020: June Bug
Getting back into it
Hello! And welcome back after my unexpected hiatus… Today’s piece is a bit rambly since I’m getting back into writing for an audience, but I hope you’ll still enjoy.
Written at home on a Tuesday.
I’ll admit that I’ve dropped my writing practice these past few months. As more and more weeks went by, “Are you still writing your Substack?” messages turned into unsubscribes, and then into “Is writing still something you want to do?”
To answer the question—Yes. It’s been hard, but I want to keep going at it.
Sometimes I’m a bit disappointed in myself, that I cast aside so easily the habit I worked so hard to build. It took so much iteration and experimentation to find something I enjoy doing as much as writing. Yet, it took only a little bit of busyness to demotivate me from writing my weekly posts—or, a more generous take: that in periods of stress time distorts, and when you next come up for air you realize an entire season has passed.
I compare these days of the regular work grind to the freedom and endless present moments of my sabbatical. I’m very grateful to be working, but I can’t help but feel that the speed at which I’m growing now is but a fraction of what I experienced while on break. Perhaps what I really miss isn’t writing itself, but rather the rapid growth that writing (this Substack, at least) helped me synthesize.
Ironically, the flip side to the demotivation I’ve been experiencing is how much and how quickly I can work when I have a pressing deadline. Fake urgency is so effective because I love the feeling of making progress—even if the goal is arbitrary. While I still have plenty of forces around me enforcing deadlines and asking things of me, I haven’t really asked anything of myself lately. Without a new set of personal goals to reach for, I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life a bit—waking up each day to the same routine, waiting for others’ direction, chasing some short term things like the holiday or trip around the corner, but without much purpose aside from that.
I visited my family in Palo Alto this past weekend, and my sister and I took Lychee for a walk to Piazza’s, the local grocery store in our neighborhood. Steve, one of my friends from high school, was over for dinner, so he joined us for our walk, along with Johnny, her boyfriend.
“I forgot that there was such a big grass field behind Cubberley,” said Steve. His family had moved out of Palo Alto since we’d graduated, so it was rare to hang out with him where we’d both grown up.
“Yeah, I think there’s a soccer field? And baseball field?” I hadn’t seen Cubberley Community Center for a while either, especially since I stopped visiting home as much after Sunny passed. (She used to love chasing the swallows that flew low along the grass, just out of her reach.)
“Seems like four soccer fields,” he observed. “Shall we cut across?” It was a well known shortcut.
Before he could finish asking the question, my sister yelled, “NO!”
We looked at her, surprised at her passionate outburst. “It’s brown beetle season,” she clarified.
The boys were still bemused, so I added, “They’re called June Bugs, in some places—”
“—and they’re these giant brown beetles, like, so big and loud—with really hard shells, and they just stupidly fly aimlessly and clumsily into EVERYTHING for 2 weeks in June and then they die. But there’s so many, like swarms of them, so until they all die out you just get pelted by them, you literally feel them hitting your legs, and they’re SO gross and scary, ugh! And they’re all in the grass!” finished Cat.
“It’s true,” I said. “Like literally, the Wikipedia article says something like ‘as adults, they fly clumsily and aimlessly into light sources until they die.’”
Later, upon writing this piece, I’d spend an hour searching the internet for this exact excerpt. I learned the intricacies of scarabs and rhinoceros beetles but never did find the line I quoted. Part of me felt relief—as if the inability to find that line meant that I couldn’t complete the comparison I had in mind, proving we’re more complex than beetles drawn to more than just the next shiny thing we see. I know it’s a silly, fallacious way of thinking, but I still keep wondering—am I being a June Bug right now?
Sometimes I slip and reveal my worries to people I don’t know so well (something I got desensitized to from publishing my innermost thoughts online, lol). James and I were having dinner with a couple who were a bit older. The wife was in her forties, and point-blank responded to a comment of mine with, “Yeah, but you’re just like that because you’re young. Once you hit 40, you run out of fucks to give. And then you’ll feel so free.”
I looked at her. She was a seriously cool lady, but I felt like she had a life’s worth of experience on me. I couldn’t help but feel so young and unwieldy in contrast. I’d later learn that I was currently the age she was when she first met her husband, who she’d known for 16 years by now. I could barely recognize the woman next to me from the one in the stories of her youth.
I still want to give a fuck, I thought. When I give a fuck, I’m angsty and never satisfied, but at least I feel alive… On the other hand, I want to be happy, and happiness is great in spurts, but as a mode I feel complacent. Perhaps that’s the just the struggle of navigating this phase of adulthood—not knowing which side to pick so you are stuck wanting both, and stuck feeling like you’re chaotically flying back and forth between two extremes.