gym session, your twenty-four-hour day, your five-day work week, your brief window of time to meal prep, your financial investments, whatever whatever. Whimsy-maxxing is a recent variation of this trend, invoked on social media in a manner akin to the “romanticize your life” trend, which is two degrees from, really, the cottagecore aesthetic and the “oh to be a country mouse” of it all, all of which have had their thinkpieces and video essays made about them, the unavoidable racialized and class-obscuring undertones, especially when used to willfully ignore how this vision of a “good life” is really, just, one particular form. And I think about all those things. They’re in the air when I wake up and (try to, every day) write lines into my creative writing notebook (separate from my dissertation notebook, and my planner) for ten minutes each morning, the way Catherine Barnett does (can you tell I’m still thinking about the Poetry & Practice workshop from May?), remembering what she said, too, that most of the lines she writes are shit. Catherine Barnett writes shit??? I thought to myself in the Beinecke classroom, befuddled. The week of workshops gave me permission to devolve. Craft is not about perfection. Craft is practice, and craft is openness. Craft is daring to enjoy what you feel when you feel it.
I suppose the case can be made that anything can be whimsical, which is perhaps the point. Not to maxx out on whimsy, but to enjoy something. Without, for a moment, justifying or ethicizing. Not willful ignorance. Just remembering to live—and, perhaps, trusting that you might just be good at it, if you remember to try not to try so much.
cw: mentions of suicidal ideation
I used to talk more about my experiences with depression, in part because it provided empirical evidence that I had dealt with serious shit™ in my life. “Maybe don’t be as explicit,” someone once said after one of my personal essays had been published online, and I had been a bit offended at the time. Was I too much? Was I being seen as too much, for being who I was and being honest about it?
Looking back, I would recognize a distinction between honesty and transparency, and how insecurity operates between the two terms. I recently reread an essay from that time in my life (those first few years of out of undergrad), expecting to cringe from embarrassment, and actually what I found was an assurance that “this is not as bad as I feared it would be.” Like, Karis, remember, a literary journal chose to publish this, and nominated it for a prize.
I am praised a lot for my honesty nowadays, I wrote when I was twenty-one, almost twenty-two, which is interesting because it’s when I’m being honest that I’m most worried about being dishonest. Like I’m deploying my honesty because I know that’s what works, that’s what endears me to people. At the same time, I cannot help the things that come out of my mouth and I am very much at the mercy of the person sitting across from me as I helplessly watch, eyes crossed, my guts push out from between my teeth and spill onto the table. I am terrified of being perceived as a too-earnest child and nothing more, but this is the only way I know how to be that feels the closest I can ever get to “true.”
The past four years have more or less confirmed that there are people who will, as the last sentence gestured, misunderstand the honesty as precarity. As a permanent existential state of helplessness, like an infant, rather than the active choice of someone who, time and time again, feels that a life without truth is unbearable, and will always, even under duress, make the choice to do the brave thing than fake something she doesn’t mean at all. And to see me as such is a choice, too, ignorance at best and a willful lie at worst, ignoring the rest of the evidence. It’s strength, not weakness, to not hide or obscure or pretend to be blase about the life I want to live. And to not apologize for it. Am I a dick for liking my life? In all its ups and downs, but without making caveats for them. Happiness is not, you know, a zero-sum game. It doesn’t have to be, if we’re honest.
Being happy now, daring to say things like “I’m having a good day” or “I’m very happy/excited about [this thing],” to crack jokes and retell nostalgic childhood stories and reference unhinged parts of Gen Z Internet humor, to laugh so hard happy tears are coming out of my eyes, to be human and vulnerable but positive and healing, will never be enough for some people, apparently, who speak down to me about mental illness and hardship as though I will never understand, who never seem to believe I deserve respect because have I “really suffered.” Because I have never been on SSRIs, or ever been hospitalized, or proven myself to be close enough to death to legitimate “real” sympathy. The poetry that alarmed a teacher so much she called my parents. A journal entry I shared only with my sophomore year English teacher. Multiple drafts of suicide letters in my personal documents, some of which I finished, wondering who might actually miss me if I followed through. Not enough, I suppose. It’s only enough if I actually disappear.
“Well, Karis has never experienced failure in her life,” a real person said once, who had no evidence to prove it.
“Bullshit,” says my sister, with whom I shared a room nearly every year of my life until college. “I watched you struggle. I watched you survive.”
What a privilege it is to get to enjoy the life I live, especially when this was not always the case. I won’t apologize for that. And I don’t need to prove that to anyone.
It’s hard to be happy for other people’s happiness. And I think the sooner we admit that, the better our relationships will actually be, because we’ll know where we actually begin.