DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ Coming of age, every single year
thoughts from the afterparty
When I was 21 I heard that your brain stops being neuroplastic at 25, and became obsessively paranoid that my brain would clamp shut like a beartrap trapping me in my selfish ignorance forever. When I was 23 I took acid and scrambled my brain, and when I was 25 I sent my writing to my high school English teacher and he said “Yes of course I remember you: sharp hairstyle, dry wit.” And I looked down at my purple hair thought goddamnit, I can go through all the spiritual bullshit reformation I want, I will always still be 13.
The other day I turned 27. I am more or less OK with the lot I’ve got, neuroplastic or not. I’ve become both secure and sober enough to merge my friends and family into the same party. I have given away fifty percent of my books, the best ones, and when I sentimentally inscribe my partygoers’ books the tone of the party also accidentally turns it into a sort of unspoken farewell.
In the morning after I get up puffy-eyed and hardly hungover. As I bend over my recycling box with thirteen paper gift bags, 27-itself feels vividly like an afterparty. I’m exhausted from operationalising creme brulee, vegetarian pie, bruschetta, pani puri, and sixty onigiri and rice paper rolls and D gave me two cheap cigarettes as a sort of end-of-party “you did good(, kid!)”.
By 27 I have less of a need to shake up my brain and stare at it like some kind of magic 8-ball, or attempt to drink pleasure from the firehose. I become outwardly simpler and inwardly life is more detailed. I’ve given my mind the mercy off of any substances (cigarettes and booze don’t count) and been rewarded by a corresponding increase of perceptual resolution. I realise that I hate trying to make my life interesting and storied because then I’m beholden to rattling off embellished stories to other people instead of simply living with them and being interested. S writes on a birthday card, “I appreciate your drive to enrich the inner and outer worlds of others” and I’m impressed by both his astuteness and the integrity of my own brand.
D drove me home after the party and we sat in the gutter and had good conversation, meaning: permanently off-topic, fertile with alternate universes, obnoxious (to an outsider).
I tell D how I honestly feel. Because I’m wordy I usually want the truth to be complex and insightful. But the truth is only complex when you’re explaining it to someone who doesn’t understand you. Really, honest disclosure is so boring. My deepest fears are banal when said out loud. I romanticise movement - going to a new country - but the truth is I feel like everyone else: I don’t want to change, not really. “What if I don’t make friends? What if the people aren’t like this, what if they suck?”. I sound like a stupid little kid, that’s how I know I really feel that way. D answers: “Then you come back.”
He has a story from Japan: “I went everywhere looking for these ‘Peace’ branded cigarettes, but I couldn’t find them, and eventually I had to decide to make do with what I could find.” He wants to write it into a whole thing, but we agree it doesn’t have much legs further than a chuckle-worthy one-liner.
On the plane to Singapore the next week, I shove my giant bag considerately within the invisible borders of seat 54A. In the sensory deprivation of solo flying, you still build attachments with silent strangers. Me and the guy in the seat behind me have something of an intimate relationship, as I grow familiar, but not endeared, with the constant pulse of his irritating foot-tapping habit. By touchdown, I recognise the rhythm of his neurosis has a Pavlovian reliability: 60bpm as the plane starts to taxi, 80bpm as the baby in row 56 makes an earnest attempt at depleting the cabin’s oxygen, 120bpm as the flight attended carts down the aisle with three equally uninspired variations of stew and rice.
Susie Anderson has a poem I love where she complains about the assholes boarding the plane with her: obnoxious board-shorted blondes drunk on boyhood, messy nesters, and even straight-up racists. She imagines how if the plane goes down, in some way they’d be true comrades in the trenches of life’s last moments each other. Imagine that, spending the last moments of your life with a bunch of cunts. Still, dying with some cunts around you is better than no cunts, right?
I mean I’m not saying the guy behind me with the foot thing is a racist, I don’t mean to demonise him. I’m just nervous, and I love to be a cunt when I’m nervous. But I suppose my point is that as human beings I’m pretty sure we can make do with wherever we land. I believe there is an optimistic human impulse to grow tolerance of cunts and make friends of strangers. And if I don’t find what I’m looking for, I’ll go back.
And I have found this fact of psychological resilience to be true in smaller situations. I used to really really hate ordering new dishes, but I had to learn to deal with disappointment. Even though disappointment is like, one of the bottom ten feelings of all, it still beats being tight and weirdly attached to your habits of safety. Disappointment is collateral for broadening your world.
The other thing I tell myself about change is the same thing I say to friends who are a little too resistant to therapy. “I’m afraid I won’t be myself anymore”, are you sure? Because maybe what you should be afraid of is continuing to be yourself.
The ego finds a way to survive with very little effort. People just don’t really change by accident, ever. I’m still going to lose my keys three hundred more times. I’m still going to think, “God, I can’t do this”, and then eventually do it. I’m still going to feel the gnaw of boredom that, left long enough, inspires inscrutably high productivity. “Wherever you go, there you are.” - I read this on a thread about addiction.
Anyone who claims online that they learned 27 things by 27 is a huckster trying to sell you the opiate of self-improvement: I feel I learn the same one or two things over and over again. Banal boring truths not worth writing. “People are all we have.” “The most important relationship is that with yourself.” “Everything will be fine, eventually.” Perhaps, as my therapist would gently nudge me into framing more positively, I have learned these truths a little deeper each time, but who can really say - I could really just be that stupid.
Warmly,
Marlene
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