On change, saying no, and staying too long at the fair

A city this size has a million pitfalls. The clubs are always open when you need them, the bars always have a place for you to sit, and there's always a friend somewhere doing something. It's hard to say no to your friends. It's hard to slow things down.

Joan Didion, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was the same age as I am now when she wrote "Goodbye To All That." Her city was New York, mine is Seoul. There are a lot of other differences, but there are also a lot of similarities. A few choice passages from that essay:

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. (pp.233)

I remember one day when ... we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples ... parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guadalajara ... parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties ... the worst kinds of parties.

You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair. I could not tell you when I began to understand that.

All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen ... I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. (pp. 235-6)

I'm not as over it nor is it as bad for me as Didion puts it. I don't believe that I have already met everyone that could tell me something new. I don't believe I'll ever feel like that. But there is a lot of truth in what she is feeling, and how it resonates with what I see in my days. If anything, the essay is about growth. It takes a lot of honesty and discipline to get to that next place.