you're not demure, you're a mess

mindfulness can't come to the phone right now

By some happenstance or sequence of events, I now live in a newly built apartment complex with around 150 flats stacked on top of each other, tiled with panoramic glass, and accompanied by not one, but three rooftop terraces. Fancy, you’d think, but I’d argue: it’s a young people-only living concept, which means it’s your average apartment complex, except due to regulations aimed at combating the housing crisis, the apartments have been allocated to people under 35. Had I given this factor any consideration before moving in? Honestly, no, I just needed a place and barely skimmed through the contract. If you live in a big city, you know it’s never a “let me search for my dream Architectural Digest-esque apartment” situation; it’s usually a first come first serve, don’t care about the leakage or if the bathroom’s in the kitchen, begging on your knees for the landlord’s approval, please please please let me transfer you obscene amounts of money every month situation.

Long story short, I suppose I now live in what can only be described as a glamorous dorm. At least that’s how I’ve been feeling—back to a time in my life when running on three hours of sleep, a cold shower, and a hangover was just another Wednesday. Teenage suppleness. You can sort of imagine what it’s like to be in the building: there’s always a party somewhere, everyone’s constantly doing laundry at ungodly hours, you’re always greeting cute strangers—some of whom you’re pretty sure you’ve met before—and some parts of your body are always freshly shaven just in case. There’s music nights, card game nights, sneaking in and out, and back in again. I haven’t seen this much beer in my proximity since freshman days. I greet my neighbors and ask if anything’s up tonight. I get intense FOMO from the group chat. There’s even an eerily inseparable group of guys all wearing Lacoste polo shirts and cargo pants that are a few sizes too tight, and I’m strangely enthralled by people’s ability to imitate their coming-of-age years into adulthood and bills. Now that’s commitment to the bit. You also catch people walking out of each other’s apartments past midnight all the time, as if there’s an unspoken curfew they’re violating, seizing captive glances that are half-shame, half-mischief. You’d never judge them because sometimes you are the curfew breaker yourself. Situationships might be back in style, I heard?

A serious case of vertigo spins my head around like an old laundromat as I’m trying to understand why, or how, life has come to this—why I’m suddenly ravenous for all this fun, relishing it, childish and whimsical, can’t get enough of it, like I’d been imprisoned for too long, kept in the basement of an old grumpy recluse who’s diligent about her skincare, bedtime, and calories, allocating specific days for partying and never doing anything remotely on a whim. For someone who mostly goes to reservation only cocktail bars with a minimum of 4.5 stars on Google, biding time on some guy from the third floor’s couch with a concoction he just proudly served me in a tall glass is not just out of character—we’re in a whole different film genre now. I don’t distrust this phase; if anything, I lean into it with pride and no prejudice. I just thought I’d left all of this behind a long time ago, sometime in the first quarter of my twenties. It’s a Spring Breakers sequel. Low-rise jeans. Glitter residue, maybe. Addison Rae in my headphones. I knew that, first, people can change and second, age is mostly a construct and doesn’t mean anything at all… I guess I just thought I was the exception. I thought maturity was linear. I thought I was grown, whatever that means. I thought wrong.

I’m very much perplexed about it all, ashamed even. My first instinct is to punish myself for misbehaving, back to the recluse state we go, what are you doing. Haunted and bombarded from all sides by the three M’s of womanhood—modesty, maturity, mindfulness—the thought of digressing or deviating in any way is terrifying. Sandra Lee Bartky explored the concept of false shame in Femininity and Domination (chapter "Shame and Gender"): “False shame is felt when a person evaluates her behavior in line with commitments which are not really her own, commitments which disturb a moral equilibrium to which she will shortly return.” Indeed—in my mind, with every year added to a woman’s lifespan come new responsibilities, drowning out the partying, the lipstick stains, the promiscuity, the wilderness of it all, one day at a time, taking everything away until there’s only chronic fatigue and a full counter of anti-aging serums. The days she’s going to reminisce on decades from now can only be lived once. I thought that once you’ve stepped into the woman who’s very serious about her career and relationships and every other little thing territory, there was no going back. But August came, and so did waves of chaos alongside it, dragging me into the quicksand and spitting me back onto the shore, teaching me how to live with all this newfound joy and oxygen. I barely recognize this social, easygoing creature staring back at me in the mirror. She likes to party. She knows people. She’s okay with being late. She’s actually fun to be around, not at all in the corner of the room. She’s a little careless now or maybe it’s an innate thing, simply got tired of caring too much, of being anxious. Has she always been here, hiding in plain sight? Have I been holding her hostage unknowingly, terrorized by the sunk cost fallacy of maturity? I have to unlearn some of the dreary conditioning, pluck it out of my conscious with tweezers.

It seems as though up until this point, I didn’t own my maturity—my maturity, or the concept of it, owned me. I know I’m not the only one. It’s hard to believe, or maybe acknowledge, that I never allowed myself to have fun as a grown woman before. At least whatever I thought fun meant wasn’t half as fun as this. Fun within the brackets of what’s acceptable only. Adulthood is synonymous with boredom, right? You’re told to have fun but not too much fun. Don’t be rigid, but never go off the rails. Must do this, must do that, must find man, must pay bill, must, must, must… Blah. Sometimes I wonder whether some of our bigger life choices are dictated by false shame (of course they are), even for those who tend to be self-aware and assertive. It’s an autoimmune response, which might be emblematic of a bigger problem—our addiction to self-regulating and policing ourselves, performing, and assessing our lives from a third-person perspective more than living them. Bartky, once again, put it better: “It is in the act of feeling ashamed that there is disclosed to women who they are and how they are faring within the domains they inhabit.” Of course I’m perplexed: this is not quite what I’ve been told a woman aged 26 should be doing. But then again, I’ve been told a lot of stupid shit about women and what it means to be one, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had incessantly listened and obeyed. It’s just that some of the social conditioning is more insidious, harder to question, especially when it seems to mimic my own beliefs and morals, seemingly coinciding with my introverted, quiet nature. Floating above my body’s baseline temperature, somehow more alive and younger than ever before, I breathe in the thrill, breathe out wisdom. It’s like I’m learning how to walk or ride a bike again. Except this time, my frontal lobe is fully developed and I can afford better wine.

There is no guidebook for your twenties, or thirties, or forties: we’re all running on assumptions, cross-hearted intuition, and pushing our luck. I suspect that those of us who never learned how to let loose and have fun get particularly scared when fun inevitably finds us. It’s not about the partying itself, nor the amount of alcohol, or the beautiful men. I feel like, for many years if not forever, I’d been frozen in a permanent tiptoeing state—always self-checking, scanning how people feel, how I’m acting, if my hair is frizzy and my words are right, acutely aware of everything in my periphery. Too attentive in all the wrong ways. Too controlling to be myself. Rigidity verbatim. I might’ve simply run out of fuel, and to hell with it, I no longer want to be a walking thermometer of my surroundings. There’s only so much space in my brain: tonight, it’s occupied by a party I’m co-hosting. Tomorrow, maybe, one I’m attending. There’s a rave coming up and, well, there’s dinners and dates. So many dinners. Whenever friends visit, I have to warn them chances are there’ll be a rooftop party, and we’re going. I’m starting to think that all this untethered partying isn’t a phase—maybe deliberate avoidance of fun in the name of maturity was. True maturity can also look like rejecting rigid disciplines to embrace something more fluid, effervescent, something where any kind of fun is welcome, not frowned upon.

In the meantime, you can shove as much Nara Smith and Rory Gilmore demurecore content down my algorithm’s throat as you wish, but I’m kind of enjoying having a messy, sweaty, sticky, not at all mindful, carefree summer. And can we please stop using the word demure? Brands and corporations have adopted it and I’m feeling nauseous. Unless that’s my hangover.