AGEING IS GETTING TO KNOW YOURSELF

Ageing Is Getting To Know Yourself

Ageing is getting to know yourself on the most mundane, irrelevant to anyone but you level. What is your favourite laundry detergent? Which shape of fork works best for you? What accumulation of  unhinged self survival behaviours have you collected - I’m not referring to emotional resistance I’m talking putting a water bottle in the freezer and cuddling it all heatwave night long. 

The higher the number, the strongest sense of self and security. I know who I am and though I may not be pleased with all of it, I have ruled out what I can work on from what I can only take responsibility for. I can’t describe my coming of age with anything other than a perpetual dark lightning filled cloud spreading inside me like a pest with roots so deep I thought it was who I am. Call it hormones, situational trauma, puberty, a bad school system I don’t know and don’t care to find an explanatory solution, but it was temporary and in venn diagram fashion - a shared experience. One day I woke up and I just realised I could breathe. I was old enough to breathe. Existence made sense and felt stable in a different way, a progressive click into place where the darkness no longer exhumed from my arteries and lungs. It’s still here, I still host demons inside my vessel, they just don’t put a filter over my every sensation and windscreen anymore. I look forward to aging because aging has proven to me that experience improves. Autonomy and strength come from time. My days are no longer a relentless battle against a world filled with conflict minions disguised as household objects and strangers, my days are something I can struggle through whilst maintaining a core and a shield that doesn’t shatter me upon outside impact. I fight occasional final boss demons, usually they have my face and my voice and my mannerisms and they feel invincible until they walk away on their own terms. They might never let me be and I fear they are not mimicking but are in fact, me. Still, they show up so inconsistently that I know the percentage of their presence in my day to day life is no longer something haunting and torturous, just part of what makes me an artist and a soul that can help others. 

I turned 25 and had a mild career crisis. A landmark like that made me hyper aware of ageing equally meaning the concretizing of consequence. When you're a tween everything feels real but is really a dress rehearsal for adulthood. Suddenly my fig branches* started withering and all the little choices I had made for 25 years accumulated to funnel down my life to a shape taken and taking. 

Turns out, there’s a philosopher who articulated the very thought that saved me in 2021 and I didn’t know about it: Emil Cioran.

When you hit rock bottom, if you aggressively jump a few more times (I was checking to see how stable this rock bottom truly was), you actually fall through a trap door to the most peaceful bliss. Because; if I don’t care if I die tomorrow then why should I care about any of the stuff that got me down here in the first place. Suddenly I am so selfish that I cannot care what anyone else thinks. Side note - I hate the idea of selflessness and how people seem to think it could be a rewardable, admirable trait, why would anyone want to lack their self ? Why do we have to be selfless or selfish why can’t we just fuckign be? No one will ever truly understand your intentions anyway but for goodness’s sake live for you first and worry about the collateral damage from a mitigation perspective. The right people will never hurt from your own caretaking. Anyway so, the idea of suicide is what makes life bearable, this is was Cioran said. And I get that, because the idea that I could just leave if I wanted to well why should it be such a pressing matter. If I don’t care about anything then why not stick around a few more days just to see what happens. Now that nothing has any standard or hope, I can never be disappointed. Everything is an extra a bonus a pleasant surprise. Everything weighs lighter and is brighter in comparison. 

I do not feel this way anymore, I live a full and loving life. Some of the best art I’ve made was when I was entirely lost and ungrounded and I am terrified of the brain that wrote three poems a day but I do miss making powerful things…

Ageing is also the witnessing of changing truths and the subsequent disappointment in understanding the rug could be pulled out from under you with a millisecond warning.

On realising I might (definitely do) have high functioning autism in my early twenties: I fear the reason I will not be successful in my career today is the same reason I was lonely in highschool cafeterias. I dreamt of a world in which my inability to connect with groups of people would no longer hinder my ability to meet my goals. A world in which my work would speak for itself and I would be seen as a curious mind and a gentle, caring heart. The harsh reality is that I know I am not progressing because I do not hug my colleagues hello like the person sitting next to me does, because I did not drink at the pub with them last night and I did not scream along to Charlie XCX last weekend in Victoria Park. I still feel heart wrenchingly alienated except today I know it is my own shortcoming, not their teenage ignorance or meanness because they are no longer teenage, ignorant, or mean. I wonder if there will ever be a room in which I do not feel odd. I have grown to take pride in my oddness and find comfort in my solitude. As an artist I know both of these traits would be welcomed and respected. As a bottom feeder in a massive company I worry I am simply incapable of performing to the level required if I wish to feel a part of an industry that no longer seems crystal clear. I was drawn to music because I thought it would be a place in which my oddness, my creative tortured artist projection of self would be understood. Now that I am here, higher up as an employee than as a side hustle performer, I know I will not climb any higher unless I have a team around me to do the outward facing humaning for me. I need a manager and a booking agent because I do not feel accepted within the business, I do not feel I could be successful due to my social handicap and need for isolation. My anxiety can be summed up this way: everyone else owns a guidebook in their back pocket outlining everything social and I have never seen one page. I see microexpressions on peoples’ faces that prove to me that I am wrong and I have no idea why. I just don’t say the right thing or compose myself the right way. I will never be able to make friends with the people who could lift me up, I need someone already on the inside to rise the entity of my artistry for me - because I cannot rise as a personality.

In conclusion, I look forward to ageing because it has proven to me that I am here and I will stay here and the peace I searched for lives inside me now that I have gathered the tools to allow it. I wonder what more daily wheels I will claim to make my mundanity the easiest it can be. Yesterday, I overheard a colleague laughing off how he would rather bring a broken tent to Glastonbury than trek out to buy a new one after work because he wants his life to be as easy as possible. I completely agree. I want my life to feel as easy as possible and yet if I do not feel challenged I vividly see my fig tree catching a poisonous virus and dying. Well, I want my life to be easy so that I can decide on my own hardships in the form of working tremendously at picking the figs that grow into my awoken dreams. I need to give my dreams a chance. My dreams are not fragile, they are high maintenance.

I wonder what my favourite laundry detergent will be when I am thirty, if I will still refuse to use any cutlery bar two in my drawer, if I will finally find a pair of shoes that I feel comfortable to walk in. I wonder how long the new beauty spot appeared on my shoulder before I noticed it. I wonder if I will still choose a long walk home listening to podcasts over a drink at the pub. I wonder if I will ever know how to physically react when my coworker comes to my desk and puts her head down on mine as a sign of fatigue and a reach out for connection. I wonder if I fail every test of intimacy when I am unprepared like that and if I will ever learn how to reciprocate. I wonder if others perceive me as robotic as I do myself. I wonder if I will ever feel my age around my parents, if I will ever be as close to my sisters as I wish I had the capacity to be. I wonder if I made a mistake leaving my country, and if I will ever be able to leave my first home here in England. I wonder how many more years I will rely on synthetic sleep and how my extra towels will be organised in their designated cupboards when I have more space. I wonder if I will have more space. I hope I have not forgotten the tiny details that define us through time. I have always overdocumented my own existence, perhaps as a method to hold onto it, but I do not always remember how I chose to live minisculely.

*I worship Sylvia Plath, but it has always disappointed me that a writer who shocks my heart and puts static through my brain in poems could write a novel that read like stitched up tumblr sad girl passages. Though I must remember she tumblred way before tumblr was, and if everything is a copy a copy a copy of a copy then in 2025 how can we expect any substance to remain. I digress. The metaphor of the fig tree branches has stuck with me six years after reading.