What High-Functioning People Do When They’re Drowning
By Angela Perez, for AFTERlight
Los Angeles is a city that loves its own ambition, and nothing sells quite like the illusion of control.
We love the vision boards, the carefully curated “process,” the artist talk where someone confesses how hard they work, as though that’s the sacrament that makes the finished piece legitimate.
But beneath all the hustle and “flow” is something uglier and more familiar: terror.
I found one of my old notes the other day.
It’s exactly the kind of thing this city rewards: part-journal, part-to-do list. A promise that I was handling my shit.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Email Spanish teacher.
Find new dentist before benefits expire.
Add mentor chat to calendar.
Submit resume to three jobs.REVELATION:
Sell the house in June. Move overseas.
I want to live near diving. Swim in crystal-clear water.
Feel clean. Wild. Free.And still—I haven’t moved.
This is the erotics of management.
Look at me, being so organized. Look at me, proving my worth with bullet points. Look at me, controlling what cannot be controlled.
This is what high-functioning people do when they’re drowning:
They choreograph the drowning.
They design it.
They make it look productive.
They keep everyone fooled - especially themselves.
The thing about that list that still haunts me is the honesty that breaks through despite my best efforts to suppress it:
I WANT TO SELL MY HOUSE AND MOVE. PERIOD. I KNOW THIS.
All caps. A primal scream dressed up like a productivity plan. I found versions of this sentence throughout the dozens of half-empty journals and notebooks scattered all over my home.
Los Angeles loves the performance of clarity.
The slick branded wellness.
The Instagram grid that swears I’m thriving.
The hot yoga studio that reeks of rot-scented generational trauma in expensive sweat-wicking fabric.
But real clarity is messy.
It doesn’t fit in the grid.
It doesn’t look like an achievable goal.
It often demands you abandon everything that made you respectable.
That old list of mine read like a woman preparing to destroy her life in the most polite, acceptable way possible.
Option 1: Stay in Raleigh. Get a “real” job. Live for weekends.
Option 2: Keep the remote hustle. Hope for freedom at a future date.
But even there, buried in hope-for-the-best optimism, is the truth:
I want to swim in crystal-clear water.
That line is the only part that feels like a body wrote it.
Not a resume.
Not a cover letter.
Not the performance of “good worker.”
Just the body, demanding to be wet, weightless, free.
This city understands desire better than any place I have ever lived.
But it hates honesty.
It wants you to be sexy, but not needy.
Ambitious, but not greedy.
Free-spirited, but always able to pay rent.
So we learn to manage our longing.
I tell myself, You don’t fix this shit with another list.
You don’t plan your way out of the cage you built.
You don’t bullet-point your way to freedom.
You fucking leap.
When I read that old note, I wanted to reach back through time and slap myself awake.
Not because I was stupid.
Because I was so goddamn good at the lie.
I want to swim in crystal-clear water.
That wasn’t a fantasy.
That was the map. I did not follow the directions, yet.
AFTERlight | Los Angeles
