I spent so many years certain everyone else had everything else slightly better than me. I spent many moons wishing for ‘Better’ to find me. I am sitting here, 12 days to twenty-seven, a glass of wine flushing my cheeks, rain pouring down on much younger people outside my window, and I understand now, that nobody has better.
There’s a buzz under the streetlight that floods into my living room, I’m listening to them and remembering stumbling home in smudged red lipstick and a belly full of questions. The electric girl is chatting with her friends, they’re sharing a cigarette between them as she’s spinning and swaying and singing as they look at her like she invented the night sky itself. I know they admire the way she doesn’t care and look at her for explanations, not knowing that these things simply cannot be explained. They sit there realising for the first time ever that some people live, others observe, some people create and some people consume, and both these types of people question whether this is it, both do not want this to be forever.
They are convinced in this very moment that this is who they will always be (for how wrong they are), the performer or the consumer, the one who lives and the one who passes by, both are eventually exhausted by this thought. By the time they get home and into bed - after narrowly avoiding their parents who had set the curfew for 11:00, they forget they even had this thought.
They all grow up, away from the streetlights and the girl who created the night sky and Better becomes a bitter lover they could never reunite with. But it’s okay, they forget they were ever curious about it in the first place, but that doesn’t mean it forget them. Sometimes it creeps up on them in the form of a hazy dream, other times it appears in the tones of someone younger’s laughter coming from a source without any real figure, but it never fully reveals itself. This weirdly half-created self-realisation shapes a lot of how they think they should be for a very very long time.
I speak to the people I made assumptions about at reunions, the people who had better health, better homes, or simply better opportunities. They look at me with the same eyes I saw them back then, in the school playground or by the fields lining our summer home. I was always certain this look meant a level of joy that was foreign to me. Now I know all too well the meaning they carry. There is stuff that cannot be spoken about, not here, over drinks and catchups over dinner. They look at me and it’s all I need to understand that Better never really existed for them either. And somehow, in some sick and lightly guilt-stained way, I feel good about it. At least we were all in the same boat. We all shared laughter under the streetlight and none of us were in the company of Better, only in the company of Now.
I’m almost twenty-seven now and I attempted to make a ‘27 things I learnt by 27’ list, but I quickly realised I haven’t really learnt anything. I still live my life in hopes that Better is out there knowing so well it is a form of snake oil. I still exchange painfully detailed and painfully recent stories of mistakes over glasses of wine, and I still belly laugh at the same jokes my dad tells me now that he would tell me when I was 7. But, I can try to list a few things I think I‘m learning, things I’ve noticed over my not-so-many years on Earth.
Number One - I truly believe that it’s important to try to not know it all by 27, 37, or 47. I now understand that everyone has it rough sometimes. When people are spinning under stars and streetlights and making up dreams of what 27 will look like through their 17-year-old’s eyes it’s because they are looking for the future to be an ‘out’. But an out doesn’t exist, we all have it rough, and we also all have it good, life exists in between the two for everyone. It’s best to not try and know it all and have it all figured out at any age because we don’t choose to learn or have it all, life chooses that for us. Best to just enjoy the time you have with the people you have, everyone could do with more company and fewer answers. Life will feed us lessons and answers when we need them anyway, the pursuit of this shouldn't consume you to the point of loneliness.
I guess Number Two is to just love. I know now that to love and love and love is to belong; belonging is all anyone ever wants. To belong to someone, to belong to an idea, to belong to a place or a flavour or a voice. To belong and to own, whether or not anyone admits it. I know for a fact the feeling of belonging is such a big driving force in my being. At some points in life belonging to a community was all that mattered to me, other times belonging to one particular person felt like the cure to all my issues. No matter who, what, where or when I’ve wanted to belong to, I’ve always craved the feeling of belonging itself. I don’t know if that makes me vulnerable but it’s the honest truth. It may be insanely raw but it is also a primal urge I don’t have very much say about.
Number Three - We are all still cavemen beings, we want to fight, fuck and feed. The three F’s that make the world what it is, this I know for sure. My Fight urge has been going off a lot lately, so, Number Four would be that Anger really does set me free. My therapist said this and I thought it was the dumbest statement ever, and then I realized I now know what I deserve, and exactly how I’d like to be treated, and so, anything less than what I deserve drives me insane. I feel a huge sense of shame about times I didn’t speak up in rage about things that deserved nothing less than absolute fury. On some level, it’s an overcompensation, some sort of catch-up game now that I feel like I am ‘okay’. I am angry, I deserve better. We are all angry about things in the present, but we are also raging for past times we didn’t stand up for that younger version of ourselves, and now we won’t sit back and let things pass us. And so, I’ve learnt (/am still learning) to let the anger take over sometimes and let it set this version of me free.
Number Five is the knowledge that my inner child/teen/person is an absolute cunt. But she’s also me and mine. She will be with me forever so I have to just learn to speak to her, and understand her. It is so terrifying to be so young and not know anything. It is terrifying it is to face life and changes alone, forcing that inner child into a corner and just grow past your years overnight, over and over again. Any time I’d feel comfortable another night would creep in to teach me a thing or two about growing up, lessons now that do not matter, shame and confusion that make themselves at home. And so, my inner self is an absolute cunt but only because she feels like she wasn’t safe, and so, now I take time to sit with her and listen to her moody rambles. I leave a nightlight on for her, I shoo the dark away out of the window and towards the sun that always arrives just in time.
Number Six, with every age I hit I seem to reset on who I am. At first, it was very confusing to re-discover myself over and over again but now it’s exciting. I look forward to getting to know new versions of myself. Loving them or hating them, begging them to stay or waving them goodbye without a second glance, knowing new me’s with every passing month feels like a privilege. I’ve not yet lived a year where my truths aren’t shaken and my knowledge on something or another isn’t proven to be absolutely wrong, and that’s exciting to me. I get things wrong and it’s fine. Nothing is absolute, not my ideas not my worldview, not my lines, things change, people change and so do I. For better or for worse. I know that this will be a constant in my life, the Life/Death/Life cycle continues in all things surrounding and within us, and we simply exist within its rhythm.
Number Eight is that everything does not happen for a reason. Sometimes things suck, people are shitty and life throws you a curveball as a laugh. This leads us to Number Nine, and perhaps the most important thing I’ve learnt - What I chose to do when I’m in shitty situations says absolutely nothing about who I am as a person but a lot about my fight or flight system that may need some tweaking post ‘dealing with it,’ and so, I will never tell myself off for how I ‘deal with it’ in the moment, so long as I then take time to work on it afterwards.
And finally, Number Ten - I choose when to end it. That bad habit, that 27 things by 27 list, that friendship, relationship, obsession, source of pain, source of joy, I chose when to end it. My life is mine to wreck as I please but also my life is mine to live and enjoy, and so it’s only right that I choose when to end things, even if it means allowing feelings to overstay their welcome or depart early because I choose.
Here I am twelve days to Twenty-Seven, thinking about who I would’ve been had Better ever found me. I still followed Fate around like a lost kitten, lapping at the milk it left me at its front door. It’s been a weird age, I’ve been at a weird stage of who I have become and the me I have let go of, but despite it all, I think I’m okay. Soon I will be doing Better, and then Worse and then Better again. My loved ones are here, just a phone call away, I hear their voices speak about better, the sky cries with me when I’m sad and brightens when I smile, and my family comes to me with the strength I need on homesick nights. I don’t have any of the answers, most of the time I don’t even know the questions…all I know is that love exists, anger protects and Better is a teenage dream. I can’t assure you I won’t become a worse person than I am this very day but I can assure you I will love me till the next ‘change point’ and so will those around me.
I’ll light the stars up extra bright tonight, in memory of all the people I was in the past 12 months and all the people I will be in the next 12 and take things from there, one day at a time.
Till next time,
Happy Birthday to me, to you, to her and him, Happy Becoming to us all
Strange Glue.
What I’ve been consuming -
Audio
Secrets From A Girl (Who’s Seen It All) - Lorde
This song could just be my 27 things at 27 list 1
You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon
“with some roly-poly rat-faced girl”
Visual
This month has been a month of movies -
I cried my eyes out at Ceaser in Rise of the Planet
The scene in Midsommar where all the girls are shouting and crying together made me feel things that would require a blog post of its own
[REC] was beyond terrible, but a really fun communal watch experience
Reading
I’m about halfway into Stephen King’s Revival and I am loving it so far!!
this was beautiful, happy birthday!