We Honor Time With Patience

Perspective is a funny thing

I recently rewatched 12 Monkeys (the movie) because I’d rewatched 12 Monkeys (the show). I’ve watched the show a few times but I had not revisited the movie since I saw it in the theater as a teenager. The movie is a much weirder and wilder affair, and while the show is true to the spirit and many of the characters, it’s hard to outdo Terry Gilliam in the weird department. Both are about what is inevitable, what we can change, but especially what we cannot. The show is a little more so because that’s just the difference of spending 40+ hours in a universe as opposed to 2, but I was really struck by it much more this time. Especially in the movie. The allegorical nature of seeing yourself die (sorry if i’m spoiling a 31 year old movie) feels spot on, and it’s hard not to feel that way sometimes about my past selves. Obviously very easy in certain ways, as a trans woman, but I have no sole claim to this concept because of that.

We’ve all seen past selves die in ways that we never thought they would. Surely you can think of your own examples, but to borrow a few from my life…I was in a band. Until I wasn’t. And now I haven’t been for a long long time. I was working in compliance. Until I wasn’t. And maybe I will again. I was a Minnesotan. Until I wasn’t, and it’s been 13 years and you’d think I’d be used to being a Californian these days but I’m not sure I ever will. Sometimes these sorts of transitions are planned, sometimes they are impromptu. I wasn’t really planning to leave my job recently until I realized I needed a break and that I only get one shot at all of this and I gotta heed that. And that’s yet another identity change. SF YIMBY is not my account these days. I’m no longer what I once was, what will I become next? 

I keep wondering…am I having a midlife crisis? Is this what this has always been about and I just couldn’t really tell? Especially when I was younger, the older people in my life had more constancy. At least I perceived them that way. So it’s jarring to see them make what appear to be weird left turns. To leave a place. To quit a job or a marriage. It’s easy to scoff at stuff when you are younger and say you would not do the same. It’s harder to recognize that you just don’t understand them, you cannot possibly understand them at that age.

Time is the ultimate arbiter. A lot of stuff that did not make sense to 25 year old me makes a lot more sense to 45 year old me. I’ve been wondering a lot about what is next, and what I want to do with the rest of my life, and even just how different I feel about who I am and what I want as a person compared to a few short years ago, let alone compared to 13 years ago when I moved to San Francisco, or 23 years ago when I moved to Minneapolis. Those were whole lifetimes ago, my god. The way that I’ve moved through my life has been unpredictable even as I try to ascribe a clear narrative to it. On the one hand, that narrative is written by what I’ve gained and what I’ve done. But it’s also littered with a lot of what I’ve quit. Jobs. Cities. Genders. Creative endeavors. You name it, I’ve quit it at this point. After a number of years, it’s easier to think about what I’ve discarded than what I still consistently do sometimes.

No, I have a habit of leaving things half done. I have journals full of half written stories; I have most of a novel stuck in a drawer somewhere. Hell I have several half-written entries for this new venture that I have been unable to finish. Life is littered with incomplete works, mine, yours, anyone’s really. To say nothing of the shows I have not completed, books I haven’t finished, a longer list of records to listen to then I’ll probably ever get.

But I didn’t think that’s a terrible trait. There’s nothing wrong with leaving some things undone. You don’t have to finish every show you watch, there's a reason you stopped. Some might even go so far as to say it’s a sign of maturity to know when to put stuff down. There’s no prize for reading every book or watching every movie or show. You do not have to finish that half-interesting streamer. You don’t need anyone’s permission to quit.

Of course, it’s all much more complicated when it’s higher stakes, when it’s your livelihood. I still got rent to pay. To say nothing of the fact it’s a little terrifying to step away from a job with no plan. It’s more complicated by the fact that I really don’t know what is next. There is no key, there is no plan. I’m working to figure it out. Just like I was when I was 32. Just like I was when I was 22. Which is not to say that it just all magically works out. It’s more to say that it’s hard to see what is around the corner. When I took the job that brought me out to San Francisco, I was living in a condo I bought in Saint Paul because…I didn’t think I was leaving the Twin Cities? I bought it a whole 10 months prior. That was the plan then. Until it wasn’t. A lot can change in a year. Hell, a lot can change in less than a year. 

So perhaps, metaphorically, past me is just wondering who present me is. Who is this person who would walk away from a job I had worked towards? Who is this person who cannot seem to write a story anymore? Who is this person who doesn’t even own a bass anymore? But then I think more about 12 Monkeys (the show) where Cole talks with himself about how hard the journey is, about how things are going to break in you, things you didn’t know could break. That’s true, and getting truer every day. But there’s also an element of finishing what you started. Those things in you break as you keep pressing forward. I say that as I go through some old stuff here and think about what I’ve left undone. Sometimes you aren’t in the right place to finish that book or that movie because it doesn’t connect with who you were then but it does now. Time is funny like that. The first time I picked up The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin, I was not ready for it, and I quickly put it down. Years later, I tore through it. It’s still a bit baffling that it just didn’t connect the first time. But it didn’t.

So perhaps, those stories are not undone, they just couldn’t be finished yet. Perhaps I lacked the proper perspective. Perhaps I didn’t give up, the time just wasn’t right to complete it. Perhaps I was not the right person then to complete them. Perhaps I needed to step away from what I am doing now for what is next even though I cannot see what it is. We honor time with patience, to borrow an oft-repeated phrase from 12 Monkeys (the show). I lack the perspective to fit my present moment into the narrative of my life. It does not mean I always will, or I will always feel this way. I am not the person I need to be yet, but I’m the person I need to be right now to get there.