At sea.

Or, where the f&#k do I belong?

Welcome to can’t relate, a newsletter from me, Maria Del Russo, that I write whenever I feel like I have something to say. Here, you can expect essays from me where I grapple with the weight of relationships — romantic, familial, friendly, and everything in between. If you like what you see here, please share with your friends and subscribe.

---

For the past few weeks, I’ve been asking myself who I am and where I belong. I’m not alone in this panic at all — a year in lockdown without our typical markers of humanity has pretty much everyone in my life questioning who they are and what they’re meant to be doing.

It’s not even my first identity crisis. In 2018, I went through a deep, dark period following a layoff. I had been presenting a version of myself through my job in the form of columns and Instagram posts. When that went away, I had no idea who I was. What followed was six months of depression, self-isolation, and a lot of questioning what it was all about.

This shift during COVID, however, has been something different. By all accounts, I am exactly where I thought I would want to be at this point. I’m 31. I’ve written a book. I have a job, a partner, a cat, and a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a patio where I grow basil and tomatoes. On the surface, things look and feel pretty charmed. But I am in a state of constant questioning and comparison. I compare myself to friends, family, strangers, acquaintances, and even my past self. And all that comparing doesn’t help. It just leaves me feeling even more stranded, isolated, and confused.

I sometimes feel as if I exist between two worlds: The world that I was born into, and the world I choose to inhabit now. The world I was born into is a conservative one. In this world, women get married young and start churning out babies immediately. In this world, most women stop working full-time (or they just stop working — full stop) when their first kid arrives, and they devote their lives to being mothers. In this world, women cook and clean, and roll their eyes when their husbands leave their socks on the floor because “that’s just the way men are.” The focus of their lives shifts to one that is more focused on family first. To be focused on yourself is selfish, so their individual beings get placed on the backburner for labels that connotate their relationship to others: mother, wife, daughter-in-law.

In this world, I am a failure, because I am 31, miles from an engagement or a wedding, and instead of saving for a home, I’m saving for an egg freezing procedure that will buy me more time to figure out how and when I want to bring children into the world.

I used to look to the world I inhabit now as my place of refuge. In this world, I have a good job, a relationship, an aesthetically pleasing home. In this world, I have a small, but tight, clutch of friends around me, and weekends filled with equal parts social gatherings and lazy, breezy moments alone. This world used to be what I’d point to when I was confronted with my failures in my other world. At least I have all this stuff going for me, and not an annoying husband and screaming babies that other people are strapped with, I’d think.

But lately, I’ve been feeling like a failure in this world, too. And it’s hard to point to why. It’s a general feeling of dissatisfaction — the desire for some type of tectonic shift to snap me back into excitement. But, like most people, I am tired and worn out from the pandemic, and unsure of how to proceed. Do I even want to keep working in the same industry that I’m working in? If so, do I want to keep working in the same way? Why does it seem like my excitement around this world has been waning lately?

A lot of it has to do with social media, as Haley Nahmen grapples with in her most recent newsletter. She discusses how draining and uncanny social media has become, and how we use it as a marker of success instead of a way to just share what’s going on. For me, social media has become the epicenter of so much of my self-doubt. I’m constantly checking my performance there to figure out whether or not I am a person worthy of notice. (Or, if I’m being honest, a person of worth.) It’s a ridiculous metric to live your life by, but the media industry has done a pretty incredible job of telling writers and reporters that their Instagram engagement is relevant to their jobs. The idea of “editors who are also influencers” has completely bastardized this industry, and the idea that I am not a good editor if I don’t crack 20k Instagram followers is complete bullshit. But I continue to participate, stuck in an endless loop, feeling like I’m cutting off potential future job prospects if I let my follower count slip too low.

And it’s not just other editors or influencers or 25-year-olds getting engaged I compare myself to. I compare myself to my former self, the girl with a new book deal, a ton of bylines at respected publications, and a life that looked exciting and sexy. Now, logically, I can look back at that time and say to myself you were incredibly depressed and isolated, so maybe it’s not the best moment of comparison. But my life looked good then. Nobody knew what was going on deep within my brain. I want to recapture the filtered version of my life, not the reality of what my life actually was. But I also have a deep desire to move forward, to make some type of change, to not feel boxed in by some bullshit “brand” I built for myself on social media when I was 27 years old.

I’m ready to start over, but I have no idea how to do that. And as someone who doesn’t like to sit around and wait for things to happen, this is an extremely uncomfortable position for me to be in. The sense of time slipping from me is also incredibly overwhelming. I feel like, at 31, I’m too old to start over, and that I’m destined to be stuck in this position forever. Logically, I know this is untrue. But that doesn’t necessarily keep me from waking up in the middle of the night, heart racing, wondering where the fuck I’m going to be in 10 years.

The only way I can see to rectify this is to try to get used to the discomfort — through writing, through slowing down, and through trying things outside of my comfort zone. It also means pulling back from the triggers where I can.

I used to think of this disassociation as a negative thing, like being adrift at sea. But I’m starting to believe that this might be the best place for growth. We spend the time adrift so that when we emerge from the surf, we’ve grown, and shifted, and changed. That way, when we once again find ourselves treading water in the middle of another vast ocean, we’ll be more comfortable with the discomfort of the journey, and better equipped to find our way back to shore.

I’m curious — have you been feeling a little adrift lately? How are you coping? Sound off in the comments.