#45 We need each other
There is so much more of you there than you think.
“You are moving out of the realm of fantasy "when I grow up" and adjusting to the reality that you're there; it's happening”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
I think being gifted a sense of independence has taken me very far. It has taken me to so many new, uncharted territories by my own will. I've knocked on doors and tried new ways and gone down paths feeling like, for the most part, I chose them on my own. And for the most part, I did. But there is a force unseen and a magic, that's just right there, very glaringly obvious: the only reason I knocked on those doors was because I was told by the people I loved that it was possible. I was told that I could do it. And this wasn't always my family - I come from a beautiful family, but they didn't always understand my impulses and my urges - much less my interest in writing for the sake of writing. I am my father's daughter; I too carry visions of grandeur and material success. But I differ in that I love many things simply because I love them rather than an immediate connection to how I can make money off them.
This, too, is a privilege: my father drove a Chevette in the blaring Sun, desert-like heat enveloping him, windows down while he transported trays of doughnuts from a small town to sell in the capital, every week. He was somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. Everything must be an opportunity where he comes from. I tell him I've been selling a few things on Vinted for the pocket money; he tells me we should launch the Venezuelan version ASAP and get a hold of that marketplace, be early adopters, cash in on opportunity. For him, to create is to survive in the literal sense.
In an economy like Venezuela's, entrepreneurship takes many shapes and sizes; street vendors sell homemade ice-shaven clumps of flavors, syrup, and sweet milk toppings. People find jobs at a café and run a side Instagram business reselling all kinds of small products, or open up accounts on online marketplaces to offer auto parts. Mechanics have their clients next to their full-time jobs at their shops. And so on.
I come from a place where there is always room for opportunity because there must be. I used to think I knocked on all these doors because I was born with it, because I was compelled to, because I was proud of being told I could do it, because I thought I had it in me. And I did! But I mostly was told that I could.
I am here to deliver a truth we tend to think little of: we all need each other. We need each other a lot more than we think we do.
And it isn't really anyone's fault - our culture prizes the self-made myth. We are constantly barraged with, sold, and packaged into stories of giants who took the world by storm, fueled by wit, smarts, and audacity. We make mountains out of the little guys that could. We favor a Person of the Year and a single President and the Star of the Show and the Lead of the cast or the marketing department (they're interchangeable, really). We were sold the idea that climbing to opportunity had all to do with our power of will, as if we could shape the future with so much arrogance. As if it was something to tame and to domesticate into our own image. I categorize this as a very... specific urge to dominate, to shape and to force, even, into whatever it is must bend to your will. This urge was often modeled across history by specific demographics, but I digress.
Our image of the self-made is only an imagined one. None of it is actually real. We all need each other. We are only so interesting, so driven, so meaningful as long as we remain in relation to each other. So far as we can compare ourselves to each other. We all need each other to make each other feel like we're going somewhere, to be part of something. Ridding myself of that idea; that principle that tells me I arrived one day, all on my own; that I chose, singlehandedly, the fate of my future.
The truth is that I was made in a community. I was told, countless times, how much I was loved and how much I mattered, how much I could do. I never did any single of these things alone. I never knocked on those doors on my own. Behind me were years and years and years of you can do it, you can keep pushing, you can do anything you want to do. I never attributed much of my confidence to it until one day in January, texting my Dad. "I don't want you to think I'm useless," I despair, as I wallow about the slowness of January and ask for help paying my bills for the first time after University. I ask him for help because I feel I have no other option. I feel like an abject and absolute failure. I imagined myself differently at twenty-seven: eleven-year-old me thought I'd be married with children, surely with the self-possession I saw in all those people who walked around in their late twenties.
Of course, the image of self-made changed with time. I shape-shifted it to mold to my new desires - the writer, the artist, the lead, the cast favorite - all these archetypes shifting with me through the years. Suddenly you're three years from thirty and you're confessing to your parents that you never want them to think you're a failure.
We need each other. We may not think we do, but we really do. Even when you are at the end of a new decade and the world is spinning with layoffs and you rethink your skills and you wonder if you need a rebrand and you consider posting more on LinkedIn and you think about home ownership and all those little ways you can or should assert your uniqueness, whether through holding a museum pass or watching the latest screening of an obscure cult French film or buying those dreaded hiking shoes that are littering the entirety of Amsterdam, in a laughably flat country (yes, I'm talking about Solomons).
Why do we do all these things? Why do we think of ourselves as self-made when we're all image-making based on each other? You can be eighteen and bravely look to the other side and jump into it, headfirst, you can be twenty-two and take a trip on your own, a new language, you can be on the edge of twenty-five and decide that you might as well try this, because it's been a while since you've tried anything.
We all need each other. It is a very unnerving thought; the culture prioritizes individuality; it is scary; people prize the winners who seem self-made; it is daunting; you have to confront your desire for another; it is beautiful; you were made to be with people and for people.
What is really wretched is thinking you made it all alone in the world. Undress yourself and your little ideas of success. Embrace your interdependence. Give yourself to others. There is so much more of you there than you think.
