LARP-ing

I’m on a ranch with a bunch of 20-something’s this week, many of whom are here working their summer jobs before returning to school or post-grad life. For the 20+ crowd, anxiety is relatively high: Not because they don’t love their summer jobs (many return, year after year after year), but because by choosing to be here, they’re not there, however nebulous that destination may be. For the most part, they’ve forestalled juicy internships and have yet to crystallize a career track. Often because they “don’t know what to do.”

I relate: When I graduated from college I was frantic for a job. I needed income, certainly, but I also felt an intense amount of pressure to not only find a job, but find a job that would transmute itself into a career. It’s a bit like being shot out of a barrel: Aim counts. I very much felt that once I was on a path, there was no getting off, without starting all over. There is no other decade where every year acutely feels like it counts so much. Where a wrong step feels like it will take you down the wrong road, an irrevocable mistake. 

This idea of a certain way is a state that we mythologize, in America at least. But as Joseph Campbell wrote, “If there is a path, it is someone else’s.”* I don’t know many people who haven’t faltered in their careers, who haven’t gotten off trains to get on different ones, sometimes landing far, far afield from where they started. And yet: When we’re starting off, we’re so easily convinced that if we’re not moving steadfastly forward, we must be going nowhere at all.

Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes in The Bond with the Beloved, “After a lifetime of searching it can be difficult to learn not to look. This is particularly true in the North American culture where there is a very powerful conditioning that you have to aspire to be other than what you are and that your own life is not good enough. This conditioning drives people remorselessly to work harder and harder to change their life and better their material circumstances. It is a pioneer psychology that has helped to develop America and create a ‘land of opportunity.’ But this conditioning has also infected the collective attitude towards spirituality. There is an intense drive to search that overshadows the need to wait.” In Vaughan-Lee’s view, when we wait, we allow an ineffable power to guide us closer to ourselves, and to our gifts.

This searching outside of ourselves is a tragic miss, not only because it’s a waste of our precious time, but because it leads us farther afield from the unique way that we’re each intended to serve. By trying to be someone else, or other than who we are, we’re abandoning our posts.

Vaughan-Lee again: “The song of the world soul is our own song, and yet as we are each unique individuals so is our own song unique. It is written in the Qur’an that ‘Every being has his own appropriate mode of prayer and glorification.’ On the level of the ego the collective denies the individual, and many people repress their individuality in order to fit into a collective social group. But on the level of the soul the collective enhances individuality: our own individual life becomes more meaningful when it is experienced in relationship to the larger pattern of life…Jung defines individuality as ‘that which is unique in the combination of collective elements of the persona and its manifestations.’ Our individuality gains a deeper significance when we appreciate the collective elements that so influence us.” I read this as a call to each do our part, on our own path, for the collective whole; if the world is a tapestry, its wholeness requires each of us to own our thread.

The other night while we were watching our kids play softball, another mom told me that when she went to pack for this trip—cowboy hat, cowboy boots, Wranglers, et al—her high school son saw her bag and said, “God, mom, you are LARP-ing so hard.” LARP-ing, as she explained to me, is Live Action Role Play, like people who dress up for Civil War reenactments. I LARP hard at this ranch, too, every year adding to my collection of diamante-dusted rodeo shirts and Carhart jackets.

As I rode my horse today, I thought about the larger context of LARP-ing, and how we’re all pretty much at it, every day. Do we all not feel like occasional imposters, performing ourselves for the world? Looking around for clues as to how to be ourselves, but better? When I interviewed the stunning Katherine May earlier this year about her late-in-life autism spectrum diagnosis, she told me about the work of Erving Goffman, a sociologist who wrote about the idea that we all have a backstage self, who very few people actually get to see or meet. As Katherine explained to me, “Goffman didn't think that that masking was damaging. He thought that was just a part of how we behave. But actually, when you talk to autistic people, the kind of levels of exhaustion that we endure and the fragmenting of the self comes from, if we can manage it, like trying to ‘act normal,’ massive scare quotes there.” Most of my conversation with Katherine was about the way she feels like she and her community are canaries in the coalmine for the rest of us, not only about how intolerable modern life has become, but also the cost of “passing as normal,” or doing things because there’s an expectation or idea that that’s how it should be done.

To bring it back to the 20-year-olds in my midst this week, there’s only so much one can do outside of putting yourself into the river and letting life take you downstream. It’s scary to be yourself and to not cast your identity and life plan after someone else, but there’s nobody to take your place if you abstain from the role.

*(I first read this quote in the very apt Quarterlife, by Satya Doyle Byock.)