nice to meet you
Sometimes you need a fresh start. And sometimes a fresh start isn’t as shimmery and romantic as all the TikToks set to soft indie cover songs or as thrilling and liberating as Miley, Demi, or Selena’s first post-Disney album*. Sometimes a fresh start is simply necessary. And if I’ve learned anything in the last six years of purely definitional adulthood, it’s that something that is necessary is not always something that is positive. Which, for the record, sucks.
If you met me for coffee four years ago and we’d made plans for a second coffee date for four years after that, it’s possible I’d border on unrecognizable to you. When I think about the implications and instigations of this fact, often times, it makes me happy. Happy that I’ve somehow managed to leave behind many of the things and people that kept me from embracing the version of me that I’ve (so far) turned out to be. Other times, it makes me quite sad. Like I’m mourning my past self, and all the bright-eyed years I spent free of cynicism. It’s easy for me to get more caught up in this latter reaction.
Life comes down on you hard when you realize the reason people always told you to ‘live while you’re young’ and ‘enjoy your youth’ and other pithy shit like that. Because you realize they were right. I’m willing to admit that I’m still a youngin’ at the infantile age of twenty-four, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss being a teenager. I miss my age being a more valid excuse for making dumb, midnight decisions that may or may not land you in the ER. I miss thinking that a crush not liking me back was the absolute pinnacle of heartbreak. I miss messing up and not feeling like it was the end of the world, because tomorrow was another day and I felt I had an infinite number of those. I miss not being mentally ill. Too real? Circling back.
The somewhat scary thing is that, in my 30s, I’ll probably feel the same way about my 20s. I’ll miss getting in my car and driving wherever I want, even states away, because I want to and because I can. I’ll miss having my life in my own hands, but being untethered to the world, free to find out whoever it is I am. I’ll miss having the excuse of being in my 20s as the reason I haven’t figured that out yet. I’ll miss only having joint pain every now and then, and not all the time. This is not to say you lose any or all of this the second you turn thirty, but there’s a little less grace for those who haven’t answered all the existential questions society has deemed necessary for passing the Thirties Entrance Exam.
What I always seem to neglect to remember in the midst of all of this brooding and reminiscing is that past me kind of sucked. She was cute and all, and made a lot of the decisions that led me to where I am, and for that I am both indebted and forever grateful. But she was also dumb as hell. She fought ferociously to keep people around that wouldn’t have done the same for her. She let someone else dictate how and when and with whom she should grow. She nearly destroyed herself by trying to become something the world told her she should be. She was young, so I forgive her. But she was dumb, and I would never want to be her again. Sometimes the pains of the present can place rose-colored glasses on the past.
What I still don’t understand is why our instinct is to look behind us. Everyone does it. Life sucks right now, remember back when it didn’t?** When, in reality, maybe you were a little perkier, but life is still life and ‘life sucks sometimes’ all the time.
My friends and I say we peaked freshman year of college, because it was such a wildly happy and inexplicably fun season of life, but we often disregard the fact that one of our best friends died in a freak accident at the end of that very same freshman year. For some of us, it was our first up-close experience with death and grief and mourning and it changed all of us forever. But we choose to remember the good times—the times we spent venturing out for deep dish at 1 a.m., spending hours in the library “doing homework” that eventually dissolved into unbridled headassery, laying on the football field in the middle of the night recounting all of your past relationship endeavors to the people who would become your future. We choose to remember the good, because that’s part of how we heal from the bad. And I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. I think what gets tricky is when we decide to label the past as conclusively “better.”
What is “better”? How was it “better”? Maybe you weren’t on antidepressants, but you also weren’t in therapy, learning more about who you are and why. Maybe you didn’t know the extent to which the world was a horribly dark and twisted place, but you also weren’t aware of the deep suffering of others that you are now able to help. Maybe you didn’t have bills and taxes and rent to pay, but you also didn’t have the glorious autonomy that comes with ruling your own life. Maybe you didn’t know how cruel death was, but you also didn’t know how important it is to live.
I write all of this as less of a soapbox speech to others and more as a reminder to myself. It’s okay to miss the girl that had never experienced real heartbreak, that thought bad friends could become good ones through sheer power of will, that was convinced everything she chased after would be hers eventually. But I have to remember that she was also the girl that never stood up for herself, that let the opinions of strangers on Twitter drive her to treat her body with a shameful unkindness, that gave other people—even friends—the power to tell her who she was. Because the past remembers everything even when I don’t. The past doesn’t change just because I do. Just because life gets harder and I get sadder doesn’t automatically mean that life in the past was absolutely better and I was definitively happier.
While there will always be parts of me that will likely remain permanently—I walk too fast and I talk too loud and I still think there is good in everyone—I will continue to change. So will you. We all will. We will all tuck away parts of ourselves that we hope to never lose, but we will continually evolve and be shaped by the ebbs and flows of life and all of its triumphs and all of its tragedies. We will (hopefully) learn and (hopefully) grow and (hopefully) change, and this evolution will (hopefully) never stop. The difficult part comes in trying to not be completely terrified of it. That part I haven’t really figured out yet.
All this to say, it has been nearly two years since the last time I wrote a silly little something on here and I’m different. I’ve learned. I’ve grown. I’ve changed. Hopefully you have too.
And you know what? It’s nice to meet you.
P
*Honorable mention: Ashley Tisdale’s criminally underrated debut album, Headstrong, featuring bops such as He Said She Said. It’s on Spotify, you’re welcome.
**I’m willing to offer a little more leniency than usual here given the last couple of years have been remarkably less than ideal. But I digress.
Photographic small talk: (a few of) the things, people, places that make me the deeply flawed and ever-evolving human that I am. Shot on film (which I had to mention so that you know exactly how cool and artsy I am).
