The Closest You’ve Ever Been to Your Truest Self

One could argue that the 9-season long TV series How I Met Your Mother has more emotional gravitas than your typical sitcom. I wouldn’t know, as I have rid myself of all objectivity when it comes to this show, having rewatched it in life-changing turning points and saturating it with so much emotionally intense subtext. I first finished it during my sophomore year of high school, when I had to transfer schools and—at least this was what it felt like at the time—leave my entire childhood behind. I cried over the blue French horn and the gagging divorce, and I walked around my new school with a lumpy throat and Nada Surf playing on my iPhone 4S. 

I pride (read: delude) myself with my refined taste, so upon realizing the inherent misogyny and sheer whiteness of the show, not to mention that infamous ending, I didn’t touch HIMYM for a while. I watched better shows (or what I thought was better at the time; read: delusional) like American Horror Story (read: delusional) and Skins UK (read: delusional). I was already in college when I put it back on again—I had just moved into my dorm, a few days before my first day. My roommate hadn’t moved in yet, I had no wifi, and I didn’t know anyone in the city. But I had a TV and a bootleg copy of all seasons of HIMYM. And I had comfort. I had home. There was just something about the entire show being a flashback, like the past and present and future all muddle together. It plays around with time optimistically; it makes you feel like waiting, even if you don’t know what for, is worth it. 

“This time last year, in a city full of people I didn’t even know.” — Alyssa

I’m still in quarantine, seven months and counting. My classes, jobs, and internships are all over Zoom. It makes me feel inauthentic somehow; when I unpacked my things from my dorm onto my childhood bedroom, it felt like remnants of a person I couldn’t be anymore. I started hating dorms and condos for their transience—one day it’s home then the next you find yourself packing everything up and heading back to the suburbs. The impermanence of everything made me feel like I had no ownership of my memories there, that the places I made sacred, made mine, are not accessible to me anymore. 

There were many, many moments earlier this year, pre-COVID, when I actually felt like my true self, moments where I was the right person at the right time at the right place. Little things I wish I could do when I was in my conservative little Catholic high school—study in coffee shops, wear skirts to class, write for magazines, go to late night movies—were things I was doing almost everyday. I loved my major and I loved the things I was doing outside of it. I loved doing my papers in the Starbucks by the bay and going home after midnight to eat fries with my friends at McDonald’s. Last month I applied for an internship where they made me answer a workbook, and when they asked me what I thought my best moment was, I said:

“This may seem anticlimactic, but the best I’ve felt recently was probably one afternoon in February: I had just left my local coffee shop, writing an investigative piece on “rarepairs”, a fanfiction niche, and I was walking back to campus for my gender and human behavior class. I was really proud of myself as I felt it was the closest I’ve come to being the person I want to be. I was learning about things that I was passionate about, both in and out of the classroom, and I was pursuing so many things I love. For years I felt idle, bogged down by the pressure of academics. But there I was, smiling to myself while walking the less-than-pleasant streets of Pedro Gil, thinking, yes, this was it: the beginning of my life.”

To be taken out of that life and back to what felt like square one—back to hanging out at my room by myself, dreaming about walking city streets—was devastating. I started watching HIMYM again, because like the lovestruck Ted Mosby, there was nothing more I wanted than to switch my bitter present for my livelier past. As the months went by I felt myself regressing, turning back who I was years ago, when I was essentially quarantined even without a pandemic; just locked inside my room, waiting for my life to start.

Lately I’ve been going through really intense parasocial relationships, something I haven’t felt since I tweeted Harry Styles every day when I was 14. I only ever experienced it when I was alone all the time with no one to talk to, but now it’s like I’m just giving it away to everybody. I once FaceTimed the guy I’m dating just to talk extensively about Katya, a drag queen of Drag Race fame. “I spent the entire afternoon just watching her on YouTube,” I said as my closing statement after a half-hour rave about her. “I feel like I know her. I can’t stop thinking about her.” I said the same thing the previous month about Josh Radnor, after staying up all night watching HIMYM B-rolls and press events.

“When I was down and danced all of it out with my doors locked at 2 AM. It feels liberating.” — Mark

When I pitched this essay, I was sure it was going to be a dreary read. I got the idea for it—a piece on discovering my true self a few months before I had to pack everything up and never be her again—when I had to create a learning module about authenticity for my internship. My supervisor pointed me to the work of Simon Hammond, whose whole spiel was about one’s Moment of Self-Truth, or their MOST. “Think of a moment where you have lived in the best way possible for yourself. That’s your MOST,” Hammond said in a webinar of his I attended. Your MOST is supposed to make you discover why you matter, to know what you hold dear. “Strive to make everyday your MOST,” he added. Well shit, I whispered to myself. These days it’s hard for me to picture myself as real, let alone true. Our capital-s Self does not exist in a vacuum, it’s a developing continuum fueled not by introspection but by interaction. Finding (or more accurately, constructing) yourself is a social process, it’s not something I can negotiate within my bedroom walls. It’s a process of interactional meaning-making I’ve been trying to reenact on my own for seven months, where I spend my days doing my silly little tasks, and when I finish early, I get to close my tabs and watch my silly little sitcom and my silly little YouTube videos. 

Even with my bleak disposition I wanted this to be cathartic somehow, so I asked people on Instagram to tell me about the moment where they think they were truest to themselves. “THIS IS SO DIFFICULT,” replied my friend Marga, who I met because we hung out in the same bayside coffee shop. “omg at this point i don’t know anymore,” said Kathleen, who I used to eat lunch with everyday at university. But the further I got into writing this, the more I realized that my moments of self-truth, that pre-COVID life I romanticized to death, lasted for four months; six if I’m being generous. It’s such a disservice to myself, saying that the life I lived before that small window of “self-truth” was spent waiting, that it essentially meant nothing. The existence of my true self getting bookended by times in my life where I’m stuck in my room dreaming of somewhere else makes me feel invalidated, like nothing I do alone in my room matters. But I’m here now, and I like to think I matter, even only to myself. I’m privileged enough to still be in school, to still be at home, to still be on earth. And while it may be awhile before I can be that True Self again, whatever that means to me now, I’ll always live by this expression I just discovered but now hold dearly: Wherever you go, there you are.