Your twenties have to disappoint you

that's kinda their whole point

I’m walking through Sarphatipark with a heaviness in my chest I need to swish and spit like mouthwash before I turn 27. This isn’t my local park, but since I’m on a journey of microdosing inconvenience by opting for uncomfortable honesty and longer routes, I’ve been telling people how I really feel and I’ve been coming here on the weekends. It feels right to be born in spring, when the year is at its most ambitious and most anticipatory. I, too, feel ambitious and anticipatory at all times, as though something in front of me stands in between the current and everything I’ve yet to become, needs me to hold my breath with patience. The celebration is good for my naked ego, in a trenchcoat buttoned to the top, ready to expose itself exhibitionist-style, but then it dawns on me that I’m grown. Nauseous now. 27 is feeling equally tethered to Nietzsche and Hannah Horvath, depending on the day and the state of me.

I know how to be in my twenties. I know what it takes to stay afloat and well. I remain hopeful, remain supple, remain obvious. Lighting another cig, my daily sacrificial lamb I have so easily quit for good about five times. The wind keeps putting the fire out and I’m disproportionately uneasy about it all. I know the uneasiness has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the acute awareness of my own mortality — beautiful, disorienting rite of passage of your birth month. The last thing a woman on the verge of a birthday breakdown wants is peace, but everything is blooming and warmer now, and I think the beauty of it all might be trying to kill me. One thing’s for sure: to stay in good spirits throughout your twenties is to maintain a certain obliviousness to the cruelty of life. To keep cheering as you bleed out over the pavement, to brush your hair and curl your lashes on the last day of Pompeii, to make your very own Nora Ephron story out of a Tarkovsky feeling. It’s a necessity, really, not much of a choice or ignorance.

1

In your twenties, reality is as predictable as it is unimaginable. All of the mistakes and endings have felt arbitrary, more commonly absurd, yet I can trace each one to the very root of its beginning verbatim – it’s all a fresh wound, scarlet. Regrets may not be fresh, but lessons learned are not yet covered with scar tissue. It amuses me how memory keeps score and grudges in pristine condition, but never both ways — like when somebody leaves for the last time or when you’ve been betrayed, The Raft of the Medusa is upon them. Except for when you’ve done it, then it’s frivolity and actually not that big of a deal… I’ve been warned this is what growing up feels like, nonlinear and itchy like a hand-me-down sweater, when the parts of you that have met their potential are digging into the parts that haven’t, behaviors you keep indulging in clash against the moral goodness you know to be right. Either way, it’s all you, amorphous, hypocritical, sleazy creature of wisdom and contrast in the mirror. I’ll let myself be contradictory for a few more years. I’ll wrap it up when I’m thirty.

To make it all a little less daunting, I’ve been adding and subtracting points to gamify the passage of time, playing tennis with the timeline to conceive just how old (or young) I really am. Since female maturity is a grey area of reference and entirely reliant on both perception and the perceiver’s relationship with mortality, an equation helps. The match goes like this: I just got a library card and still qualified for the youth age bracket, which gave me a 20% discount. One point to young. Then somebody at work tells me I look ‘great for 26’. One point to ancient. That same week, someone mistakes me for an intern. Young? I’m the oldest I’ve ever been. Neolithic. But I’m the youngest I’ll ever be? Young! My body is going haywire begging me to have a baby, keeping passive aggressive tabs on my biological clock. Soon to be fossilized and ancient. I get carded at the corner shop. Young? I realized this year I actually do want a baby. Okay, deuce. Suppose this oscillation is what haunts us universally, a formula for the immeasurable is one of panic. How I miss being younger. How you couldn’t pay me enough to go back and relive any of it.

Sex and The City

Something tells me to hold onto absurdity, that treasures are found within the ridiculousness of it all. Camus thought that all great thoughts and deeds have a ridiculous beginning. If the absurd, as he believed, is the relationship between us and the world, then I would also add that recognition of the ridiculousness is the strongest anaesthetic for the harsh conditions — softly pinching yourself closer to the truth, spotting the humor before the joke slaps you in the face. As you’re pushing the boulder to the top of the mountain, you know there’s only as much fun in suffering as there are exclamation marks in your story. The boulder is always heavy and tears always stream downwards: in that sense, missing the bus, getting ghosted, a death in the family, or grappling with your inescapable demise are roughly all the same on the tragedy scale, all playing out under the same gravity laws and biochemical reactions. There’s nothing a little chuckle can’t resolve. “I don’t feel satisfied with what I have done to date,” Saul Bellow confides in his interview for The Paris Review, “except in the comic form.”

2

The older you get, the more you wish to distance yourself from a perceived lack of anything. Prescriptive with your standards, stricter on the loose ends. The immense guilt bites at night because I’m not as financially secure as I’d like to be, still accustomed to scarcity, still lacking, my face could use a couple of procedures, a syringe of this and that, more friends in my corner, lacking the perfect parties, opportunities are passing by, and men could learn to love me more and better, still lacking their approval and their hearts on a wooden stick. Of course, societal pressures are at play, but I’ve mostly been made nervous by my own credibility. And where I’m lacking, is it an error of circumstance or oversight? Am I fundamentally doing something wrong? If my satisfaction is conditional upon a sense of purpose or utility, then who’s going to help me shape that purpose, or at the least be kind enough to tell me what to do? It has to be somebody with authority and wisdom. I don’t know anyone with both.

(Close your eyes, Jemima Kirke) The only way to survive your twenties is to think about yourself too much. It’s merely self-preservation in a world that doesn’t reward neither the immediacy of youth nor the methodically slow investigation of self. You’ll either be written off as crazy or lazy, your choice. But here’s where objectivity turns relative: when you get used to living in your mind and mulling things over, the world implodes and you’re not useful. You’re laughable. Fiona Apple famously wrote “He said it’s all in your head – and I said ‘so is everything’, but he didn’t get it.” Well, what if I’d like for him to get it? It’s imperative that they all do; otherwise, my truth is suspended in fiction and I’m an old lady making up parallel worlds where the narrator is always sexy and victimized.

The biggest blind spot of it all is, of course, the deluded belief that I still have a fair shot at escaping my body. That it isn’t too late or unnatural for me to wake up with a better face, a bigger butt, fifteen pounds smaller, able to pull off any dress. In an alternate reality, the sheer lingering hatred for myself is a force so fierce and powerful it makes me quantum leap to a size 00 by virtue of wanting it so bad. In reality, it’s just something that dissolves energy and gnaws at my limbs. Since I’ve only ever been able to appreciate myself retroactively, in old photographs and fuzzy Merlot memories, will I have spent the first half of my life wishing for a different look, and the later wishing for a more appreciative brain? There is no restitution. We already know how it’s going to play out, but the still wide open desire for a better me outweighs the knowledge that it’s never, ever, ever been enough before. I feel I owe it to myself to experience perfection at least once, however briefly, if not by some strength or innate talent then at least by the diligent repetition of everything I’ve been so keen to master. But the more I steer one way, the more I burn rubber on the other side. This dissatisfaction may be discreetly in my favor.

3

I’ve gotten better at abstaining from extremes and worse at relying on momentum. The discernment is tough, so is the loneliness that grows with it. Melting into the busy streets, this solitude is no longer unbearable and doesn’t make me cry. I knew I’d learn to build things out of it. There’s no doubting my ability to be excellently alone, I do not allow myself such luxuries. But things were easier when I could do with any kind of love as long as it would authenticate that I’m loveable, and when seeking to feel understood was a prerogative far more important than understanding myself. Now that I need no confirmation or salvation, the company I want is hard to find, the love I crave is hard to keep. Rare. When shipwrecked, I’d always blame myself — and that was fun and brutal. What’s with all this boredom when you don’t let people crash your bones against the shore anymore? Where did the dramatics go?

Then there’s the new kind of fascination, defiant to the nihilistic dread densely calcified into your early twenties. Suddenly calling your mom is kind of fun again, so is buying a new cutting board, and vacuuming. Staying out too late is for juvenile idiots, but sometimes also really, really needed. The time is moving through you and you’re simply catching up, a vessel in a stride. Feeling your heritage down to bone marrow, it’s a good thing we never got nose jobs, isn’t it? The vanity of ageing is only upsetting, but not existentially challenging — sure, you feel slightly unnerved when you look in the mirror for too long and observe the plumpness of your cheeks hollowing out, that your eyes are duller and the skin is looser in some places. But we’ve spent our whole lives wishing we were different, so it truly does not matter. Like looking for satisfaction in a well that’s never known water. It’s also an instance of thinking about beauty so much you stop thinking about it at all: spoon-fed with so much fearmongering, you get just curious enough to see the worst of it. It converges, all of it, the paranoia and the unknowing, onto a state that isn’t quite bliss or oblivion, but doesn’t demand neurotic action.

Le Radeau de la Méduse by Théodore Géricault

But we’re stubborn, and the commitment to fixing disappointment is what carries us through it all. We insist on happiness because it’s ours to take. Survival of the fittest is also survival of the most willing to swim in the absurd. To be in your twenties is to have lived through a million days where taking it out on your wrists would’ve been a viable solution, and yet not only are you waking up in the morning, still with us and dancing, but you also don’t remember most tragedies. Someone did something, a careless word was uttered, a bed was in tears and ruins, love was given and taken away. It’s geopolitical, it’s emotional, it’s vital. The details all remained in ellipses and sighs. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it reserves a pirouette for irrelevance. As the greats say, put your headphones on.

We love to take all the turns pacifying each other not to panic, that everyone’s on their own path, that you have all the time in the world, that you’re so young and not yet at the pinnacle of your potential. It doesn’t taste true in my mouth when I say it, so why would I lure you into something I myself have trouble reconciling with? I can’t take the disappointment away from you, nor the dented pain, not even the here-we-go-again’s, and you don’t need my comfort because my words are on a screen and you are in your heart. We’ll all just feel behind and old and underloved because we’re primed to do so, threatened by our success more than ever inclined to do the hard thing. You have to remember that the echelon of the human condition is trying. Which, by the way, is eternal, not capped at an age milestone. Today, I’m trying not to freak out at the park, and then it hits me that my twenties were always meant to be disappointing, and that the culprit of this heaviness isn’t my eventual demise. It’s just pollen.

(the rumors are true, I’m turning 27 on May 17…)