I Know Nothing: Reflections on Turning 30

I'm what a handful of reputable sources would call a middle-of-the-night insomniac: while I rarely have problems falling asleep, I almost always have problems staying asleep. Sometimes, I wake up three or four times and pass out again immediately; other times, I wake gasping from vivid dreams in which something is coming after me and I'm powerless to stop it; and once in a blue moon, my sleep is so fitful that I wake up unsure whether multiple events and interactions were real or imaginary. Sometimes, sometimes, I feel like my waking life and my "sleeping" life are indivisible. That feels especially true today, the 30th anniversary of my birth.

It's weird enough to realize that you've been alive for three whole decades -- and though there are dashes of vanity here and there (like my recent horrified realization that I've got whispers of crow's feet, or the creeping disfigurement developing in the joint of my right big toe), I'm struggling to really comprehend that I've been alive that long. I'm 30! I have been alive for three whole decades! Three whole decades! How did I get here?

But what's far weirder is that I've already spent one of those decades here in the greater Boston area. I've spent one third of my life away from my family, my home state, the little city where my grandparents provided piles of juicy tomatoes in the summer, the swath of the south where I frolicked on the shores of North Myrtle Beach every summer and the name Mandy is a three-syllable word. I've spent one third of my life letting go of my religious upbringing -- without much resentment, thankfully, but letting go nonetheless. I've spent one third of my life wrestling equally with the part of myself that is an independent feminist and the part of myself that longs for a family of my own. I've spent one third of my life learning how to live with people who are not my family -- or at least, not by blood. I've spent one third of my life struggling to balance work and play (and failing most of the time). I've spent one third of my life slowly and quietly acknowledging to myself that although I really like boys, as I always have, well… I also like girls. I've spent one third of my life battling a crippling case of Impostor Syndrome, unable to call myself an artist or actively pursue my creative goals, and yet also unable to deny that maybe, just maybe, I could do it if I really tried, and maybe, just maybe, the people who tell me I have talent aren't totally full of shit.

I've been alive. Alive! for three. Whole. Decades. How did I get here?

And where am I going, now? Those days when the lines between my dreams and my reality get oh-so-blurry, I try to wake myself up, as when your alarm clock intrudes on a deep sleep and you can't get your brain completely out of the fog and you don't know if it's been minutes or hours or days since you last comprehended what was really happening around you. I fail at that, too, and even as I write this it's hard to say for certain whether I'm asleep or awake. When I was little my dreams involved flying and underwater mermaid lands and meeting magical creatures (including Satan himself, who was actually quite fascinating and a pretty genial guy); these days there's a lot of yelling, a lot of running, a lot of hyperventilating, and the line between sleeping and waking gets blurrier by the minute.

And the lines separating what I have from what I think I have from what I think I should have from what I wish I had… I couldn't even begin to map those out. I'm smart enough to know that I have a hell of a lot to be grateful for, but then some days, well, some days, I think about my post-traumatic stress disorder and my anxiety and my seizures and my failure to meet anyone's expectations of me -- and I wonder, loudly, fretfully, how did I get here?

Those first two decades of my life revolved almost entirely around pleasing other people. Oh, sure, I had my moments of rebellion -- various piercings, minor deviations from fashion norms, moving up the east coast, underage drinking, smooching the wrong boys -- but I always felt a nagging desperation to gain approval from someone, but without putting myself out there too much. The risks were always small, and so were the rewards; so it went with my writing, by which I gained high praise in English classes and high fives from peers but from which I ran like mad when the stakes became too high. I knew that the "real" writers, the "real" artists, weren't afraid to fall down on their faces from time to time because in order to succeed you had to fail and keep going away. The failing, the falling, the embarrassment wasn't worth it in my mind. And so I stopped trying. And so I still failed, but silently, voluntarily, on my own terms, and so I told myself it was ok and it was what I wanted.

And so the heart of the matter is this: The real sadness and frustration that surrounds turning 30 isn't about vanity. It's about realizing that I've been alive for three whole decades and I feel like everything that I really wanted slipped through my fingers, or maybe what I thought I wanted wasn't what I wanted after all, or maybe I have no fucking clue what I want and I'm doomed to wander this life dissatisfied and disappointed in myself. It's about realizing that I've spent three whole decades fundamentally confused about what I'm really capable of.

It's about knowing that the one thing I know is that I know nothing.

How did I get here -- but the real question is, where do I go?

How I (Mostly) Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the L-Bomb: Part 1

[I have been thinking a lot recently about Valentine’s Day and romance and tradition and lurrrrrve, and I have too much to say in just one post! Thus, I present my thoughts in a series; here is part 1.]

When my mom and my stepdad first got married, I remember being somewhat shocked by the number of times they said I love you each day. Every time one of them left the house, every time they spoke on the phone, every elbow-to-the-ribcage joke—they took every opportunity to toss out those three words. After awhile I began to wonder how much meaning they could possibly ascribe to the phrase while saying it so frequently; didn’t the habitual nature of it all cheapen it somehow? Don’t many things hold weight and value due in part to their rarity?

But then, what other conclusion could the child of an acrimonious divorce come to? I have very few memories of my parents together as a happy couple, memories that I can no longer be certain are even real because they are so frail and frayed round the edges. What I remember much more vividly is the day they sat me and my brother down in the living room in our pretty little shiny-wood house in a nice neighborhood, the house where I had a big room and a front porch and a back porch and kittens, and told us they were separating. I remember how helpless I felt, how confused, how irritated I was that they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) explain to me what had gotten us all to that point. They told me repeatedly that they had grown-up problems that they simply couldn’t work out. What they didn’t have the heart to tell me was that they didn’t love each other any more—or rather, they had forgotten how to demonstrate their love in a way that made them both feel safe and respected. Or perhaps they never fully loved each other, not in the truly-grown-up way, because their love had never progressed beyond their high school days. I don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t matter, in the end, as it doesn’t change the outcome.

And so, when I look back at the relationships that were modeled for me as a child, I can now see how I might have become a little… bewildered. I was merely eight when my parents divorced, and in the years that followed I watched both of them muddle through many forms of relationships with a variety of people. Some of them were clearly silly little flings with an ever-looming expiration date; some were rebellions, whether against my parents’ respective social norms or against each other; some might have worked out in a different time and under different circumstances, but ultimately failed; and one for each of them, finally, stuck.

Throughout all of this, I managed to miss out on my own trial-and-error in the dating world, and thus I was woefully unprepared when, at 20, I finally landed a partner of my own. I’ve written about him before, but I did not elaborate too much on how incredibly insecure—and perhaps even desperate—I was by the time I met him. I am naturally highly anxious and self-doubting, and by that point I felt I had no barometer for what constituted a normal level of attention and affection from a partner. What I interpreted as sincere love and admiration was mostly obsession and co-dependence, and I ignored many a red flag because I needed to believe that I was worthy of all the time and energy he directed at me. We know how that story ended, although I’m not sure now if what happened between us could be described as real love. I suppose that, too, does not matter in the end.

When I look back on our time together, I can recount in intimate detail the ways that he devastated me psychologically, yet while I know I loved him very much when we were entangled, I cannot remember the first time we exchanged I love yous. I think perhaps it’s too difficult to reconcile such tender words with the violent way by which our relationship imploded. I and love and you became words with entirely different meanings in subsequent partnerships, neither better nor worse. In one, they were bargaining chips—something to withhold from me when I wanted them, only to be dangled tantalizingly over the distance between us after our breakup. In another, they took on the sparkle and bang of fireworks at first, only to turn into trails of dust that clogged his throat a little bit more every time I said them. So it goes, says Vonnegut, and how can I argue?

I’ve been with my current partner long enough now to admit that I thought those three little-big words long before I actually said them. It seems we both wanted to play it cool, keep it casual, all those heart-guarding clichés, until suddenly I realized that I was swimming hopelessly against an emotional tidal wave. I knew when that first flirty moment occurred that I was in no position whatsoever to fall in love, but I was powerless to stop it, and when I finally (and, yes, drunkenly) dropped that L-bomb I was absolutely certain that I had launched a bullet through whatever promise we might have had. The seconds that passed between my confession and his reply felt like an eternity (another cliché, I am well aware, but never has it been more true). But then he said it back—with no caveats, no apologies, no footnotes, he just said it back.

He said it back.

And now, just as suddenly, I find myself saying those words to him every day. Like my mother, I see that saying I love you all the time doesn’t cheapen the sentiment—because every time I drop an L-bomb, it bursts with truth. Even if he’s already fallen asleep and I’m murmuring it into the gently-heaving valley between his shoulder blades, I mean it. Even if he tacks it to the end of an email sent at 3:00 am on a rare night apart after wreaking havoc on Cambridge with his dude-friends, he means it. Even if it’s blurted out on the phone just before one of us has to switch over to a work-related call, we mean it.

Once a day or a hundred times a day, we mean it. And that means more than a silly blog post could ever explain.