on growing older

i’m twenty-seven now

I live a charmed life. In the morning, the coffee shop plays one of my favorite songs of all time, Thom Yorke singing, “I'm the next act / Waiting in the wings” at the beginning of “All I Need” by Radiohead. It’s like they know it’s my birthday. I get to celebrate my birthday with my parents and eat at beautiful places and overheat from too much love from the sun. I’m twenty-seven now, and when I go home for the night, a rat drags a pizza crust larger than its body across Pershing Square. As I ride the C train back home, the conductor has fun with his announcements, yelling, “If you wanna see the Brooklyn Bridge, get off here and go outside now!” It’s not my stop, but I consider it. I live a charmed life.

In the days leading up to it, when a friend asked me about what I wanted for my birthday, I thought about whether I needed anything new, considered how being 26 was — an age where everything seemed to come together in ways they had never before. A line from a Chance the Rapper song resonates in my head: “Lord, let me have another year like this.” 

My last year was one of leaning into myself, taking myself less seriously and more seriously at the same time. There were two main aspects to this: my shifting emotional state and constant neuroticism lost their grip on how I lived my life, and my writing practice expanded to fill my time, my thoughts, my identity. Combined, every day became more straightforward.

With my emotions, it was as if my frontal lobe fully developed all at once and I could notice the patterns in myself unlike ever before. I was still the mercurial person I’d always been, but it seemed clearer in the moment that the rage I’d feel, or the laziness, or the despondence could disappear just as quickly as it appeared. Even as I experienced a feeling that would overwhelm me and control my actions, the end was always in sight. Maybe it’s a practice in self-awareness from writing more, and maybe it’s a physiological change in my gray matter, but my emotional changes seem so much more visible than ever before, so obvious that they will disappear, like everything else.

For years in the past, I’d attempt to resolve these emotions through healthy habits and complicated situations that would trigger my anxiety or confusion. This meant canceling social plans or avoiding making them in the first place, fearing interactions with strangers or comfortably letting others decide what to do on trips or anything else going on. I found these things scary in the past, so I simply avoided them until it became obvious that the fear came from the unfamiliarity with those tasks. In other cases, I’d think that my unhealthy habits were the only sources of my suffering, that I was just a perfect morning routine away from being fulfilled, seeing things clearly.

I’ve been doing so many of the things that I thought were the cause of my unhappiness and feeling better than ever. My laziness still abounds, my screen time reaches catastrophic levels, I complain constantly to my friends, and order DoorDash when I should probably be cooking more. I only seem to grow more vain, staring at myself in every reflective surface, filling my camera roll with mirror selfies and outfit pictures. I have bad days where I spiral for a bit, but they’re outnumbered by the good days, and I always know that the bad days will end.

When negative feelings like fear and anxiety lost their teeth, no longer able to hold fast onto me, the world seemed to open up, freeing me to live in ways that I never necessarily thought possible. A previous me would be too fearful to go on spontaneous trips to Japan and New York to chase ideas and feelings. A previous me wouldn’t end up talking to strangers that I would’ve never considered talking to. A previous me would never transform into an extrovert after years of being severely introverted. I love this current version of me. I’ve become more like the outgoing people I’ve always admired, the people I once thought of as incomprehensibly different from myself.

Writing has helped here, too — the constant self-reflection I force on myself from writing weekly reveals where my thinking goes wrong, helps me highlight what I can do better, how I can be better. And, when even the negative outcomes of trying new things can be something to write about, it feels like there’s barely a downside to the unknown. Even though I’ve been writing for years, a renewed intensity on my work has elevated both my introspection and my actual ability.

In the last year, I’ve been taking my work more seriously, with a belief that my continued focus on the work may net a better world. Over the last 52 weeks, I’ve spent more and more time focusing on the work, finding purpose in it more than ever before. In a discussion with my writer’s group, the idea of “art as a public service” came up: that by framing one’s work as something that can improve the world, or even just an individual’s life, an artist is forced to take themselves more seriously and commit more fully to their work. The result, ideally, is that the artist digs deeper to try and make actually meaningful work, rather than something that looks more like vanity projects. 

I can’t be the one to label my own writing as meaningful rather than a vanity project — I am still writing about myself over and over again. But I tire of modesty. I’ve suffered from low self-esteem for most of my life. Even when I’ve felt competent in different things, it felt gauche or arrogant to acknowledge my own prowess or abilities. As I gain my own sort of self-knowledge, it becomes more apparent that being modest here is being dishonest. I can see the quality of my own writing, and that is much better than it used to be, better than some other writing around the web, even if my arguments could be stronger, my metaphors can be extraneous, sentence structure repetitive.

Among all that, writing has given shape to my life. Each day is guided by the words that I read, the words that I record, and their amalgamation transforms into how I interpret the world. It isn’t just that though — in my attempts to live a full life, one of newness and change and novelty, I seek to share these moments with those that I love. I want to write with such clarity and vigor that everyone that isn’t there with me can taste a piece of the splendor that I’m so lucky to experience. I live a charmed life, and it would be depressing if I couldn’t share some of the charm of it all with you — this past year and into the future.

Through 26 and at the beginning of 27, life isn’t as I expected it, and it never is, but it seems to be expanding in front of me as I grow more comfortable within myself, less inhibited by doubt and more purposeful. I’ve been here (on this planet, with the birds and the trees and pizza rats) for a little while now, and it feels a little more familiar, warmer with each passing day. 

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• EP - SNAKEGANG EP Volume 1 by SNAKEGANG - short but fun

• POEM - “Dirt and Light” by Aria Aber - “I recited Merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you, then touched / the damp and swelling mud, blue hyacinths”