The Aesthetics of Emotional Minimalism

or, How to Disappear Completely

"Hey!" calls out a co-worker. "You're wearing a blue shirt!"

She's making fun of me. I always wear a blue shirt. Except when I wear a gray sweater.

"It's a good color for you," she goes on. "It brings out your eyes."

Blue does bring out my eyes. But that's not why I wear it. I wear it because it helps me disappear completely, a goal I've been working on for years, and one which I think I've very nearly achieved.

* * *

I just wound up watching Garden State again. I'm a sucker for movies about crazy people. In this one, the main character, Andrew Largeman, has been on a potent blend of Zoloft and lithium for all of his adult life, and it's left him completely numb: in the movie's opening scene, he dreams he's on an airplane that's about to crash. While the passengers sob and cling to each other in desperate fits, Largeman sits impassively sipping his ginger ale, in silent slow motion.

It frightens me how familiar this seems to me. And I'm not even on anything.

* * *

"Good morning! How are you today?"

Why do you always have to start the day with the hard questions?

* * *

I haven't had posters or decorations of any kind for at least five years. If people ask, I explain that it's because I move around a lot: objects—decorations—have gotten lost to nomadic attrition. But that's not why. Really, it's the same reason I stare at my closet for ten minutes each morning, trying to decide, "Blue shirt, or gray sweater?" It's the same reason I can't pick a restaurant, the same reason I go into near panic when it's time to get my hair cut. It's probably the same reason I move around so much.

I don't know who I am.

* * *

In philosophy, the study of aesthetics is considered a sort of kissing-cousin to the study of ethics, because both should follow logically from whatever you believe about the world, from your cosmology. This underlying belief dictates why you behave the way you behave, and why you like the things you like. It determines what is good and what is bad.

It's been said that I lack discernable moral focus.

* * *

When you don't know who you are, every outfit is a costume. Every interaction is a role-play. The only way to be yourself is to be generic, to be as friendly and safe and innocuous and evasive as possible, to dress in non-colors like gray. The only way to make the right decisions is to decide nothing.

The only way to be comfortable is to disappear completely...

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