I have led a toothless life. . . A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides, what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistering trail behind it.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason
What happened to me?
Another day, wasted.
This needs to stop.
Why do you keep undercutting yourself?
I’m so much bigger, so much better than this.
These are the words that you’d find strewn across the pages of my journal, should you (god forbid) be brazen enough to crack it open and attempt to decipher the incoherent scribbles.
And you wouldn’t just see these sentiments once or twice—if my journal were published as a book (GOD FORBID), it would be titled: The Girl with the 5-Year-Long Existential Crisis: She Had a Lot of Ideas and Zero Ability to Execute.
Critics called it “insufferable and nauseating”.
Each day is like a revolving door of dissociation. A Groundhog Day of the most boring, monotonous day ever, where nothing of consequence really happens.
It’s hard not to be overcome with the feeling that with each day, my life is passing me by. Every hour chained to my computer, when I feel deep in my bones that I, nor anyone else, is meant to spend a lifetime this way, feels like an hour of time I just crumpled up and tossed in the bin.
Sometimes when I write, I feel like a fraud. The wisdom I try to endow upon others is really the wisdom I try to endow upon myself. Aspirational at best, naval-gazey at worst.
They are things that I know, intellectually, but often haven’t yet been able to integrate into my being. I’m learn best by teaching, so I guess, in a way, I’m attempting to soak up things I’ve learned, the things I know to be true to the core of my being, by sharing them with you.
But it doesn’t always feel honest. Does a truth have to be lived to be true? Does it need to be tested and embodied by the teacher to be imbued? I’d like to think so.
I try to avoid speaking from a pedestal. To teach from experience instead of speaking in platitudes that merely sound nice. I want to infuse my writing with truth and lived experience.
But the truth is, I don’t do much living.
My life doesn’t have teeth.
There are moments, though. Fleeting, glorious moments. Where my fangs protract and I bite down. Moments where I feel like I’m exactly where I need to be. Where life feels impossibly magical and awe-soaked. But, like I said…fleeting.
I often wonder if I have unrealistic expectations for what life is supposed to look and feel like—social media comparison is real. But it’s not just comparing my life to the idealized and curated highlight reels of those I admire.
It’s comparison to myself.
To my past. To earlier versions of myself. To how my life was “supposed” to pan out. To how I want things so badly to be in my head. To the person I know I can be, but resist becoming.
It’s this comparison that makes those chunks I bite off seem to vanish in my mouth.
I want to do everything, so I often do nothing. Paralyzed by a million possibilities, petrified of choosing the wrong one. There are so many versions of myself I could be that are in some way true and authentic. And in wanting to give them all equal attention, I lock them in a room, never to see the light of day.
I was recently on a group Zoom call with two creatives I admire, and one girl in the chat, nearly a decade younger than me, asked, to some effect, about getting to a point where creative work is no longer a grind—the point where life becomes “bliss”. If I had been drinking something, I surely would have choked. If you were watching me in my little box on the screen, you probably would have seen me squirm (I don’t have a poker face).
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that we need to release the expectation of “getting” anywhere. Even though I’m often plagued by high expectations and delusions of grandeur, this is a truth I know in my bones. One that I often forget, but am sharing with you so that we might all understand:
There are no endpoints in life; there is no where to get to.
Wherever you go, there you are.
If you spend your days looking towards a golden future moment—a job, an award, a milestone, an opportunity—not only will you be disappointed, but you might look back and realize you missed your life waiting for something that never came. And if it did, you’ll likely come to realize it wasn’t as consequential as you thought it would be.
Imagine with me for a moment, a snowflake: even at their biggest, they’re tiny. When you think about it, it seems a miraculous feat that they can stack themselves inches, feet, even meters high.
But it’s not miraculous at all (ok, it is if you consider all of the perfect conditions that had to stack up over billions of years to even allow snow to happen on this planet in the first place, it’s the definition of miraculous, but let’s ignore that for a second). It happens every winter, all over the globe, without fanfare.
The little actions you take every day are not miraculous, either. A sip of coffee, an exasperated sigh, a kiss on the cheek, a glance out the window. But the sum of their parts—that’s your life. And that’s quite significant.
We spend so much time looking forward to the big moments—the promotion, the vacation, the date night, the magnum opus—but when those moments come, they might as well be already gone. The anticipation of them was better than the actual experience itself (thank you, dopamine).
But what if instead of looking forward to landmark moments that come and go, we were to find enjoyment in the everyday, seemingly mundane little actions?
Seeing a foot of snow on the ground is pretty great. But, at least to me, it’s not nearly as exciting or magical as seeing a perfectly formed snowflake that’s fallen on your glove, studying it in its delicate beauty and impermanence—nature’s best art.
What if we studied the fleeting moments in our lives like we would study a snowflake?
The moments we would usually dismiss or rush through.
I’d almost guarantee we’d all be a lot happier if we did.
I almost guarantee that would be a life with teeth.
To me, a life with teeth is not one full of accolades and peak experiences. It’s about finding joy in the mundane, meaning in simply existing.
But that doesn’t mean we just go with the flow. The flow is a trap. A lazy river to nowhere. A current slowing sweeping you to somewhere you were never meant to be—A place where marketers and algorithms, oligarchs and technocrats tell you what to do and who to be, for their own benefit.
In this modern world, the flow is toothless.
My worst impulse is to try to give my life teeth through chasing peak experiences—traveling, climbing mountains, doing epic shit, getting rewarded and recognized. But the more thoughtful side of myself knows that these things do not give a life teeth.
It’s the everyday, seemingly small decisions, fleeting moments—how you end up spending the bulk of your days—that take an otherwise gummy situation into a mouthful of pearly whites that allow you to take a full, satisfying bite out of life when the opportunities present themselves.
It’s the ability to be fully immersed in and captivated by whatever is currently in front of you—be it a snowflake, writing and essay, a walk through your neighborhood, listening to music, or standing on the peak of a mountain.
So, here are some ways I’m currently trying to give my life teeth. I’m not perfect at them; I often slip back into old patterns and habits. But these are things that, by attempting to do regularly, I can start to shake up and expand the borders of my reality:
