I wrote this last year and kept it in my notes section…it feels a little sad to read back. I remember the day I wrote it, sitting by myself in a brewery on a Sunday afternoon dreading my birthday more than I ever had. I had forced myself to do something out of character and went somewhere alone, and as moody and cool as it felt to be writing alone in a brewery, it was also quite achy…watching families and friends and couples come and go and laugh and cheers…feeling like they had been more places than me…experienced more than me…that they had figured out something more about how to live wholeheartedly…I knew that I wanted to live bigger but I didn’t know how. And now I was going to be thirty…and I was still going to be me. And that literally kept me up at night.
Here’s a little something about age from that day:
I don’t get carded anymore…and I don’t know how I look older…Is it wrinkles that I somehow ignore when I look at my own face? Is it a palpable resigning? An unspoken, settled way that I present myself now? I certainly don’t feel settled. I feel more chaotic and less sure than I ever have…and maybe that has to do with my age…and how time’s passing hasn’t changed me like I would have expected it to…It hasn’t healed me or made me particularly satisfied…
Instead, I am wildly unsure and a little bit sad all of the time…and maybe that is a part of aging no one talks about…that it doesn’t change you on the inside— that you can be twenty-nine on the outside and twelve on the inside, afraid that you’ll forever be too awkward to function…You can be twenty-seven and nine, crying because your friends are hanging out without you. Forty-four and sixteen, wondering if your heart will ever be whole again…sixty-five and three, elated at the sight of the ocean…and maybe age doesn’t change us, and we won’t become suddenly “together” whether we turn thirty or eighty…we’ll just keep going… gaining perspective, having experiences, falling apart, and wondering if we are doing all we can with this little life….
It’s true—age doesn’t change us the way I thought it would when I was 7 years old playing Barbies with my best friend, creating future worlds and fake boyfriends. Age isn’t as glamorous as I had imagined. I don’t wear silver mini skirts and high heels to breakfast and I don’t have a dream house or a convertible. And my dream job isn’t easy or fun a lot of the time. And I think there will always be a part of me that wonders if I am doing all I was meant to…and I don’t think the longing is bad. I think it is inevitable.
As true as it may still ring, there is a certain sadness to the above that isn’t here anymore, a stuck unsettledness. If the gal that wrote that knew where she’d be or who she’d be in a year she would have been absolutely shocked. There has been more hope and joy and surprise invited to the table than I could have foreseen. I had truly resigned to a life of melancholy and as much as it hurt, it was also my safety blanket. It was better to resign to it than to hope for something that may never come.
The world didn’t get less sad and my circumstances didn’t really change, but I let joy back in (with the help of the pill shaped serotonin) and the swirly twirly thoughts that used to bury me under piles of self doubt were no longer there, and there was room for the joy and the sad and the hope. There was room for it all. I surprised myself over and over again. In my 30th year, I had my lowest lows, fell apart, put myself back together, tried things I never thought I could, fell in love, believed in better, and coped with hard things in ways I didn’t know I could… I had spent 29 years looking at my feet when I walked into rooms and in my 30th year I started looking up—and there was so much to see.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Keeley Shaw Art to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.