being nonchalant isn't cool

i'm happy to care; i'm happy to love; i'm happy to have lost

Being emotional has never been “cool”; I don’t need to copy-and-paste the “cool girl” monologue from Gone Girl to prove that. It’s odd though, that in our desire to be “cool,” we find ourselves at the footsteps of being “nonchalant”: of not only not caring for ourselves, but not caring for others either. To me, loving, as vague as it is, has always been the most significant part of my life: the acme of satisfaction and the goal of human life. I don’t think that this is necessarily a contested perspective on life: if anything, I think that most people would generally find themselves in agreement with the idea that loving is the pinnacle of human achievement and that most everything pales in comparison.

There are really only two guarantees in life: that we are born alone and that we die alone. There is something extremely beautiful about the human condition: of using our limited time and opportunity to surround ourselves with people while we can: with warmth and chatter and embrace. I suppose that’s why I just cannot find myself understanding the desire to be “nonchalant.” It is human to want to be loved. It is human to love. Even our careers revolve around making the lives of other people’s lives — or souls (in the case of conservationists I suppose) easier. It is not embarrassing to admit to that, if anything it is beautiful. We are imperfect by design: we get frustrated, we cry, we trip and fall, we obsess over our appearances, we think about those we have lost, and we yearn to love. Why is the expectation to “thug it out” or to hide that? Even worse, is the newfound expectation to “heal” in isolation: to be quiet in our pain and to sweep our imperfections into our bedrooms, where we can piece together our broken selves.

But I think it’s easy to forget that we are inherently broken by design. As much as we idolize influencers or even people in our lives for their being “nonchalant” or perfect, I can’t help but think that even if we assume it is real (which it’s not), that a pain-free life is not a life worth living. I stare back at the person I was a year ago and I’m beyond happy to say that she is unrecognizable: it is a beautiful thing to change and to be changed. There are choices I made back then that I can’t help but chuckle at now but those choices were no less valid than the ones I make today. They were backed by reason, by emotion, by love and I would not have been able to grow to the point where I am now, where I can see her in photos or videos or even memories and can’t begin to fathom making the same decisions, without a few mistakes along the way. All this to say that I am not afraid to admit that the most I have been able to grow has been through those who I know no longer spare me a second thought: by the girls in middle school I used to admire or by the boy who broke my heart when I was a sophomore in high school. Even if the girl I was a year ago may have called the people who broke her heart a “mistake,” I can’t help but be grateful for every person who has hurt me just because it is through them that I can definitively say that I’ve grown from. In that sense, I think vulnerability might be the most beautiful thing that we are given. It’s more than just the power to share or the power to be loved but it’s the power to grow and to change: the power to wake up a year from now and think, “Wow. Why would I have ever done that?”

I am the product of everybody who has ever loved me; if I cannot love myself, then how could I have loved all of them?

That isn’t to say that I don’t understand the appeal of isolation; if anything, there have been multiple times in my life where I’ve felt the desire to hide myself in my bedroom or my closet in some fantasy of saving the world from my mistakes. But as I’ve grown, I’ve learned that there is something strong in vulnerability. It is beautiful to wear your feelings and experiences on your sleeve: to simply not care about “hiding” your most intimate and personal thoughts. The appeal of isolation, however, rests almost solely on the idea, that one day, in some unforeseeable future something will happen: maybe we’ll engage in self-loathing enough that we’ll come out as shells of ourselves, that way we can’t begin to make mistakes. I, for one, don’t think that ever really happens. There is not enough diffidence in the world for me to come out of the other side no longer making silly mistakes: I’m human after all. To be willing to get hurt, to be willing to love, however: to make and possibly lose the biggest investment we have in this life— time— is scary to say the least. But it’s the kind of fear you get over: not the kind that you solve by hiding yourself behind a buttress of walls. Love is one of those things that is probably the most out of our control: there is no guarantee that your partner won’t simply choose to cheat on you tomorrow, fall out of love with you the day after, or even just drop dead. But that’s part of the beauty, isn’t it? Under the assumption that we are constantly growing, is it not an unfair expectation to grow identically with a partner? If anything, I think it’s quite natural for relationships— especially romantic ones— to fall out of touch quite quickly while we are young. I don’t think that’s the same pretense that being “nonchalant” falls under, though. It is inevitable for proximity to cause friction: it’s one of the first things they teach you in your high school physics class and it’s true about individuals as well. Tension is unavoidable and no amount of isolation will save you from that. If anything, there is something genuinely beautiful about loving a person: something inherently broken, and being loved as a broken person as well.

The idea of “healing” in today’s society is vaguer than ever, and even worse, has become commercialized. Does psychoanalyzing how your parents’ divorce impacted your “attachment style” genuinely help you? If anything, I feel as if excessive psychoanalysis takes away from the authenticity from relationships: obviously, the goal is to “heal” from trauma but the life-advice quacks on TikTok and Instagram are a bit more unclear about how to go about this after self-realization. If anything, it feels a bit more like “giving up” than anything else: it’s one thing to come to the realization that your past has impacted you, it’s another to genuinely, wholeheartedly believe that the way you treat your partner is primarily impacted by the relationship you had with your parents. This isn’t to say that attachment style isn’t rooted in psychology, because it is. But just like any other field (economics, politics, etc.), psychologists also differs in perspective, and not all psychologists subscribe to psychoanalysis. I can’t help but wonder if “unpacking it” and becoming self-aware of trauma genuinely helps. I think most people do engage in some form or another of self-reflection and introspection but I think the most I’ve “grown” has been from being shown other types of love rather than locking myself in my room and thinking deeply about my past. Worse than just not “healing” (whatever that means), it suggests that it’s not “valid" (whatever that means) to just hurt sometimes. Am I less valuable or “less healed” for being hurt? Frustrated sometimes or angry and even spiteful at others?

To be honest, the idea of this essay: of essentially defending my desire to be appreciated and my desire for authenticity is a bit disgusting. Am I odd or deranged for believing that in the small time we have on this earth— that our prerogative should be to spend that time as meaningfully as possible? Throughout all of my memories, none are as tangible as the memories I have of other people: of the last time I saw my childhood best friend, of my first kiss, or of my first sleepover. Even milestone achievements like my first win at a debate competition I remember as the feeling of being held by my partner rather than the feeling of “winning.” When I am on my death bed, I will not be contemplating how many times I “won” when my “situationship” loved me more than how much I loved them. I will not be pontificating to my children about how they need to pay attention in school or make money, nor will I be telling them to hide their feelings. Instead, I imagine I’ll be grateful for all the opportunities for love that were given to me: all the times I got to grow, to change, to just find joy in other people.

Even swans know it to be true; why must it be “embarrassing” to admit?

I believe that we are fundamentally not nonchalant people: we stare out of our car windows and think about the people we’ve lost, sometimes we get a whiff of a smell and are taken back to our childhood homes, we cry and we laugh and we love— how is it possible to see the rejection of the greatest aspect that humanity has to offer as a “good” thing? This isn’t to say that crying nonstop or that bemoaning about your life as a conversational tactic are good things but just that the reframing of our lives to other people feels so unnecessary. Will people realistically be thinking about my every fumble or conversational error that deeply? Will my friends really judge me for every out-of-pocket comment that I make or when I’m feeling just a bit sad on a Wednesday evening? Is it really embarrassing to be known as somebody who cares?

I’d rather propose the contrary: there is something endearing about fucking up. I honestly don’t think I could truly love a person without their flaws: there’s something fun and lovable in the kind of friend who misspeaks or gets lost or just fucks up sometimes. Why is it so difficult to imagine somebody being able to love us for our own flaws? I think we all have that one friend who gets lost consistently, who always has the weirdest, most unlikely shit happen to them, who we get to laugh with. Ironically, I think it’s those kinds of friends that I love the most. The same goes for less flattering mistakes as well. There is something warm inside that I feel when I resolve conflicts with friends: knowing that even the friction wasn’t enough to withstand our mutual gravitational pulls. Not everything is rainbows and flowers in love, though. Oftentimes, there are parts of people that ultimately upset us, hurt us, or annoy us. Part of love, though, is accepting those parts and learning to embrace them alongside a person’s good parts. If anything, that’s the most beautiful part of love. Whether you subscribe to nihilism or existentialism or whatever, I think that universally it can be agreed upon that our purpose in life is not to lock all our doors and windows and endlessly chisel away at ourselves until we feel “worthy” of the world outside.

There is safety in a feeling of sonder: in looking at a person and realizing that there is no possible way that their thoughts are not dominated by their own problems or perhaps even their own self-detrimental thoughts. As I’ve learned to stop caring, I’ve found the people who surround me changing as well: I get to be a shoulder to cry on; I get to hear a myriad of stories that I otherwise wouldn’t have; I get to be closer to my friends than ever. I say (and emphasize) get to because I think it’s really easy to assume that our friends will get irritated with our imperfection, but to me, it’s only more to love. Maybe it’s a bit sadistic to say that I love it when my friends feel empowered to talk to me about their lives but it’s the truth. I get the opportunity and the chance to be there for a person in the way others were for me. I get the opportunity to love somebody for themselves: for their pure, broken, genuine self and maybe even help them learn to love themselves more in the process. There is no love in being nonchalant. There is no love in hiding our real selves from the outside world. Rather, I think it pushes expectations down upon our youth, our friends, our family that they too should abandon their feelings at home every morning alongside their toothbrush and pajamas. If there is some higher purpose to our being here, I find it difficult to argue that it isn’t to just love: to find those who will love us in ways we can’t even begin to understand and to love them back as best as we can. Sometimes loving other people means changing ourselves for them and I suppose in this way, we naturally change. But I think the most compelling way we grow is when we love somebody for themselves so dearly that we can’t help but absorb their traits along the way. As I stare myself in the mirror, I find that I am, more or less, an amalgamation of every person who has ever loved me: from my parents to my elementary school best friends to my exes. If I could love them, why should I struggle to love myself? My favorite parts of myself are the parts I adopted from my loved ones and nothing brings me more joy than seeing my reflection in those closest to me. Even in that proximity, we still grow in our individual ways: we process differently and think differently and ultimately become different people. It’s scary, to say the least: to leave ourselves at the mercy to the compassion of our friends or to the risks of one day becoming fundamentally unrecognizable. But there is only so much growth in isolation, and only so much love in perfection.