Growing pains
#3: Quarter-life crisis or contentment?
‘I feel like I’m at the end of a long tunnel,’ I said to the man. ‘And reality is at the other side. Do you know what I mean?’ – Milk Teeth
There’s something deeply unsettling about reaching an age that no younger version of yourself imagined making it to – that’s to say every birthday since my 21st has evoked some sort of bewilderment. Something clicked on my 24th though, and ageing is now more friend than foe (seriously, why are we conditioned to be so opposed to getting older?). Coming of age during a pandemic was weird – yes, I’ll be 25 tomorrow but it still sometimes feels like I’m frozen at 21/22, a sentiment perpetuated by the liminality of my circumstances. It does occasionally feel like I’m playing catch-up – to whom? To what? God knows – but I’m finally content with simply being where I am. Circumstantially, I’m far from where I want to end up but that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the views along the way. I realise now that the beauty in not having seen myself get this far is that the only ‘expectations’ are societal and cultural, neither of which I’ve cared for since the shackles of mandatory education came off.
By the way, if you’re expecting this to be an intellectual dissection of the peaks and troughs of one’s mid-twenties, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place. This is simply me indulging myself for the sake of it.
One of my favourite things to do in the build up to my birthday is trawl through the pages of my journals (I have several, which serve varying and incoherent purposes) to see how much I’ve changed over the years. Excessive self-awareness, she’s a thorn in my side but I wouldn’t be who I am without her. There’s one that I don’t touch though, my 13–16-year-old mind isn’t one that I care to revisit, let sleeping dogs (aka the trauma block) lie and all. I started journalling properly at 17 as a way to externalise my feelings after losing my paternal grandad when it felt like I’d exhausted those around me with my grief – my bereavement journey is one that I attempted to unpack in my last entry. After that, it stuck as my primary outlet and we’re still going strong, eight odd years later. Maybe my mid-life crisis will include an Ernaux-esque exposure of my journals but for now, here are a couple of extracts from 3am-notes-app-rambles™ that I think sum up the evolution of my relationship with myself (you can make your own conclusions about my teenage perception based on the above):
~ I don’t think I’ve ever felt more comfortable in myself, with myself. Not that I see myself in a particularly flattering light, it’s more rigorous self-acceptance than self-love. Only took almost 25 years to get here, but I’ll take the win.
~ Everything in life feels tenuous, like I’m trying to plant my feet on solid ground but the earth beneath them is constantly shifting. So much change, constant change, yet there’s a lingering feeling of stagnation. Funny how that works. I feel like everything about me: who I am, what I want and where I find myself in life currently are all so contradictory. But I realise now that that’s natural, something to be embraced rather than panicked over.
—
In my early twenties, I often fell into cycles of romanticising younger versions of myself, even if only the previous age. Given my inability to look forward and my disillusionment with the present, it was the past to which I would turn when seeking out the ideal me. In summer of 2022, aged 23, I wrote of my 18-year-old self ‘maybe she was deluded but at least she was having a good time.’ Ha. A good time she most certainly was not having, at least not beyond the surface, and now when I think of myself in 2017, I feel sympathy and remorse rather than longing.
One younger version of myself I’ll always covet to a certain extent is me at 20. Maybe 21 pre-pandemic too. Anyone who knows me well knows my fondness for 2019 – despite it being one of my worst mental health years, it was also one of the best. Ironically, the improvement came once I came off anti-depressants, but they did what they needed to do when I first went on them. What I miss most about that version of me is that she was very much a doer, and I feel I’ve now become a lot more of a passive spectator of life. I do believe that’s a by-product of burning myself out so severely over the duration of those early years of adulthood, which I’m still recovering from, but what are your 20s if not a journey of chopping and changing?
—
I’m currently reading Milk Teeth and though it’s painfully relatable in more ways than I can express without doing a deep-dive, the main question it poses is ‘what is home?’ As somebody who’s never felt at home in a place, with a person or in an emotional state, I’ve found my home in myself, even if my brain and I don’t always get along very well. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start preaching live laugh love, all I’m saying is that over the past year I’ve learnt to let go of the debilitating self-loathing that my depression often used to drive me to. I enjoy who I am, who I’m becoming and can finally say, without feeling obnoxious or like an impostor, that I’m proud of myself, and I think my younger selves would be too.
These reflections have all been very vague, I’m aware, but not everything needs publicising (my fear of vulnerability is something I’ve never been able to shake).
—
To wrap this up, given what a pivotal role literature has come to play in my life over the past few years, I thought it would be fun to compile a reading list of twenty-five books to define my twenty-five years, albeit a day premature (sue me):
Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood
A Woman is No Man (Etaf Rum)
Bad Fruit (Ella King)
My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
Rouge (Mona Awad)
Sunburn (Chloe Michelle Howarth)
Twenties so far
Acts of Desperation (Megan Nolan)
All Down Darkness Wide (Seán Hewitt)
All the Lovers in the Night (Mieko Kawakami)
Assembly (Natasha Brown)
Beautiful World, Where Are You (Sally Rooney)
Common Decency (Susannah Dickey)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh)
None Of This Is Serious (Catherine Prasifka)
Ripe (Sarah Rose Etter)
Severance (Ling Ma)
Small Worlds (Caleb Azumah Nelson)
Stoner (John Williams)
Whereabouts (Jhumpa Lahiri)
Writers & Lovers (Lily King)
The full 25
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)
Breasts and Eggs (Mieko Kawakami)
Evil Eye (Etaf Rum)
Lazy City (Rachel Connolly)
Milk Teeth (Jessica Andrews)
Tennis Lessons (Susannah Dickey)
My life so far has been an amalgamation of different elements of the above – these are all pages in which I saw, lost, heard, found and healed myself (don’t attempt to psychoanalyse, not all parts of all books are applicable to all those feelings). While in my adolescence, I utilised reading as an escape from my life, now I indulge in it as a way to better understand myself and the world around me. Apparently, mid-20s have turned me into a walking bundle of clichés – and I’ve never read a self-help book – which is kind of an ick but ‘destroy the part of you that cringes, not the part that is cringe’ and all.
—
I do want to be consistent with this newsletter this year – it was one of my 2024 ‘ins’ lol – but we’ll see how it goes. The goal is one piece per month but ideas occur to me so sporadically that they often end up getting lost in the tangle of my brain’s wires: easy come, easy go as they say.
Anyways. Twenty-four has been my most revelatory age yet and despite its many hiccups, it was a beautiful one and I’m excited for whatever 25 has in store. Who knew ageing would be so gratifying?
Until next time x