Feeling So Gatsby...

I must confess, I've wanted to read Gatsby since 2017, but for two of the worst possible reasons. For one, I've been citing Gatsby-related Taylor Swift lyrics my whole life, and would love to know what they actually mean. And secondly, I am borderline in love with Young Leo, and think that everything Baz Luhrmann touches turns to gold. Every time I pick up the book and read a party scene, the flashing image of Leo's entrance comes to mind. I can see it so clearly: champagne in hand, casually the center of attention, smiling with an "irresistible prejudice in your favor." 

Side note: Nick's description of Gatsby's smile is the stuff dreams are made of: "It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." 

But non sequiturs aside, every chapter of this novel served as a therapy session for my fear of change. Even knowing what I know now, that Gatsby winds up dead in a pool, I find it so hard to judge him for anything. If I had the money, power, and naivety to think I could quit my day job and chase the past, I probably would. There is something so untouchable about who we were: pain is far less painful in the rearview mirror -- and that's a blessing and a curse. 

In a lot of ways, junior year feels like standing on the edge of a cliff (or rather, being pushed towards the edge of a cliff). If you take one step forward, you find yourself somewhere completely unrecognizable. Sometimes I'll be doing homework (English, always, obviously), and find myself wishing I had more than a year left with these posters from the fifth grade and plastic participation trophies I got for no reason at all. 

My favorite author of all time, Fredrik Backman, wrote one of (I think) the most beautiful quotes about our relationship with our hometowns, and, in turn, our pasts: 

"Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it's not home anymore. We're not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn't." (Deal of a Lifetime)

I think all we, collectively, ever try to do is make our teenage selves proud. Because when we were twelve we thought we would make it big as a rapper, and when we were sixteen we thought we would change the world. At forty we'll realize how utterly forgettable we truly are. Gatsby has this gaping hole where is identity should lie, and ultimately, that's his undoing. He claws his way up the social chain only to be dragged down by his own people. He spends half of his life building a celebrity status, full of enigma and lies, and then the other half running away from the truths that threatens to expose him. A fitting metaphor for Gatsby's life is that moment when you outgrow your favorite jeans. You keep trying to shrink yourself down to who you were in the past, without realizing the space that time takes up. In Gatsby's case, that space becomes distance between him and Daisy. But without an identity to contextualize this change, he was left truly believing he could "recover some idea of himself". In a way, Jay Gatsby sealed his fate the day he killed James Gatz. Maybe he should've read some Fredrik Backman...

But ultimately, for all his massive character flaws, I think most of us live our lives, just like him, with the hope that someone will tell us (or, even better, truly believe), that we are "worth the whole damn bunch put together". Sometimes all we can hope to be is our best, and say what you want about Gatsby, but that's all he ever was.