Twenty-Five
I sit on the edge of turning twenty-five in the next few weeks, and when I look back on myself I find I’m smiling more, kinder and more understanding than when I first entered my twenties.
My life is not where I thought it would be, and in a way it is much less cinematic than I imagined, with its own rhythm that spans months instead of weeks. The intense waves of depression I used to be submerged by have receded, and I have a private theory that they were growing pains from a frontal lobe finishing its development, though I won’t say it out loud in case saying it invites something worse to prove me wrong. I no longer dramatize these feelings the way I used to in my early twenties, when I treated every problem as evidence of an inherent character flaw I needed to destroy. I see now that whatever I am living inside of will eventually ask to shift into something more sustainable, and my job is to notice when.
I try to write about things other than love or yearning, but these thoughts are the most salient when I start to articulate my ideas. Once the yearning quiets into something more malleable, I read about art and psychology and anthropology to take my mind off the discomfort of change. I used to be so preoccupied with who wanted to love me and why they didn’t return those feelings. I ache at how much time and energy was lost ruminating on men who have forgotten my birthday and middle name. How I would worry when I felt the relationship turn cold and forget to do anything but pace and wring my hands. Now I see that my brain will always find something to chew on and it is my job to provide the necessary nourishment.
These days I’m less preoccupied with how I look to others and more interested in the beauty in the mundane and overlooked. I have taken up landscape painting and observational drawing. I’ve found how to be comfortable in my own element by dissecting the uncomfortable out of my life: I don’t watch dramas, and I stick to comedies, nature documentaries, and lectures. Yesterday I watched James Gurney and David Finch work, to feel surrounded by artistically minded people while I drew alone. I have the leisure of solitude and self indulgence many have sacrificed for marriage or children. I think of my mother, who by my age had to balance a child and a job and school. How different my life would have been if I had to focus on being a good mother, colleague, wife, and student. My heart sits with her and how suffocated she must have felt from the pressure.
I have found myself not petitioning God as much as I did when I was younger. The prayers that remained unanswered are now things I cherish and relax in. My relationship with God has gained more distance, but I find that this allows me to manage my expectations of our relationship more realistically. Like Monet’s water lilies, I find that God makes no sense up close, just pretty ideas combined in unknown marks. When I take a step back, I see that there is a much bigger picture at play for all of us to indulge in that I am not necessarily privy to orchestrating. I no longer believe in the Christian God verse and chapter, but I believe in a perspective more grand than the one I can envision, and I try to act accordingly.
My detachment from my image of God comes hand in hand with my detachment from how much I control others and their actions and perceptions of me. I no longer feel this incessant need to hold everything so intensely and get my fingerprints all over it. To over communicate and over emphasize feelings that haven’t even had time to bubble up. Instead, I am more observant as things come and go. I find that even the trash knows when to take itself out of my life, and that I should be grateful others know when to leave.
I am grateful for the freedom and afraid of what it costs, worried I’m more susceptible to contempt and inaction, becoming a hermit to my own comforts. This way of existing is what causes my days to bleed together, like ink on cheap journal pages where my previous days color the next one and the next. I don’t want to be moved anymore by the loud feelings, the sudden urges to run or overhaul. I don’t want to be tempted by the rush of dramatic change that sounds exciting in words but leaves you disoriented in your own decision. I want to be indulgent of the quieter thoughts, the ones that come back more than once without raising their voice, and to act on those more often. Call it the voice of God, my consciousness, the person in my brain, but they whisper to me to take care of myself, to take breaks, to cook and walk around and talk to strangers.
With the inaction comes a worry I have given into nihilism and the inevitable entropy of life. I hope my later twenties will be about meeting discomfort without prolonged navel gazing. Instead, I choose to think of my life as a charcoal drawing, a continual rendering of what I add and what I lift away while the overall picture stays intact.