I don’t want to skip decades

the end of 2024

A few days before my birthday, I sat on the floor and stared at myself in the mirror. I run my eyes over my body, noticing how mature the limbs look. Rather than tacked together extremities, my knees and elbows, calves, even my feet look smoothed over. There’s unity in my body, like my toes recognize my fingers, like my hips wink at my shoulders. Each bit of bone and flesh knows its small function, acting in faithful service of a larger purpose. Everything moves as one. Without jutting angles, inefficiencies are eradicated and my blood runs smooth.

When my eyes get to my face, I let them linger. I see fading roundness, underlying bones settled into promised grooves and fated divots. There is more shading in my features than when I was a little girl, and the light touch of color in pockets under my eyes, around my cheeks, creates an irreplaceable palette. There’s depth.

When born, we all look alike. At age twenty two, my face is becoming irrefutably my own and the mirror reflects back the combination of gradients, materials, fine lines, which make me up. I see dimension. There is something to recognize now, someone. Rather than a sketch, I'm becoming real.

How many stories are there of breath yielding life? From the thin pages of Adam and Eve to the artisan of Coppélia to the charm of a snowman on Christmas Day, breath gives way to life. Within me, I feel, perhaps not a renewal, but a progression; breathed into me was not a new breath of life but a deeper one. I embrace my rediscovered sensitivity, feeling the air’s freshness against my soft tissue.

When I walked into the restaurant on my twenty second birthday, the first thing my friend exclaimed to me was “wow, you look so twenty-two.” In her words, I think she too recognized within me a shadow of adulthood, a kind of transformation which perhaps felt both familiar and foreign to the both of us. I wonder if it scared her like it scared me, ringing some little bell which reminds us that we’re growing up. Well, not only “up” or upwards, but growing away, away from our point of origin and towards something we can’t yet make out, an orientation which is easy to assume is a lack of direction. Only time will tell, where we end up, if anywhere at all.

One of these days, the world will see us differently than we see ourselves, expect different things. Each year we are afforded less and less room for error. I feel my chest tighten, as I think about the demanding nature of maturation. I guess it’s that fear of failure again, knowing that in the adult world, it’s not just a bruised ego but real consequences we must face. I think your twenties are about mustering up the courage to brave real Failure with a capital F, or to discover Failure is a myth. I don’t know yet.

When I speak now, I sound older. I understand better how to make vocabulary obey my mind. Words fall into line with the sound of my voice; they don’t escape my grasp as often, leaving me wasted in awkward silence or fumbling to shepherd them into the right pattern. For this, I am thankful.

My disposition too has shifted. I’m milder than I used to be. Now, arguing and fighting, I find to be draining. When resentment builds, I feel the energy seep out of me, and I become tired. So, instead, I search for ways to preserve my own peace. Sometimes, I fear this change in attitude. It’s made me more understanding, more empathetic, but I’m worried that I’ll lose the fire so characteristic of young people. I try to convince myself that my quiet resolve is just as valid as a fiery passion. I’m hoping that it’s more steady, more sustainable, or something. In an attempt to preserve my own energy, I let small things go. By not caring about little things, I find that joy —or at least contentment— is less like a flighty bird, flitting away at any sign of prolonged attention. Instead joy becomes like a cat, still finicky, but perhaps reliable enough to be a lifelong companion.

I originally began this essay in July, but I set it down, as I hoped time would give me more clarity as to what I wanted to note about my twenty-second birthday. Finishing this essay in December, I’ve kept much of my original writing and realized that the crux of what I wanted to say was already hidden in the words I’d put down on the page. But, I will add the following: as I reflect on half a year of being twenty-two, I realize that my newfound attitude towards living —one where I strive to give and receive grace, one where I strive to be both honest and gentle, with myself and others— is reflective of the following realization: one’s values are not intrinsic, nor are they static; rather values are commitments, decisions we choose to make repeatedly.

Perhaps to others, especially those older than me, this realization of mine falls under the category of “common sense,” a label which I’ve come view very skeptically. If taken lightly, I do see the phrase’s utility, two words into which the entirety of a culture’s shifting norms can be stuffed. It’s efficient. But, to me, the discipline behind being a good person feels like a revelation. In youth, so much that is old, ancient even, feels new, and this feeling of newness is repeated infinitely across space and time as long as human beings keep cropping up on Earth. The practice of being a good person takes the pressure off; we are not inherently “born good” or “born bad”; we are agents of our own fates. But, what a load to bear! Each action becomes laden with responsibility.

This essay began with rumination on the corporal, as I began my twenty-second year in a flash of vanity, flouncing in a new dress I’d bought for the occasion, dancing to Taylor Swift. This frivolity too is a part of being twenty-two, of being young, and I try my best not to discount the importance of belting pop music. I don’t want to skip decades; I want to act my age, as so many nooks and crannies of experience are hollowed out from the journey, the process of growing old. This post ends with reflections on how to live a full life. I find myself mulling over these thoughts a lot lately. These introspections too are a part of being twenty-two.

These next seven months peel back the newness of another calendar year —2025— while sealing shut an age —22— that encloses an era: the end of college. Birthday and New Years, these two markers of time passing are constantly misaligned, missing each other by wide swathes, in my case, belying the illusion of time’s syncopation, coordination, reconciliation. Each year, we’re forced to start something new without finishing the old. Maybe if our births’ occurred in tandem with the planet’s revolution, we’d learn at opportune times, coasting through life on comfortable, well-fitting timelines. Instead, we learn by whiplash. Grasping at the reigns, we perpetually play catch-up, as life kicks up gritty lessons, which we have no choice but to inhale.

Although I cannot be sure what the New Year brings (I think I prefer it this way), I do know, as far as any of us can “know” these things, that my 23rd birthday will pass. I hope that 2025 will softly cradle a fragile age, which is only perfect in the way of its symmetry, two twos, which often materialized in the form of “and this too.” As I sit in my New Hampshire room writing, where even the frigid cold itself seems to seek warmth inside our house, I do not yearn for new seasons anymore. I do not futilely force my own pace on nature itself, racing, resisting against time; instead I stay still and ask myself to trust in snow as much as I crave shine.

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As I close out this Substack post and the year of 2024, I’ll write about some media that’s become particularly meaningful to me in the past few months:

Music:

• Skin by Hans Williams (2024)

  • “Well you walk with no insight”

• Blackbird by Chance Peña (2024; his whole album Ever-Shifting, Continual Blossoming is really beautiful)

Both of these songs perhaps fall into the “folk” category. I find myself listening to such music more and more as I lean further into New Hampshire, New England, looking to nature to quiet me. These songs are written by people my age; the lyrics show our angsty youth. Their tracks are serious, well suited for times of thought, for the months of winter.

Movies:

• Brokeback Mountain directed by Ang Lee (2005)

Watching this film for the first time last week, I felt that I got a glimpse of something not “raw” not “emotional” but rather pure. I felt I saw love as an element in its natural form rather than a self-satisfying commodity, or worse still, a plot point. It struck me, a few days after I’d finished watching the movie, how the tragedy of Ennis and Jack Twists’ story might be refracted as profound grace, as they experienced the profundity of love: an emotion no other character in the movie gets the opportunity to understand. They were both lucky and unlucky in love. Director Ang Lee treats each character and their circumstance with such delicacy. Although Brokeback is tragic; it’s a gentle film, humble. I’d like to watch it again.

Books:

• Swing Time by Zadie Smith

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, which I’ve only just started

Probably because I watched that clip of Sally Rooney on Louisiana, talking about how to write theory into intimate interpersonal moments, or, maybe it’s because I just listened to Professor Cynthia Liu’s interview on Doomscroll, but, in the brief moments after finishing Swing Time, I’ve come to see the novel as a commentary on Marx’s alienation of labor. To answer Rooney’s rhetorical question in the above linked video: maybe Smith’s novel is a “Marxist novel.”

Swing Time is about the alienation of the mind from the body, and the disastrous effects of this disconnect. This detachment is central to the relationship between our two main characters: the narrator and her childhood friend Tracey. The narrator is all mind; born of an “intellectual” mother, she lacks the physical faculties necessary for dance, so she pursues a college education. Her friend Tracey is all body; with exorbitant physical talent, she pursues dance, as her socioeconomic position impedes her ability to attend university. Mind and body separated, the narrator is middle class and Tracey is working class. Using dance as metaphor, Smith helps us to decipher class hierarchy, and all the corresponding issues, which make it complex.

While I cannot say that I am an avid fan of Zadie Smith’s novels, I do see her works as quite cerebral. She is quick with her words and quicker with her thoughts. I read White Teeth in college and, now, after finishing Swing Time, I see her novels as beautiful case studies on how to write intricately.

However, I will say that, it seems to me, Smith’s characters are mere devices deployed to make larger points about culture; I’m not sure she cares for them deeply as people. They are tools used to prove bigger points, about race, gender, class— nothing more. I think it’s for this reason that I seem to find her novels devoid of emotion, or, at least, I feel little emotion while reading them. Some could make the case though that this too is a lens through which we can interpret people: as merely reproducers and upholders of invisible structures. I can’t innocently find fault in this approach because part of me suspects that, if I were to write a novel, I’d do the exact same thing (only a fraction as well as Smith). Well, if a few fictional characters must be sacrificed in service of cultural commentary/critique, that’s quite a small price to pay.

Onwards, I’m excited to read my first Marukami!

Thank you all for sticking around, and Happy New Year!

Tea and a candle; cozy winter reading essentials!