how can we get back?
the jet lag of growing up
[ Includes spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once ]
I live a third of my life jet-lagged.
And I’m not talking the merely annoying few hours that most Americans and Europeans have to deal with when flying within continents. I mean eight hours, sometimes even twelve: the length of a full night’s sleep, the kind that has you craving lunch at four in the morning.
For me, jet lag is insomnia, exhaustion, nausea, the larger sense that something is wrong. Jet lag is humiliating; your body is shoving your brain away from the controls, to do the wrong things at the wrong times. It is, stubbornly, physically operating as if it were somewhere else.
All of this is understandably not enjoyable when you have exams to prep for right after term break.
ALPHA WAYMOND:
You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes… wrong.
Our institutions are crumbling. Nobody trusts their neighbour anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself…
EVELYN:
It’s in the rules that if you’re a queer Chinese kid, you have to rewatch this film every Lunar New Year. The clue’s in the name; Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about literally everything. The multiverse is used as an allegory for technology,1 queerness, depression, and the immigrant experience.
First-generation immigrants generally make the decision to leave home in search of a better life, to move onwards to opportunities of the future. So why does Evelyn express the desire to go back?
In January, I posted this melodramatic rant on my private Twitter account:2
In reality, how can we get back is a universal truth of aging, whether you’re a middle-aged laundromat owner in California or a first-year international student in London. When Michelle Yeoh Evelyn says she wants to go back, she means back to when her clothes fit and her hair fell the right way, back to the days her daughter ran freely through the laundromat and before divorce ever even crossed her husband’s mind. She still feels like she should be living in that temporality.
That’s what jet lag feels like. You’re vaguely aware you’re in a new place—your mind and body just haven’t quite caught up yet.
So when I say I want to go back, I don’t mean that I’m ungrateful for the combination of privilege, luck, and hard work that got me where I am today. I don’t mean that I would trade it, ever. I just mean I want a real break, and miss having everything taken care of—and worried about—for me. I miss going out to the dining room to a table full of fresh food, miss not having to stress over the whereabouts of my ID and passport 24/7, and I miss my bedroom window. Even my calluses are falling off my fingertips because I couldn’t bring my guitar over. I want to go back.
As we grow older, our guard grows taller. These are the institutions and distrust Waymond talks of. There’s always something to worry about, even at home: the next grocery trip, laundry load, round of bills to pay. Of course we want to go back—Even when we were poorer, even when we knew less, we always somehow seemed happier.
We’re all useless alone.
It’s a good thing you’re not alone.
It’s a good thing none of us are alone.
Joy gets over her teenage angst (sarcastic but also not really?) by the end of the movie. She has her mom, and Evelyn has her husband, googly eyes and all. It’s about pledging to stick together through the thick and thin: the mundane days of laundry and taxes, and the slightly more troublesome ones where you have to pull your daughter out of an everything/nothing bagel (it happens). It’s about finding the right people to figure this shit out with, ‘cause it’s everyone’s first go at life anyway.
Ending with this Inception-style screenshot of something Jess said to me when I first moved abroad:
Here’s to breaking the rules, and embracing the jet lag.
two summers ago i watched this youtube video by thomas flight on eeaao, metamodernism, and the internet, and i haven’t been the same person since
here’s (like half of) the scene on youtube, for anyone interested—of course i like this movie. the mc cries to taylor swift in the car
loved this. also your friend's words at the end really resonated with me as someone about to leave high school and start my new (kind of) adult life. it gave me hope, something that I find trouble looking for these days.