Dear Lana,

Today, I was re-reading Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality thinking about how often we associate events that are individual with theories that are universal. I personally find a lot of Freud’s writings on repression and sublimation to be quite relatable; the entire reason I started writing (I mean, genuinely writing) in the first place was because I was angsting over this girl who didn’t like me back some time ago, but it seemed that this habit has evolved quite a bit since then — but in the most predictable manner possible.

In Infantile Sexuality, Freud talks about how susceptible to impressions we are in our youth, which is simultaneously a time period about which we remember the least. Sublimation serves the role of addressing repression in a way that allows us to continue functioning in society. That got me thinking — if I was just more successfully socially or romantically or academically when I was growing up, would I still feel the same need to bridge the gap between repression and reality through writing and music and art? Maybe, instead of spending my evenings drafting these weird letters, I could actually spend time other than figuring out the source to all of my neuroses.

Maybe if I accomplished more socially or romantically or academically as a child I would feel less of a need to prove something to myself. It would be so easy just living life, consuming media and eating food and figuring out what “passion” to pursue next. It is living towards something as opposed to away from something. It is living without the need to compensate for something you missed out in the past, living with some sort of unpredictability that is only possible through living without the need to relegate neuroses. It would be a genuinely unpredictable life because it would be living without having a definitive causal relationship with your past. I wonder what it would be to live like that.