Half My Life Ago

Because I'll be turning thirty in a few days, and thus have been feeling all sorts of horrible feelings, I dug into my old diaries looking for an entry from the eve of my fifteenth birthday in order to see what kinds of feelings I was feeling then. It turns out I didn't write anything at all that November, but pressed between the pages instead was a printout dated October 15, 1998. I think it must have been for school, and I vaguely remember reading it aloud to the class (ugh).

I like that it says "soon I'll be thirty" (and I mean "like" in the darkest, most cynical way possible). If you dare to subject yourself to this, you can click to enlarge the photo. You'll see that, even then, I was destined to become a blogger with an audience of twelve.

The biggest change between then and now is that I no longer have the feeling that life is a "carefully directed play." I used to have more of a sense of destiny, that I would become "something," and that that would somehow make everything worthwhile in the end. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty I fell into nihilism, and I don't know if I'll ever climb out again. The second biggest change, but perhaps a worse one, is that I no longer do somersaults. I hopped just this morning, and I played in the mud last week, but anything remotely gymnastic is long behind me now.

Plenty has stayed the same. I still feel far, far behind others in my age cohort, and even "kids" in their twenties have begun to surpass me. There's a couple down the street who are five years younger than me, and they already have three kids (not that I envy them that). I, on the other hand, haven't even held a job for longer than five months.

On the eve of my forty-fifth birthday, I'll need to either already have had kids, or have decided that I won't be having them at all. The family money I've been living on will have been long gone by that point, so I'll definitely have had to figure out my work situation. I know the intervening decade and a half will feel even shorter than the space between the present moment and driver's ed, so I know I can't drag my heels any longer. 

Hanging on for dear life--it's a scary thing.