Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

When I went to college, I was given the advice, “You can be anything, but you cannot be everything.”

It was meant to be empowering, I think, but also reasonable — you know: Shoot for the stars — but stay grounded. The world is your oyster — but think it through first.

Looking back, that was the whole post-Great Recession, Obama-era vibe. We still regurgitated all those Y2K motivational poster platitudes but we tried to distance ourselves from the rancid optimism, tried to prove we were real and relevant without tangibly changing anything.

I wonder what my eighteen-year-old self would think of me now. That girl was still riding high on the promise of being promising, still thought being smart and “a pleasure to have in class” was a job. She had big dreams, vague dreams, something to do with saving the world. She got woke and realized international development had nothing to do with anything, got broke and realized being an anarchist is also not a job. Now she’s almost thirty, with a dozen addresses in the past five years, in debt to her parents and scraping together a career change in the hope of finding stability.

The thing is, I don’t really like stability. It’s a necessary evil in my mind, something I lean into when riding the waves leaves me crashed and exhausted enough to stay put. Dolly Parton talked me out of a 9-to-5 before adulthood could talk me into it, and I’ve wormed my way out of defining my career so far through a special combination of recklessness, idealism and dumb luck.

I like life better on the fringes of the world, where everyone’s got big dreams and no one can pay the rent. I like the people I meet and the places I end up and the stories I have to tell after. I like this world where everyone’s on their way from somewhere and not quite sure how they got here. Out there, you don’t have to be everything. You don’t have to be anything. You can just be.

The problem is that I was told I could be anything. Not only anything, but that I was gifted and talented and a pleasure to have in class enough that I could be something great. I could become a very, very good thing. The kind of thing the whole world would envy, the kind of thing people would kill to have the opportunity to become. An A+ thing. A winning thing. That was what they told me and for some reason, I believed it.

But in the face of that belief, I keep finding the truth. Like all that 90’s optimism, the belief is going rancid.

I am, in fact, not anything.

I’m not a great writer or a successful revolutionary, not a world leader or a small business owner. I’m not yet a therapist, not still a traveler. I’m not really a punk or a hippie or a hipster or a yuppie. I’m not a Californian anymore, not really a Vermonter now, American by default but my ancestors sure weren’t. I’m not a native or a guest. I’m not an us or a them. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I am neither joking nor serious, nor a secret third thing.

I’m not lost and I don’t need to find myself. I know exactly where I am. I’m here. I came from that way, I’m going this way. I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m breathing. I exist. That is what I am. That’s true.

They said I could be anything, so I became nothing. I am no thing. I’m really just a verb, a plural verb, a series of processes unfolding that include and transcend my body, include and transcend my past, include and transcend you.

But if I answered that to the question, “What are you doing with your life?” you’d laugh me out of the building, because the world is not interested in truth.

The world is interested in nouns.

We’re obsessed with defining ourselves by career and achievement as if these were our identities. We are obsessed with defining our identities as if these were the truth.

We categorize the world around us and fit ourselves into it so we can create easy maps to follow. But try as we might, the places on our mental maps do not remain in place. The persons are not things.

A living being is not stagnant. Its only real definition is its being, a verb, a dynamic process that unfolds and changes and moves between states of being (and every stagnant state is an illusion, too, including these United ones). Nations are an illusion. Laws are made-up. Identities are attempts to put boundaries around the boundless, to make water into rock, to put vapor on a spreadsheet.

That’s why the Buddhists say illusions cause suffering. Believing in illusions as though they were the truth not only denies the sacred reality of existence as it already is, but it tends to lead to crisis points where the illusions collapse and reality comes crashing back in.

Try as we might to nounify ourselves into order, we remain, resolutely, not nouns.

We are obsessed with turning verbs into nouns because nouns feel digestible and permanent while reality is chaotic and dynamic. We cling to nouns (and adjectives, which define nouns) to make sense of ourselves and relate to one another. The thing you learn the first time you really see someone or they really see you, instantaneously, with all of your being, is that the nouns and adjectives were always just illusions.

We just are, man.

Try putting that on your résumé.

In a lot of different ways, the world of civilization enforces fictions upon us. It invents fictions and then backs them up through violence: borders, wealth, laws, land ownership, credit scores, presidents, New York City — these are all imaginary concepts forced into reality through the threat or use of violence against people, nature or both. The division between people and nature is another such fiction, too.

All of it, this whole damn thing, is made up. It’s just a dream that’s become a cage that’s become pathological that’s poisoned our minds and distorted our ability to be what we are: beings, who exist, and live, and that’s it.

That it takes a monastic level of spiritual retreat to exist in surroundings that don’t reinforce the illusion that we are nouns, and by extension, good or bad nouns, is a sign that everything about our world is very, very messed up. Reality should not be a spiritual pursuit or a radical proposal. It should be a given. Instead, we live in such an intensely illusory world that reality seems foreign and otherworldly.

What the hell is wrong with us?

Are they still telling eighteen-year-olds they can be anything today? No sensible teenager would believe that anymore, not in this economy. What’s the motivational speech now, college deans of America? Struggle through pointless stress, jump through arbitrary hoops, and you too can end up $100,000 in debt with a job you hate and an apartment you can’t afford? Miss a hoop and you too can end up dying of a fentanyl overdose?

If the best advice we give to young adults today is a Hunger Games-style, “Stay alive,”then in a perverse sort of way, we’re on the right track. The rest of this bullshit has only ever been bullshit. That we believed in it for so long is why the world is crumbling.

The truth is: you do not need to be great, or even okay. There are no rules. You can literally just exist, and that’s fine.

In fact, the more you tend to your own existence, find joy in meeting your basic needs and living relationally and harmoniously with your surroundings, the better job you’re doing. The rest of what “you could be,” all that promising potential — it’s really just your potential to perpetuate illusions.

If I could talk to myself at eighteen again, I’d tell her keep doing yoga. I’d tell her not to worry about being everything, or anything. Just live your life. Breathe and eat and forage and drink and run and play and learn and hunt and swim and fuck and laugh. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just be, be kind, and tend to what’s here.

That is our birthright as humans on this planet. We don’t deserve a nice house or a cushy job or a car. We don’t deserve to starve or be shamed or abused. We are here to live in sustainable reciprocity with our surrounding ecosystem, to gather food, share with our communities, praise the sacredness of everything and be alive.

We owe nothing else our allegiance. We owe nothing else our belief. We owe nothing else our lives.

At the end of the day, the best advice is the truth, and at the end of the day, the truth is this:

You are not anything. You will never be anything. You will forever live as a fluid process with no fixed edges and the only thing that defines you is the verb of existing.

You just are. We’re just here. So just be.