vanity and value

I watched Vanity Fair tonight. I’ve never read the book, though now I might. I love films where the opening scene comes into focus once the movie progresses. I look for the full circle and feel satisfied when I see it close. In the opening of this film the young girl was sitting in her father’s studio as he painted. A wealthy patron comes in to buy an oil--a portrait of the girl’s dead mother. Her father offers it for four guineas, same price as all his paintings. The girl stands in protest shouting that the painting is, in fact, ten guineas. Not because that's its worth, but because that amount would be “too much to refuse.” The story unfolds from there and Rebecca Sharp, the heroine, spends the rest of the film discovering and redefining value.

I wonder about how that happens in life. We spend so much energy sizing things up, deciding if what we have is worth the effort we put forth and eyeing options for the moment when we might trade up. We chase satisfaction and puzzle over why we’re never happy. But, there’s something irresistable about growth and accomplishment. I’ve always thought ambition was a great virtue, now I wonder if it isn’t the thing that stands in the way of peacefulness and satisfaction--the truest accomplishments in a human lifetime. (Or at least I guess the Buddhists would say so.) So, is that voice inside me just American-bred rhetoric that I might be great if I only hold fast, work hard, and aspire for the gilded life I secretly know I’m destined for? Afterall, haven’t great men and women admitted that success is always there for anyone to harness, if you’ve got the tenacious grip? I’ve wondered if I had the heart and hands for greatness. Sometimes I have felt it resting there, taunting me with possibility.

A few days ago I had lunch with my ex-husband. He’s an attorney now with his sights set on politics. He could do it. I married him knowing he could; maybe it was one of the main reasons I became his wife. We ate bistro burgers at the power lunch spot downtown. It was my suggestion. I did that throughout our relationship--put him in the environment where greatness might take hold of him. I may be overstating my influence, but I think that’s how he got to law school in the first place. He got through it on his own, for sure, but I know I was a big part of the momentum. Looking back I wonder if I pushed him forward in that you-go-first kind of way because I didn’t know if I could accomplish the same success. Or maybe I wasn’t willing to fail (and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to try to begin with). At the very least, I’d learn from watching him go first. He asked me if I was resentful of that--him in school as I worked to pay bills. If that was the reason we split. I said honestly, no, but now, awake at midnight, I reconsider my reply. Not whether I resented him, but I wonder what was so frigtening about valuing myself? Why did leaving him feel like the only way I could really do that? I guess for whatever reason, what I had with him wasn’t enough.

So much has changed for me since then, but what was frustrating me at lunch was how much hasn’t. How I still feel that uncovered something within me that I can’t quite grab the corner of. I can’t decide which direction to tug, but I’m dying to expose something new. I worry that I’ve already spent too much time deliberting it. Like Becky Sharp, I seem to be born with the notion that one inncorrect step could lead directly to ruin, so I stay motionless. Where is my faith in cycles now?

There’s great danger, I often fear, in trading up. In the bargaining stance, sure footing is never guaranteed. And lately, putting my foot down feels a lot more like tiptoeing. Like a TV ad for a local used car lot--I'm given ‘em away, folks. My deal feels like being a deal.

People say in your twenties you struggle with who you are. Maybe that’s what this is for me. But it feels like something bigger--not simply wondering who I am, but deciding what I’m worth and more than that even, what in life is worthwhile. I have two more years of my twenties to go. I feel completely clueless about the answers to these questions. Ten years doesn’t seem long enough to make such huge determinations. One lifetime doesn’t seem like enough. So I watch someone else’s story on film, wait for the circle to close, glad that someone else is going first.