If I Can’t Live For The Bit, What DO I Have To Live For?
A Reckoning With The Person I Think I'm Supposed to Be at Twenty-Nine.
This is a self-gratuitous post. I am a birthday SAP. I am a sparkly, sash-wearing, its-my-birthday-excuse-making person. I am also incredibly cheesy, cringy, and sentimental. So pardon me while I do some reflecting. It’s one of the best parts of the stars aligning back to where they were when I was born.
I turned 29 this week and this is the first time I have felt a mixture of excitement, dread, anxiety, and hope at getting older. There is a tangible tension between who I currently am, who I could be, and all the other versions of myself who I’ll always neglect to acknowledge out of embarrassment.
As a Taurus, I am not known for taking to change well. Read literally anything else I’ve posted here. And for this reason, I refuse to (did I mention I am also stereotypically stubborn, too). I want to continue to be the way I am right now.
I know that things are both staying the same and changing all the time. I know this and can almost come to accept it. Yet that 9 is doing something to me. It makes me feel like I’m being closed in on. Like I have to start being the things I’m supposed to want to be before it reverts back to a zero.
But the truth is I want to continue to steal tableware from fancy restaurants and date people I shouldn’t. I want to be naïve, to care about the world as if there were power behind those who want to change it. To continue to hold my friend’s hand when I get my blood drawn. I want to continue to call the place I haven’t lived in ten years home, as well as the place I’ve never lived at all but where my family is now. I want to continue to forgive and forgive and forgive. To spend too much money on silly things like a tiny wooden dresser and an Adirondack chair for my hamster from the Jo-Anns’ closing sale. Is that okay?
And another thing! I don’t want my friends to ever stop being the greatest romance of my life. I’m scared all the time of losing them to marriage, motherhood, or careers. I also don’t want to save for a mortgage. In fact, I don’t want to live in the same apartment or neighborhood for longer than three years, ever! I don’t want to be sensible, mature, reserved, respected, or professional. And certainly, I don’t want to care more about a significant other than I care about myself. I don’t want to not be the center of my own life. Is that selfish, voice of criticism inside my head?
If I’m being honest -and why would I be anything but to the five people who will read this anyway- I still want to be awe-inspired. I want to pretend like every spring is the first time I’ve ever seen tulips growing alongside every sidewalk in Chicago or trees blooming vibrant greens after the long, dead winter. I want to etch my childlike, goofy stupidity on the inside of my soul.
Even in my perpetual state of self-loathing, I’ve realized I actually love all of those Haleys I’ve been before. I liked being precarious at 25, not taking things too seriously. I liked spending a weird amount of time, effort and money on supplies to make Crème Brulee during the pandemic and staying in $5 hostels when I traveled. I liked when I was brave enough to move across the world by myself (!!!). I liked each time I let myself be open to the world, vulnerable to whatever it had to offer. I want to be 24, drunk on post-academia freedom forever!
What I’m trying to say is I want to continue to be all of those people I was five, ten, two years ago and the person I am right now. I don’t want to live in this rigidity (my own doing) of what the typical bell curve of life is supposed to be. Let me be reckless and undecided into my eighties. Is that dumb?
Of course I don’t need to be allowed to do anything. I can just be. I can just do. But so much of the time my brain holds a flashlight on what I think others perceive of me. I assume everyone is looking at me as too careless, too set in my ways, too much of a homebody, trying too hard. Maybe I am all of those things. Maybe that’s okay.
This idea runs through my head so often I’m reminded of something my friend Tiffany is always saying to me when I vent to her about it: “We all die at the end of this. Fuck it.” That’s actually now the caption of my morning alarm. I tacked on “have fun” at the end as a reminder for some of the harder days of the past year.
Not only that but no one is paying attention to me the way I am to myself and even if people thought all those judgement I perceive them to, why does that mean I have to change anything at all? My whole mental illness is based on wanting to live so, so badly that I panic, I obsess and I trick myself into thinking if I do X, then Y will happen but if I want to live that badly, shouldn’t I like…live?
This week, one of my co-workers gave me a little bag of dollar store goodies for my birthday. Inside were coloring books, a rubber chicken, sour candy and fake bunny ears. A former student that stopped by to tell me happy birthday remarked “Buying for Ms. Olds is like buying for a child”. Would you have found that offensive, reader? To me it was the highest compliment I could receive: to be thought as having the joy, the lack of rigidity, the magic of a kid.
Putting this down in writing matters to me, so I’m saying it here so that it’s somewhere and maybe you can hold me accountable: May I always stop to look at a bird or a squirrel or to pick a flower, take a picture of a cat in a window. May I continue to write little poems about whatever the fuck I want. May I use all of my PTO, do all my cozy hobbies mostly associated with children or grandmas with reckless abandon, and may I always, always get a little treat.
The haters (mostly the fake adversaries of my mind) are right. I don’t want to grow up. I also don’t have to. To thine self be true: I will continue to be sloppy and stupid. It is the most honest thing I can do.
Recommendations based on this newsletter:
Music: Everything At Once - Hippo Campus
Reading: Letters To A Young Poet - Rainer Rilke
Activity: Give yourself permission to do something dumb and silly this week.
Happy birthday beautiful! I love reading your writing 🥰
Love these reflections haley! life is too short to be serious and boring! 🩷🩷