Halleluiah, Anyway I'm Not Where I Started
This could be a companion piece to last week's post, because I'm nothing if not endlessly fixated on the same themes.
I'm almost 35 and I'm still alive. I think this to myself on a daily basis lately and every time it feels impossible. Not just that I'm almost 35, although that too, but that I'm almost 35 and that means I've lived so much longer than I once thought I would. There was a time in my life when I didn't think I would live past 25, and then I didn't think I would live past 30, and now here I am nearly a decade beyond anything I ever managed to dream back then and isn't that nice? Isn't that amazing? Isn't the human spirit's capacity for survival astonishing?
What's even better than still being here in this life, in this body, on this earth, is that I want to be here now. When I was younger I wanted to be anywhere else, as anyone else. I wanted to be someone people could love and I didn't think I was. I wanted to live a life that mattered and I didn't think I did. I wanted to deserve the space I took up and I was absolutely certain that shrinking was imperative. I hated myself with a ferocity I've felt for no one else before or since. But now, I speak to myself with the tenderness I always want to receive, and I create little moments of luxury and pleasure for myself when no one else will, and I love myself wholly where I'm at while also recognizing my ability to go farther.
You have to convince yourself to want things and then you have to believe you can have them. You have to carve out a space where it feels possible that you might, one day, be the person you wish you were. It's so hard to want things because wanting opens you up in a way that feels dangerous. If your chest is sparking and your blood is pumping, if you look around at what you've allowed yourself to have and you feel yourself rebelling against your cage, then you have to do something about it. Complacency is so much easier and more comfortable. Passivity is safe. Even if you aren't happy in that state, you at least know the shape of it and how to contort yourself to create the illusion of living. You can get by that way for years, decades, a lifetime, but you shouldn't because you deserve to be an active participant in your own life. You deserve to reach out and touch the world and the people in it. And you deserve to work your life and yourself like clay in your own hands until you form it into something you can love.
Gilmore Girls is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, and every time I watch it, I'm struck by Lorelai. She's 32 when it starts. That's 3 years younger than I am now. It's a weird way to measure myself, but my brain always snags on her age and how much more adult she seems than I feel myself to be. She's a mess, yes, terrible at romance and not a lot better at parenting if you want my hot take, but she has a house she owns and a job with a lot of responsibilities and a life entirely separate from her parents. And a whole child who is herself pretty close to being an adult. She runs her own life and is unapologetically herself even when it might behoove her to apologize sometimes. No one can argue that she isn't an adult. But I often feel that a strong argument could be made that I'm not.
I know these aren't the only markers of adulthood, or even the most significant ones. I know this is more of me holding myself to unfair and arbitrary standards that I don't even have any interest in meeting. It's just a TV show, and Lorelai Gilmore isn't a real person. None of that is really the point. The point is that time is relentless, and whether I feel like an adult or not, I am one. I have been one for years. I graduated high school half a lifetime ago, and it wasn't long after that I began to feel like an impostor in my own life, like maybe I would rather not even have a life to struggle with. Blame in on bad brain chemistry or trauma or reading too many books like The Bell Jar, The Virgin Suicides, Girl, Interrupted, etc at a too young age. Blame it on all of the above. I don't think it matters much anymore to get my hands down in that soil and dig up the root.
I think what matters is that I'm almost 35 and I'm still alive, and I'm starting to figure out who I can be. I'm starting to demand what I deserve and test the boundaries of what I thought I was allowed to have. I'm starting to realize that while time is relentless, that doesn't have to be a bleak truth. It can be a galvanizing fact, something to propel me forward into decisions I've been too afraid to make. I can get tattoos even if I'm terrified of the pain, and I can dye my hair purple again or, if I decide that's too rough on it, I can keep growing it until it's long enough to get face-framing layers like the ones in this article about the best haircuts for long hair that I found in a Google search. I can wear dresses that are too fancy for the places and occasions I'm wearing them to. I can change my name to Daisy Lark even if it's just on social media, even if I'm worried that people in my life will be upset about it or won't like it. I can put it out into the universe that I think my writing is worth paying for and see what comes of it. I can become the version of myself I see in my head. I can be the main character of my own story and dare people not to love me. And I can trust that they will.
Here's a playlist I made something like 7 or 8 years ago now and have occasionally added to over the years. It makes me feel big main character energy and it instantly removes my urge to apologize for who I am. Maybe it will do the same for you, or, even if not, maybe it will at least energize you as it does me. My birthday wish is that everyone who reads this will also find their own version of this space that I'm finally, at 35, learning how to occupy. Crack yourself open, plant seeds in the soil you've spent all these years convincing yourself was poisoned, and watch yourself bloom. We're all going to be magnificent.