And now the question. The million-billion dollar question, now that my night and my psyche have settled down and I have enjoyed a few minutes’ peace:

What are you going to do next, Aron Hsiao?

— § —

There’s a cultural trope about serial starters. People that begin project after project, full of enthusiasm in each case, yet never manage to carry them to completion. It’s almost an archetype, a part of the collective unconscious.

That’s not me.

Instead, I’ve always been more of a finisher. Once something has begun, I generally carry it through to completion, no matter the obstacles in my way, no matter the extent to which others see it to be folly. Cases in point: double-major, graduate school, Ph.D., mutiple books that didn’t have much of a market to begin with and didn’t end up selling very well, etc.

No, I don’t have much trouble finishing things. Instead, I have trouble starting them.

— § —

In many ways in life, I’m a very liberal person, but in this one way, I’m extremely conservative. It’s hard for me to take the initiative, to put something at risk. Once I do, I have to see my investment through to maturity. I am wary of commitment because, unlike many others these days, once I commit I am committed. I like to think of this as admirable, but it has its costs, and my hesitation in this regard is one of them.

Initial investments and commitments are hard. Hard enough that I have never managed to make a habit of making them. Or even of regularly evaluating and considering them, as most people do on a more or less continuous basis.

Left to my own devices, my natural tendency is to continue in a kind of routinized statis, day after day, plugging along. Carrying water, as it were.

But sometimes that’s not a viable option. Not if a person wants to remain healthy. Not if a person wants to be a person, to have a self and a life.

— § —

And so it is that every now and then, I’ve learned to remember to ask myself:

What are you going to do next, Aron Hsiao?

For me, it’s a scary question. When I answer it, it leads me to do things like leave for graduate school, take out large loans, switch careers, change relationships. Things that are hard, and tiring, and life-changing. It’s a heavy question for me, and so I tend to retreat from it, to put it off, to try to extend the list of options I’m evaluating indefinitely, anything to avoid having to commit to, or even to consider, new courses of action.

The devil you know, after all, and that is already here, next to you, ready-to-hand, vs. the devil you don’t know, and that is probably far away, or very expensive, or incompatible with half of your life that will then have to be discarded or rethought.

But now, now it’s time again. I know that I have to challenge myself, to confront myself, to play my own therapist. To ask the question and demand an answer and an action to follow it:

What are you going to do next, Aron Hsiao?

I will likely forget this once or twice more over the coming weeks or even months. But the insistent feeling that I have is becoming more insistent by the day. Despite every bone in my body wanting to put it off, I know that nothing good will happen for me again until I ask, and answer, this question.

— § —

So hop to it, me. Tonight my mode of procrastination is to write about the fact that I am procrastinating and avoiding on this point. It’s all very meta.

But I can’t keep it up.

The time has come.

Decide, soon, and act. Cover your eyes and plug your ears if you have to, me.

But make it happen. The clock is ticking.

Once a very long time ago, I had a rule. The rule was that once something went live on my blog, it couldn’t be removed or edited.

That rule went by the wayside a decade ago.

As have done a lot of other things that a young adult might adopt as a matter of creating and preserving a veneer of personal integrity, only to gradually drop those same things over time as a matter of preserving a semblance of personal sanity.

— § —

Earlier today I was quite sad.

For several hours, I indulged in that most traditional of mental amusement park rides, the downward spiral. I tried to hold it together, but was really generally failing.

Then, having dragged myself to bed with kids in tow, to read bedtime stories and a chapter from Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest, and very much in mid-chapter and even mid-sentence, it suddenly all went away.

A switch flipped.

I was at peace with the world once again. Grown, mature, and stable, I was suddenly able once again to love without expectations, to function without certainties, a capability I’d lost for at least a few hours today for no particular reason.

Who knows why these things come and go? Certainly I don’t.

But I was glad to be comfortable and calm once again, rather than checking my messages every five minutes with a combination of desire and dread.

— § —

And then, after and only after I’d let go and found peace, a message.

Beautiful words.

And just like that, I’ve swung from one end of the emotional spectrum this morning to it’s extreme opposite by afternoon and back again to where I’d started by evening.

We’re not all so different from one another at the end of the day.

The line between “okay” and “needs work” is a very thin one indeed, if it exists at all.

Maturity comes and goes. That’s a truism about me, one that I suspect is true about most people. This, however, is a suspicion without any solid basis, more “what I hope” than “what I know.”

— § —

What I know is that while inner peace, faith, and trust were easy to find for a day or two, they’re now in short supply inside me. I’m working once again at parenting and reparenting myself, at being a grownup rather than being an anxious kid underneath it all.

Is life this way for everyone?

There are times—and this entire year has been one of them—when I wish I was wired like “everyone else.”

Of course, I know that “everyone else” is a convenient mental shortcut for the insecure, and that in fact there are many that struggle mightily with everyday stability. Mental illness is a fact of human life that affects so many, some visibly, others not.

So what I mean is that I wish I was wired like the people, whomever they are and healthy or not, that would not actually be struggling in the ways that I am struggling right now to just be okay.

– § —

I also think back to the self that I carried to New York and, at times like this, wish I was that person again.

Those who say that life always moves forward are wrong. You can, in fact, go backward, and we are evidence of that. I am by a decent measure both less mature and less able than I was then. I miss that me and it was hard to build him.

Presently, when I manage to pull myself together, I’ll begin trying to build him again.

– § –

In the meantime, however, I’ll spend the rest of today clinging to maturity and to the idea of maturity—to sane and stable responses, to larger-context knowledge, and to emotional well-being, insomuch as I can.

It’s one of those days on which I won’t get nearly as much done as “I’m capable of.” The kinds of days that characterized most of my childhood (and that colored most of my childhood report cards, which contained precisely that sentiment for years, and for the same reason).

I find myself in something of a cliché—a difficult, complicated everyday life fraught with feelings, emotions, relationship issues, and logistical complexities. And here I sit typing into WordPress.

Obviously, what’s required is airy-yet-razor-sharp Zen-like prose that is by turns reflective, expansive, and able to dissect the tiniest of moment-to-moment specimens. Witty similes and self-depricating paragraphs that show me to be sophisticated, urbane, yet also open and self-reflective, an accidental yet wise guru in the midst of meaningful personal crises, an uncanny mix of the immature problem-creator and hip-yet-old-soul modernite.

It’s all the fault of Sex and the City and Penelope Trunk, all of these expectations.

— § —

Fact is, it’s all bullshit.

When you’re actually faced with it, those bloggers and columnists and Pinterest quotes don’t seem half as wise, self-aware, or sharp as they do before you’re faced with it.

Fact is, we’ve been playing house. Cookie cutter situations with cookie cutter platitutes to get us out of them for years, then a lot of feeling oh-so-grown up about our prowess in living and “surviving” and “thriving” through “hard times.”

Well if you’re not legitimately worried that all of life is at stake and nobody, not a single person, has any control over it, then you’ve not had hard times. Hard times cannot be controlled. Hard times don’t answer to anyone; they are a force straight from darkness, and they will have their way with everyone involved. The humans’ job is to navigate and to cling to life and love with everything they have, nothing more.

These are hard times. These things now. And the easy platitudes and nuclear family poses now seem silly to me. My self of a few months ago seems silly to me, the way a pre-teen’s first kiss anxieties seem to a worldly seventeen-year-old.

— § —

Now we have real things to work through. Things without answers, without roadmaps. It’s up to us to solve them, or up to use to refuse or fail to solve them, and real lives, our own included, hang in the balance.

Platitutes, conventional wisdom, and Norman Rockwell paintings are useless here.

We’re not playing house any longer. Now, for the first time, we’ve grown up, adults with adult problems requiring adult behavior, adult decisions and with adult consequences. Suddenly it’s so clear to me just how adolescent the entirety of our society and its norms are.

All of America is playing house, or playing hipster, or playing sporty young person, or playing Sex and the City. Everyone is comfortable and safe enough to play well into their thirties and beyond.

I’m not playing any longer. We’re not playing any longer. Suddenly, we’re past the games, unwritten rules, and prizes. Everything is at issue and everything is up for grabs, and there’s not a Pinterest meme in the entire Internet that can help us.

— § —

You know you’ve grown up when you stop searching for answers because you know that (a) you won’t find them anywhere, and (b) nobody is asking you for an answer—only for decisions and actions. Only for living, day to day and moment to moment, in all its messiness and with all its consequences.

— § —

I turn 40 in just under two months. It took me until 40 to grow up. I don’t envy the children of previous generations and epochs who had lives that were precarious enough to grow up two or more decades earlier.

At the same time, I also don’t envy the bearded Brooklyn lumberjacks and Carrie Bradshaw types that will continue to take themselves unjustifiably seriously well into old age, simply for lack of real adult problems.

— § —

I don’t know where that leaves me. I suppose it leaves me awake at 11:59 on the last day of the annual winter holidays, blogging entries that few, if any, will ever read and missing and loving and accepting my wife even while wondering if (and hoping that) she’ll be my wife for the duration.

With two small, innocent souls snoring audibly nearby.