My year of ecstasy and insecurities
Wrote this in one breath before the Dec 1 sunrise and now I'm going back to bed. Also, recommendations
This was a big year for me, I had many major breaks. I did some live readings: on desire, on insomnia, and on love. I deepened some friendships and floated away from others. I met writers I admire online. I found love—rather, it found me. I watched people my age get married. I pissed people off. I gave an uuuuber successful lecture on Shrek through the lens of psychoanalysis to a crowd of 200 (a movie I’ve watched once per day everyday for almost a whole year between the ages of 6 and 7).
Then, November arrived without my permission. I got another year older. I feel like I should belong in a tribe, like I’m waiting for a rite of passage to initiate me into becoming something else. Perhaps your 20s are meant to be one long liminal stage—the in-between phase where a person is no longer what they were, but not yet what they will become. A caterpillar liquefying in a cocoon to reorganize itself into a butterfly. A tadpole absorbing its own tail to turn into a frog. I think I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what to do.
This year, I learned many things (against my will, but for my own good, I think). I learned to not tell my friends everything, not even the best of best friends. I learned to be careful about the music I listen to. I learned that there’s always someone who loves me more than I love myself. I learned that I truly cannot control the narrative of me that exists in other people’s minds. I tasted, once more, that made-up word “sonder”—that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—I look out of my window and onto the building across the street with its windows arranged like neat rectangles of a chocolate bar: someone’s vacuuming, someone’s doing yoga, someone’s playing League of Legends, someone’s on a work call while bouncing a leg, someone’s silvery blue British Shorthair is staring out the glass, someone’s bedroom is neat and empty and cozy like the background of lofi streams. Truly, we’re all so insignificantly small in front of each other yet we’re the biggest, most important thing in our own heads.
Have you ever felt ready for your next stage but don’t know what it is yet, or felt a deep longing for a cooler, more collected version of yourself that’s so tangibly close you just wanted to birth yourself out of your chest and make a run for it?
