There was a time back in high school when I discovered this song by Arcade Fire. I instantly liked it, because it sounded so sunny and new, and Arcade Fire was then still a growing name—the era of 8tracks and bandcamp.
Back then, this song only really meant so much to me. I would imagine the song gurgling on in the radio while driving somewhere sunny. Easily speaking, it was then just an innocent track. I was 14, I was naive and gratefully dumb.
Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Years went by and I having plans, I became a bit smarter—armed with a little of this and that. I still find myself finding more dreams I want to achieve as days go by. It’s been seven years since I discovered the song and in between those seven monumental years, so much has been unpacked and tidied up at the same time. But I never would have imagined myself crying over the same melodious, pitch-rich song, seven years after.
I’ve had this job for almost four months now—still somehow short for someone to cry “Wolf!” But I really am seeing something far off the valley of my tended, protective sheep—is this the millennial hubris, the burden of dreaming too much in an era of uncertainty? Bless me, it’s 2019. The thick veil of security I’ve so carefully curated over the years is starting to chafe. My sheep’s wool are falling off—I thought I was gonna be okay with wherever I put myself in, as long as it’s giving me financial and social security. And it’s in this moment where I realized that it’s true: give yourself too much to think about and plan for, and you’re dead meat. Somehow the security blanket you’ve wrapped yourself into suddenly finds its way to be suffocating, a choking agent.
Maybe in some alternate subplot, the boy was crying for the wolf. Come get me, mutt! All these wool is itching the shit out of me.
Can we ever get away from the sprawl?
In the book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (yes good ma’ams and sirs, I am comparing myself to a nation and urban planning), the components and effects of the sprawl are shown, along with ways to combat it. What the book is trying to convey would be the effects of gentrification: how housing subdivisions, shopping malls, office parks, some civic institutions and roadways are changing the ways of communities. Technically speaking, sprawl identifies itself in the modernization of our day-to-day, the fast-tracked process of everything: from housing, urban development, and the gross, if not irksome, rise of shopping malls in every corner. City-building is taking too much of our lives.
In one click, hey, maybe I’m a sprawling city? Slowly melding along and blending in the half-light of the sky. I don’t want to call it b*rnout—because then I’d use it too much to describe this struggle, and that’s not how I want this to pan out. (Maybe that’s the case, but there is still so much to figure out.)
Maybe I’m just asking for too much, for having too many dreams—too much for one person to think of. It really doesn’t pay that I live alone in such a dense city and I’m being surrounded by so many people penetrating the world they want to be in—the art scene, the writing industry, prestigious law schools. Everything is happening all at once. Once I was so afraid to complain and admit that I feel stuck, but I feel stuck, alright. And I’m here waiting for something wonderful to happen, even working hard for the sunshine to come in my life, but it just won’t. My learned helplessness really propels me to believe that I don’t deserve a break from all the endless cages the world puts me in.
This is urban loneliness, I guess. Whatever sadness prefaced, my dreams will conjoin with it and I’ll feel an absolute need to just shut up and stop myself from being too colorful, too loud, too me. I’ve never felt so ashamed to be myself the moment I was called out by a boss and told me to stop being so me.
They’re screaming at us, ‘We don’t need your kind!’
I know there are countless ways to counter this kind of patterned lifestyle I wholeheartedly chose months ago, but it’s so taxing to think about how it’s slowly killing parts of myself. Because in the end, I may end up with nothing. I’ll leave this place, one day, I know, but what will be left of me once I step out? I’ve already cinched so much of myself; it feels thankless. I know this is part of my crusade toward a journalistic victory but everything is so confusing and scary. I know I’m not wasting my time, because I have my own timeline but I feel like I still have to beg the whole world to let me breathe in such an unforgiving environment.
If you’re reading this and you’re waiting for some vindication at the end, then I’m so sorry. This was supposed to be just a question expanded into an essay-length inquiry, a shout to the void.
I really do feel lost, and I’m hyperaware that I’ll be a little more lost in the years to come as a struggling 20-something.
